A year ago Tuesday, the street in front of Montreal city hall was crowded with 2,000 blue-collar workers staging a one-day strike to observe the second anniversary of being without a contract.

Tuesday, Year 3 rolled by, and the closest thing to a demonstration at city hall was a reception for the organizers of this year’s edition of the Festival des Films du Monde.

Which isn’t to say the past 12 months have seen Local 301 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the union representing the city’s 5,500 blue collars, grit its teeth and wait until the city comes around to grant its demands.

After a very publicly announced truce in April that saw the Biodôme and Insectarium reopened after being shut for a month, the union resumed its pressure tactics in June, closed both sites for the duration of the summer and reactivated overtime strikes that move daily from borough to borough.

The effects of those tactics haven’t rattled most Montrealers. During July’s heat wave, the blue collars suspended their overtime ban long enough to ensure fire hydrants were opened in some of the city’s steamier boroughs.

That conduct seems to be the result of a decision by the union to concede that its edgier tactics weren’t making any friends among the general public and were simply making it easier for city hall – management – to dismiss its manual labourers as rabble-rousing troublemakers.

And while it might be argued a softer approach hasn’t exactly sped the blue collars on their way to a new contract, despite the pressure tactics, both sides are talking.

“We’ve been negotiating very seriously for the past few weeks and there’s been real progress on certain questions,” union counsellor Marc Parent said, while refusing to identify what issues were close to being resolved,

“The conciliator’s taken all this into account and intends to make an overall recommendation (on the contract).”

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