EDITORIAL – Let the strike begin – who will be the first to blink?
(Image: PSAC)
An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.
FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVANTS are officially on strike and life in Canada will be different for a while.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada was true to its word after no agreement was reached by 9 o’clock last night. As many as 100,000 non-essential workers will be off the job, affecting everything from income-tax returns to passport applications.
Kamloops is among the communities in which workers will walk the picket lines; here it’s at the Service Canada Centre on Seymour Street. “Invite your coworkers, friends and family to join you on the line,” urges the union.
Collective bargaining is a lot about bluster but it’s also about asking for more than you expect to get, and offering less than you expect to give.
Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired newspaper editor.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
A shift premium for working after 4PM? Seriously? The union leadership’s position is completely tone-deaf. With falling inflation, far more job security, and more generous wages, benefits and pensions than equivalent jobs in the private sector, they are considerably better off on balance than the average private sector worker whose taxes pay public sector worker’s wages and benefits. Maybe they need to pull their horns in, get back to work, and be grateful for a great job. We now have more federal employees than ever before, and yet things like passport processing have pretty much ground to a halt. One of the biggest barriers to investment in Canada is that “we just can’t get things done” at the federal level. We are snowed under with bureaucracy and buck-passing in Canada. More employees, in fact a 30+% increase in numbers since 2015, far out-stripping job growth in the private sector, seems to have only made things worse. A big raise and even more generous working conditions, including employees rather than the employer deciding if they’re going to work from home or at the office is the last thing we need right now.
I applaud your comment Ken, fully and completely without adding anything that may disqualify this comment from being published.