@marnotom! wrote:
@momcqueen wrote:
Working Overtime pays the bills a lot faster than not getting paid at all on rotating strike. I think the average worker will work as hard as he or she needs to work to fix this for themselves and their fellow Canadian. Postal workers shop online too.
Postal workers also have families to feed and spend time with. As a working mother, I'm sure you appreciate the juggling act, even if you work from home. I think many Canada Post workers reluctantly take on overtime work in regular circumstances because while the extra money's nice, it has a deleterious effect on the their life outside of the workplace. Work/life balance is important, particularly this time of year.
@momcqueen wrote:
The shame is that last week they were given the opportunity to go back willing with $1000 in their pockets and they weren’t allowed by the union brass to even vote on whether or not to do it.
My guess as to why the offer didn't go to a union vote is that the offer didn't sufficiently address the needs of a certain group of employees--let's say the rural carriers--and since this group makes up a minority chunk of the membership, there were concerns that their votes could have been buried by votes by other parts of the membership. Mail carriers made up a separate union from CUPW until the late 1980s, I believe.
I have an endless amount of empathy for our postal workers who are putting in long hours in painful and uncomfortable positions but it's very difficult for me to have sympathy for someone who is already compensated better than me in every way conceivable and still wants more.
My family of six lives hand-to-mouth. My husband works every day for months at a time with no guaranteed stable income to (maybe) earn enough to pay the mortgage and loans. We have no benefits of any kind. My kids wouldn't recognize a dentist if one hit them in the face. None of our family's prescriptions are paid and I live with a serious chronic health disorder. We don't take holidays. What little I earn from ebay sales pays for groceries and utilities and allows me to buy clothes and toys for my kids.
At this time of year, my ebay sales for November and December should easily equal or exceed everything else from January to October combined. This year, due to public confidence lost in the postal system as a result of rotating strikes by union members who are already many times over better off than me, those sales do not. So now what? Do we eat less? Or skip my own Christmas? Not pay the utilities? For how long?
If I was someone living comfortably in some other life, this would not matter as keenly to me as it does.
I love my letter carrier. I appreciate the hard, hard work that Canada Post employees do every day. But other people are also working hard (or harder at worse jobs) for a lot less.
Asking me to sympathize with the plight of people being forced back to work by legislation when they could have gone happily with an extra $1000 in their wallets if they only agreed to set their differences aside at the time it matters most to Canadians and agreed to keep fighting afterwards? That's like a homeless dude to give a man in a $7000 suit the only sandwich he'll see today. CUPW, in my estimation, bungled this for their members. Period.
