Montreal’s main municipal unions are furious over double performance bonuses for city executives.
White-collar and blue-collar workers said they were “outraged” by what they learned Pres This morning their bosses received two bonuses in 2023. Mayor Plante argues that these are the amounts they lost during the pandemic in 2020.
“It is absolutely amazing to see executives being held in higher esteem by this administration than the white-collar and blue-collar workers directly responsible for services to citizens,” union leaders Patrick DuBois and Jean-Pierre Lawson said in a press release. In the middle of the day.
Both reject Valérie Plante’s argument that the 2020 bonus will be paid late. “But what planet does this administration live on? While executives were teleworking, our members were on the streets providing services to Montrealers, unionists added. Where are their thanks? »
The two companies want to reopen their collective agreements so that inflation in recent years is taken into account in salary increases. Montreal has closed the door on this possibility.
The official opposition at City Hall, for its part, attacked the Plant administration’s “lame and incoherent” explanations.
“Plant management complains every week that it doesn’t have enough money to address the many problems facing our city, but believes it has the luxury of paying executives a total of $6 million in double bonuses,” Aref Salem lamented in a written statement. . “Executives already have 3 days off to make up for missing their bonus in 2020. If that’s a lack of priorities, I don’t know what is…”
“It was budgeted”
Also, Mayor Valérie Plante on Friday defended her administration’s decision to offer two bonuses to Montreal city executives in 2023.
Photo by Martin Tremblay, La Presse Archives
Mayor of Montreal, Valerie Plante
The mayor argued that these were bonuses for 2020 and were never paid by the city due to budget constraints.
“The bonuses we are talking about are amounts that were suspended during the pandemic in 2020. We decided to give them to executives last May,” he argued at a press conference. “For me, it is important to note that these are not budgeted additional amounts. In 2020, they were suspended in the middle of the pandemic, where everyone was asked to try. We also asked the administrators. »
“These are not new amounts, it has been budgeted,” he added.
In 2020, the City of Montreal made no mention of the “suspension” of this bonus. “Administration has decided that executives will contribute to the budget effort by not paying any performance bonuses for 2020,” an article in the newspaper said, underscoring the city at the time. 24 hours. “We have canceled the bonus,” the mayor’s press secretary said.
Pres Montreal’s 1,800 municipal executives received an average bonus of $3,150 in May, on top of their usual performance bonus ($3,700 on average), it revealed Friday morning. The second check corresponds to 85% of the first. It is equal to 2% to 6% of the annual salary and is determined based on the performance of the employee.
“It’s not really a 2020 bonus,” executive committee chairman Dominique Olivier said before the article was published. Executives who left in the meantime don’t get the bonus and new executives – who won’t lose anything in 2020 – are entitled to it. “I was one of the executives who tightened their belts at that time and never came back,” says M.me Olivier was the head of the Office de Consultation Public de Montréal (OCPM) in 2020.
Mme Olivier explained that it was a move to retain his staff in an environment of labor shortages.
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