Metro reaches tentative deal with grocery workers’ union after month-long strike

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Metro Inc. MRU-T has reached a tentative deal with the union representing roughly 3,700 of its grocery workers in Ontario, as it seeks to end a strike that has dragged on for a month and shuttered 27 stores in and around the Greater Toronto Area.

The strike began on July 29, after members of Unifor Local 414 rejected a proposed four-year renewal to the collective agreement with Metro, which the union’s bargaining committee had unanimously recommended for approval. The Montreal-based grocer announced on Wednesday that the bargaining committee has also unanimously recommended the new deal. The union will hold a vote on ratification of the agreement on Thursday.

Neither Unifor nor Metro provided details of the new agreement on Wednesday.

Talks between the grocer and Unifor had previously stalled, as striking employees continued to demand a better wage offer from Metro. It was just the latest in a number of recent labour actions that have seen workers across Canada push for better compensation as they cope with the pressures of inflation.

“We’re not necessarily seeing more strikes, but we’re seeing more pronounced strikes, where workers are turning down tentative agreements that their bargaining committee has tentatively agreed to with the employer, and pushing for more,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.

In May, the Public Service Alliance of Canada and the federal government reached an agreement to end a strike among 120,000 employees, one of the largest work actions in Canadian history. That deal included a 12.6-per-cent compounded wage increase over four years, which labour experts said at the time could provide encouragement to other unions to seek richer settlements for workers. Days later, the Canada Revenue Agency reached a deal with 35,000 striking workers to provide an 11.5-per-cent wage increase over four years. More recently, in July, an arbitrator set terms of an agreement averaging an 11-per-cent increase over two years for members of the Ontario Nurses’ Association.

In the private sector, Ms. Bruske also pointed to a new agreement earlier this year between United Food and Commercial Workers (UCFW) and a Sunterra-owned meat processing plant in Trochu, Alta., securing a wage increase of 11.5 per cent over three years.

“We are seeing higher-than-normal settlements than we would anticipate seeing in those kinds of industries,” Ms. Bruske said. “And that is because there are more workers paying more attention when those bargaining communities go to the bargaining table, and placing a higher level of expectation on coming back with a more resounding wage package.”

Prices for basic necessities have soared over the past two years. While inflation has eased since reaching a four-decade high of 8.1 per cent last June, the annual rate once again moved above the Bank of Canada’s target range in July, reaching 3.3 per cent and raising the likelihood of another interest-rate hike. And grocery prices, while growing at a slower rate, are still outpacing general inflation, rising by 8.5 per cent year-over-year in July.

Wages generally have not kept up with inflation, and surging prices for food and housing have eroded Canadians’ spending power, turning up the pressure on labour negotiations.

Multi-year collective agreements that included pay increases of 1 to 3 per cent per year were common to see just a few years ago, said Kendra Strauss, director of labour studies at Simon Fraser University. But the spike in inflation has led to a sense that those workers are now falling behind, she added.

“While unionization is still an advantage in terms of there being good empirical evidence that unionized workers on average earn more than non-unionized workers, that’s being eroded in the inflationary climate,” Prof. Strauss said. “Unionized workers are really struggling to keep up right now, and that’s making them more vocal.”

In this environment, the striking Metro workers had raised concerns about inadequate pay increases as grocers have reported rising profits. Some workers had also argued for pandemic pay bonuses of $2 per hour to be reinstated.

Recently, in addition to picketing outside the shuttered stores, Unifor set up secondary picket lines at two distribution centres, which prevented fresh products from reaching stores, until the grocer was granted a temporary injunction on Tuesday. The union and the company returned to the bargaining table on the same day.

“This tentative agreement acknowledges the economic struggle that many of our members face,” Unifor Local 414 president Gord Currie wrote in a statement on Wednesday.

In a separate statement, Metro called the new deal fair and equitable.