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Workers punch out for vacation season: Construction holidays |
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Construction workers across the province punched out before the construction holidays kicked in last Friday, officially bringing in Quebec’s vacation season.
In the Estrie region that means more than 5,000 workers are now on mandatory vacation. Collectively they will share a record amount of about $9 million, up by 9.8 per cent from last year, in vacation pay.
All construction work, with the exception of road repairs, is shut down for the next two weeks.
As for the province, more than 132,000 hard-hatted employees have two weeks off and share about $245.4 million in vacation pay, also an increase of about 10 per cent over last year.
“The increase in vacation pay is due to the higher number of construction workers from 2007 to 2008,” said the spokesman for the Commission de la construction du Québec (CCQ), André Martin, in a statement released to the media. “The Estrie region is doing very well, the best it’s been in 10 years.”
The number of working hours climbed by 9 per cent, with 585 new construction workers added to the regional workforce.
“There isn’t a mega-project in the region, but there is a lot of development in the institutional and commercial sectors in Estrie,” Martin said.
According to the CCQ website, the construction holiday was made official in 1970 by government legislation, and took effect for the first time in Quebec in the summer of 1971.
The holiday is one of the conditions to which employers and workers traditionally agree upon.
According to Wikipedia, about one quarter of Quebec’s labourforce takes the same two weeks for its vacation, and it’s the busiest time of year for the province’s tourism industry, with a surge of up to 40 per cent in activity in some locations.
Traditional road trips lead to longer than usual wait times at border crossings as a result of the mass exodus, and heavy traffic at the beginning and end of the 14-day period.
By Joe Strizzi
July 21, 2008 |
Montreal Canadiens
