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Ratify second offer after rejecting initial union-recommended deal in July
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Grocery workers on strike from more than two dozen Metro Inc. supermarkets in the Toronto area have accepted a tentative agreement that ends a month-long labour dispute that shut down stores and temporarily blocked deliveries of meat and produce around the province.
The new deal offered an extra 75 cents per hour to full-timers, and 55 cents to part-timers, compared to Metro’s previous offer, though the wage increases are now stretched over five years instead of four. Workers ratified the deal in a vote at a Toronto convention centre on Aug. 31, said Paul Whyte, a spokesperson with Unifor, the union representing the workers.
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“This past month on the picket lines has been tough for you and your families, but you have shown workers across the country the power of a union,” Unifor national president Lana Payne said in a handout to members at the convention centre.
Members questioned the bargaining committee in the centre for roughly 90 minutes, then mingled outside, some waiting for school buses organized by the local. As people streamed out of the hall, many loudly criticized the deal.
“We just spent five weeks on the picket line for that? Oh my God,” Colleen Scott, a meat wrapper at a Metro store in Newmarket, Ont., said outside after casting her vote. “I feel like crying. It’s the biggest insult.”
‘I have to support my family’
But others said they had no choice but to accept the offer since they cannot afford to live on the union’s strike pay of $300 per week. As a man headed into the parking lot, Scott asked him if he had rejected the deal.
“No,” he said. “I have a house. I have a kid. I have to support my family.”
Roughly 3,700 employees with Unifor Local 414 rejected Metro’s previous deal in July, opting for a strike at 27 stores in and around Toronto even though union leaders said the offer was the best they’d negotiated in more than two decades.
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Negotiators didn’t go back to the bargaining table for over a month afterward. Workers picketed Metro stores and in late August, Unifor organized a blockade of two Metro warehouses that specialized in perishable food. Metro said the workers had gone too far, as they shut down deliveries to stores around Ontario and threatened to spoil truckloads of meat, seafood, produce and dairy.
At the time, Payne said Metro’s workers had created a “movement” in Canada in pushing back against corporate greed.
An Ontario Superior Court judge, however, ordered an end to the blockade earlier this week, though the ruling still allowed Unifor to continue holding up trucks at the warehouses for five minutes at a time. But within hours of the decision going public, the union announced it would end picketing at the warehouses as a “gesture of good faith” as it returned to the bargaining table. The next day, both sides announced they’d come to terms on a new tentative agreement.
In a statement, Metro senior vice-president Joe Fusco said the deal was fair and reasonable.
“Our store employees benefit from wages and working conditions among the highest in the industry,” he said, “and the new contract maintains those standards.”
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The new deal gives full-timers and senior part-timers a total of $4.50 per hour in wage increases over five years, compared to $3.75 per hour in pay hikes over four years in the previous deal. Part-timers will get a total pay hike of $3.20 per hour over five years, compared to $2.65 over four years in the previous offer.
‘It’s not enough’
In a handout at the convention centre, the union highlighted that members will get more money upfront in the current offer. Full-time clerks who have been with the company for three years will go from $20.55 an hour to $25.05 an hour over five years. New clerks earn 50 cents above minimum wage, which is currently $15.50 an hour in Ontario.
Other positions will earn more. For example, a deli manager with one year of experience at Metro will go to 30.88 per hour from $26.38 over the course of the deal. Meat cutters received a higher pay raise than other positions to address “hiring and retention challenges,” the union said. A full-time meat cutter wages will jump $6.20 to $27 per hour by the end of the deal.
Throughout the strike, union leaders said they wouldn’t go back to their members with another deal unless Metro offered an immediate raise of $2 per hour. Local president Gord Currie said members wanted to bring back the $2 hourly bonus that Metro paid to frontline employees during the pandemic — the so-called “Hero Pay.” Metro and its two main rivals in the grocery business simultaneously cancelled that bonus in June 2020, sparking a national scandal that pushed Ottawa to strengthen federal laws against wage fixing.
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Workers will get the extra $2 per hour as part of the new deal, but not right away. The agreement includes an immediate raise of $1.50 for full-timers with an additional 50 cents in January 2024, compared to an immediate raise of $1.25 in the July offer. Part-timers get a $1.50 raise upfront, but won’t get another raise in January.
The deal also improves pension benefits, boosts optical benefits by $75 to a max of $275 every two years and increases paramedical benefits by $25. Part-time workers who have been with the company for more than five years will now receive between eight and 24 hours of paid sick leave annually, depending on their years of service, according to a union handout.
“For us working people, it’s not enough,” said Keith McQuarrie, a part-timer in the seafood department at a Newmarket store. “The union sold us out.”
But Tyler Mitchell, a part-timer who is working at a Toronto store for the summer to save for school in the fall, said he didn’t think dragging out the strike even longer was going to work.
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“I think it’s the best deal we’re going to get,” he said. “We deserve more, but that’s how it’s going to be.”
Allison Glaser, a part-time cashier in north Toronto who supports an aging mother and a brother with autism, said it would have been easier to support the deal if part-timers were also offered $2.
“This was supposed to be our movement,” she said. “We may have wasted five weeks for nothing.”
• Email: jedmiston@postmedia.com
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