Ontario’s elevator technicians are returning to work after a two-month labour disruption.

Approximately 1,400 members of the International Union of Elevator Constructors (IUEC) Locals 50, 90 and 96 who walked off the job May 1 must now catch up on the backlog of projects that has accumulated during the longest strike to idle the construction industry since the 1970s.

Technicians will be back at work by July 10, but few details of the June 28 settlement have been released. Earlier in June, the National Elevator and Escalator Association (NEEA), the negotiating body for the major companies – Kone, Otis, Schindler and ThyssenKrupp Elevator – reported that the two sides were divided over the issue of workers retaining seniority when they moved from one employer to another.

A statement from NEEA maintains that the new contract “will allow NEEA’s member companies to achieve greater control over their workforce, increase flexibility over costs for customers and includes a wage increase for the next three years that is consistent with what other trades have received.”

In Quebec, construction workers returned to industrial/commercial/institutional (ICI) jobsites July 2, after the provincial government passed legislation to end a two-week strike.

Bill 54, introduced in an emergency session of Quebec’s National Assembly on June 30, gives approximately 77,000 construction workers in the ICI sectors the same two per cent pay increase that construction workers in the province’s residential and engineering/road building sectors had already agreed to one week earlier. The legislation also extends the existing collective agreement for another year to allow the two sides to continue negotiating non-wage related clauses.