Union workers call out Hydro-Quebec for asking tribunal to force employees back to work over holiday outages

Trade war or not, Hydro-Québec will have to continue to limit its exports to the United States. A Hydro-Québec worker on September 1, 2023. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press)

Union workers with Hydro-Quebec are calling out the Crown corporation’s decision to ask the labour tribunal to force employees back to work after Monday’s storm that left over 100,000 clients in the Quebec City region without electricity.

Hydro-Québec attempted to restore service quickly following the outages, but when it called on employees for help, very few responded, likely due to Fête Nationale.

“It was difficult to mobilize our teams, partly because of the holiday,” explained Hydro-Québec spokesperson Louis-Olivier Batty, in an interview with Noovo Info.

Batty said that on holidays, the Crown corporation expects a 40 to 50 per cent response rate from its workers, but on Tuesday, only about 10 per cent of workers responded to the call.

Fréderic Savard of the Hydro-Québec Trades Employees Union (SCFP 1500) told Noovo Info the situation highlights shortcomings in Hydro-Québec’s planning regarding the management and predictability of work.

“We would like to point out the hypocrisy of Hydro-Québec, which brought the SCFP1500 union before the tribunal when there are still outages related to the storm, but Hydro-Québec discharged the workers on Wednesday, and all the teams were sent back to their respective regions,” said Savard.

Hydro-Québec said on Thursday that the situation is nearly resolved, with 95 per cent of “customers affected by outages related to the June 23 storms having their power restored.”By Friday morning, only 241 out of nearly 420,000 addresses were still without electricity.

- With files from Noovo Info