(Photo by Sergey Tsynkevych/The McGill Daily)

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MONTREAL (CUP) — McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) members voted Dec. 5 to ratify a new five-year contract with McGill after almost 11 months of negotiations and one semester on strike.

After an over four-hour meeting in the Palais de congrès, the union, which represents around 1,700 non-academic support staff, voted with 910 members in favour and 353 against.

MUNACA President Kevin Whittaker said he felt the union’s main demands have been met with the new agreement.

“It’s the best we could have gotten at this point,” he said. “Whether, if we had continued on strike, it would have been better, there’s no way to know. It was a very difficult fight just to get it to where we were today.”

When the strike began on Sept. 1, the union’s main demands focused on a base salary increase for all members consistent with cost of living increases, a wage scale dictating annual salary increases for members on par with wages scales at other Quebec universities, and greater protection for pensions and benefits.

The new contract will include annual across-the-board wage increases. The contract will also implement a new wage scale, an achievement that has been deemed “historic.” On June 1, 2012, all members will move onto a wage scale with 1.5 per cent annual increases, designed so that members can reach their top salaries within 22 years. On June 1, 2015 the wage scale will be converted to 3 per cent annual increases, meaning that members should be able to reach their top salaries within 12 years.

MUNACA’s last contract provided 1 per cent annual salary increases, which, according to the union, would take members 37 years to reach their maximum salary.

Whittaker said salaries were a major issue for members during the meeting.

“People at their [wage] ceiling will not benefit as greatly as they had hoped, and as we had hoped,” he said. “Other than that, I think the rest of the package was very solid.”

Roughly 25 per cent of MUNACA members are currently at the top of their wage ceiling.

“I think in the end we achieved the consensus of the majority of our members and that’s really what it was all about,” said Whittaker.

The strike was punctuated by a number of these incidents, including two separate injunctions McGill brought against the union.

The first injunction, secured Sept. 23, was extended to Jan. 21, 2012 by the Quebec Superior Court in mid-October, which was around the time that McGill secured its second injunction, which restricted picketing around senior administrator’s homes.

The rulings led the union to expand their picketing activities off campus. At one such picket of a McGill Homecoming event at the Hilton Montreal Bonaventure Hotel, MUNACA strike organizer Joan O’Malley was arrested by Montreal police.

McGill was accused of using illegal scab labour after an inspection by Quebec Ministry of Labour official Thomas Hayden found 15 cases of illegal replacement work in late September. Upon review by the Commission des relations du travail several weeks later, the university was cleared of all charges.

In an Oct. 18 email to McGill staff and students, university principal Heather Munroe-Blum accused MUNACA picketers of defacing a McGill building, hurling insults, swearing, throwing objects at senior administrators, and behaving aggressively toward alumni during Homecoming events.

Around the same time, MUNACA picketed at the MUHC Glen Yards construction site, an action that halted work for one day when construction workers refused to cross picket lines. McGill vice-president of administration and finance Michael Di Grappa deemed it an “unnecessary, provocative action” at the time.

As late as mid-November, negotiations were suspended between the two sides, both claiming they were too far apart on wage demands.

MUNACA workers can return to work this week, but have a grace period until Dec. 9. Whittaker said returning to work would be a “huge transition” for the workers.

“I know a lot of people are happy, but I also know there’s a lot of anxiety about returning to a workplace where, quite frankly, they were not welcomed in the past, and I think that’s going to put a lot of stress on members,” he said.

Whittaker said both the union and the university have agreed to make counseling services available to returning employees should they need it.

“It’s not a welcoming feeling when you know you’ve been struggling for three months with this administration, and that they truly don’t care or don’t respect what work you do,” said Whittaker.

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