Longshoremen strike at Port of Montreal

Longshoremen strike at Port of Montreal
Kim Biggar April 26, 2021 https://splash247.com/longshoremen-strike-at-port-of-montreal/

Members of dockworkers’ union CUPE Local 375 will start an unlimited general strike at Canada’s Port of Montreal at 7:00 am ET on Monday morning. In effect, though, because the union had already refused weekend work as part of a partial strike starting on April 17, strike action will have stopped work at the port on Friday.

The union has been without a contract since 2018. After a 12-day strike in August 2020, the dockworkers and the Maritime Employers Association (MEA) agreed to a 7-month truce, which ended on March 20. The following day, the union rejected an offer from the MEA. Negotiations resumed in early April, but relations eroded.

On April 10, the MEA, citing an 11% volume drop in March it says was caused by uncertainty related to the labour situation, gave notice of its intention to remove union members’ income guarantee. The union responded later that day with 72 hours’ notice that members would discontinue working overtime and weekend hours.

Meetings with the federal mediators resulted in another offer from the MEA, and significant back-and-forth public sniping. On April 22, the MEA indicated that it would move to regular schedules to mitigate the effects of the partial strike, which triggered the union’s strike notice.

In a press release on Friday, the Montreal Port Authority (MPA) said, “the episodes totalling 19 days of strike action in the summer of 2020 had significant effects on the economy, and 20 vessels had to be diverted. In total, 80,000 TEUs containing goods we consume every day were either diverted to competing ports or grounded.”

The port, which handles C$275m ($220.4m) worth of goods every day, has been affected for the last few weeks by carriers rerouting some vessels to other ports in case of a strike in Montreal. Carriers are also implementing new fees related to rerouting. Maersk, for example, has announced an inland service fee to cover “extra inland costs of port diversion.”

Liquid bulk handling, Oceanex service (Bickerdike Terminal) and the grain terminal (Viterra) will not be affected by the strike.