STM: Trade unions demonstrate their dissatisfaction with negotiations

A bus driver for the Société de transport de Montréal wearing a T-shirt featuring the current collective agreement renewal negotiations. Photo taken on June 9, 2025, in Montreal. (The Canadian Press/Christinne Musch)

Several hundred union members from Montreal’s public transit authority (STM) staged a show of unity on Wednesday, demonstrating in front of the transport agency’s headquarters in protest at the lack of progress in negotiations for the renewal of their collective agreement.

Several unions affiliated with the FTQ, in particular, but also one from the CSN, were represented: bus drivers and metro operators, professionals, maintenance workers, office workers and constables.

Representatives of the various unions on site report that the STM’s wage offers are 11.5 per cent over five years. But the use of subcontracting is also a key issue in these negotiations. The unions say they want to keep expertise in-house for IT, engineering, and even drivers.

The STM, which is facing significant financial challenges, says it needs flexibility. It has already launched a process to privatize paratransit, for example.

“With the STM, it’s a case of ‘moving backwards,’” said Frédéric Therrien, president of the Syndicat des chauffeurs d’autobus et opérateurs de métro (bus drivers and metro operators union), in an interview.

This is the largest union, a local branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), affiliated with the FTQ and representing 4,600 members.

This union has a strike mandate, which it has not yet exercised. But Therrien assures that if it comes to that, his members will do so. For now, negotiation meetings are continuing, he said.

The STM management, for its part, confirms that it is “going through a period of great change where it must operate at the right cost.”

It says it is actively pursuing discussions at the negotiating table “to agree on working conditions that will both motivate our employees and respect the STM’s financial capacity.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Sept. 3, 2025.