Teamsters Local 597

Maintenance workers at GMT turned down a contract offer on 8/15/2021 and voted to authorize a strike. The maintenance workers perform tasks ranging form snow removal at the facility and at the bus shelters and cleaning and sanitizing the facilities and equipment to repairing the buses and keeping up with repairing any superficial damage. Mechanics currently at GMT are both journeyman and master mechanic classifications and they are qualified to perform all manners of repairs to the GMT equipment.

After five months of negotiating the group considered a final offer from GMT sent to the union which included only one raise of 2.5% in the first year of a three-year deal and no adjustments in years two and three and only minor adjustments to base compensation rates in a market where the company is already are having difficulty hiring on mechanics. The maintenance staff is already experiencing workforce shortages and morale has been slipping during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition, the employer was making moves to limit the amount of vacation time members could carry over which would, inevitably, lead to more overtime for an already understaffed maintenance group. Many of the members of the maintenance group have very long tenures at the company, and they, as well as the rest of the group voted to reject the final offer 15-0, noting that many of the long tenured mechanics with anywhere from 12 to 32 years of experience at GMT make less than the mechanics with less than ten years of tenure employed by the City of Burlington. They are demanding that GMT come back to the table with a realistic offer and have unanimously authorized a strike if that does not happen.

TEAMSTERS LOCAL 597