Employees 15 months without a contract??
Workers at the Montreal and Lac-Leamy casinos have announced that they will go on strike for 24 hours starting at 6 a.m. Monday, July 28 after negotiations with management came to a standstill.??
The 1,100 employees have been working without a contract since their last collective bargaining agreement expired 15 months ago, reported the Montreal Gazette. They hope the action will exert pressure on management to settle, but casino officials seemed unfazed by the threat.??
“The clients won’t be able to tell the difference,” said Jean-Pierre Roy, a spokesperson for Loto-Québec. “We have managers who used to work at the tables and they’ll step in.”
??Jean-Pierre Proulx, of the Canadian Union of Public Employees union, said management is “stalling and stalling some more.”??
“We’re not even talking about salary increases or anything like that yet, we can’t even get a discussion going,” Proulx told the Gazette. “If we could just sit down in good faith, we’d have a new contract negotiated within seven days.”??
Revenues at the province’s casinos were down 6 per cent in 2013 and the casino has cut 500 jobs since 2010. New casinos in the Northeastern U.S. and poker rooms on the South Shore Kahnawake Mohawk territory has all the casinos feeling the pressure. That could give the casinos the upper hand in any negotiations, as downsizing may already be in the plan.??
“The economy being what it is, the competition, the rise of online gaming are kind of like a perfect storm,” Roy said. “In Atlantic City three casinos closed this year alone. It’s not the greatest time for casinos right now.”
