MONTREAL — Averting a strike, VIA Rail Canada and the Unifor union reached a tentative agreement just ahead of the latest in a series of deadlines on Monday.
VIA said the agreement will be retroactive to Jan. 1, 2022 and runs through Dec. 31, 2024. Both sides said details would be released only upon ratification by union members.
“VIA Rail is pleased to have negotiated these agreements and recognizes the hard work of both parties during this process,” VIA CEO Martin Landry said in a press release. “We sympathize with the passengers and communities whose plans have been impacted in the past couple of days due to the uncertainty caused by this potential strike.”
VIA, which offered passengers the ability to change plans without service fees as the strike loomed, said it will continue that offer through July 31.
The union represents more than 2,400 VIA employees in on-board, station, customer center, maintenance, and administrative office positions. The agreement came after Unifor extended the strike deadline four times from Monday’s original 12:01 a.m. EDT walkout time — the last to 11:59 p.m. Monday — as negotiations continued to make progress.
“Fighting back against the concessions that VIA proposed wasn’t easy, but the resolve, commitment and solidarity of our VIA Rail members, helped the bargaining committees to push forward and achieve this tentative agreement,” Unifor’s Scott Doherty, lead negotiator and executive assistant to the national president, said in a statement. “I want to thank our members and the travelling public for their patience and support, while we continued to negotiate past the strike deadline to achieve this agreement. Without them this deal would not have been possible.”
Unifor announced last week that more than 99% of its members had voted in favor of a strike, and served a strike notice on July 7, setting the stage for the negotiations that led to the agreement [see “Union issues 72-hour strike notice …,” Trains News Wire, July 8, 2022].
