Our union settled with the company 15 days after we went on strike. I’ve finished my first full week of being back at work and making money again, which I’d much rather do than striking.
Some takeaways of what I learned or were underscored for me, being on strike for the first time:
Being on the picket line is among the most boring things a person can do
Listen, I was usually with people I work with and am only too happy to hang out with. But even with them present, I was still standing around in oppressive sun and heat outside — not sitting, not hanging out at a bar or on a patio or at someone’s place — and holding up signs. In our case, for four hours per shift.
Mind-numbingly boring.
Being on strike pays poorly
This, I knew. But knowing it and experiencing it are different things.
It’s a smaller step between how little I sometimes make a day or week and what the strike pay was than, say, for long-time teachers used to actually making a good living. But it was still not great.
Also, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that the union badly mishandled those payments for the vast bulk of people on the picket lines. Aside from not getting paid at all, the only thing worse than getting paid poorly for what you do is that payment not coming through effectively.
Media as a whole needs to get better coverage of both sides on these things
You know what most people saw on media? Doug Ford and/or his bargaining team saying how he didn’t understand why the LCBO workers’ union wasn’t taking up their (bad) offer or engaging in talks (when they knew damn well why).
That was often, but not even always, followed up with a one-line conclusion that “the union says they’ll come back when the government will bargain in good faith” (without any indication of what that actually means, a term that even long-time union members didn’t fully understand, so how could anyone else?)
Intentionally or not — and that’s a whole other discussion — the media doing this only served to put a pro-government/pro-company/anti-union spin on the whole affair. Which only served to feed into the next point…
Some people think they hate you because you’re on strike
I don’t think I’m overstating this. They really do. But they’re wrong.
Generally, the feedback that our picket lines got was positive. Most drivers didn’t engage, but I’d say comfortably between a third and half of the traffic honked for us.
But there were exceptions.
Those were the people who think they make an effective point by hollering something snarky at you as they drive by at 50 km/h instead of actually parking where we did and stepping over to have an earnest conversation with us. Yes, very brave of you to yell something at people without giving them a chance to respond (or maybe educate you a bit about what you’re clearly so upset about).
Then there was that one guy who slowed way down, yelled something angrily through his open passenger window that I couldn’t make out other than finishing with, “… ASSHOLE!” and flipping me the middle finger before racing away.
That guy has something way, way deeper and more problematic going on than LCBO workers being on strike.
Maybe he hates losing his youth.
Maybe he’s in the midst of a divorce and could really use a drink but can’t get liquor at the moment.
Or just lost his job and hates us having the gall to put a pause on ours.
Maybe he alienated his kid a decade ago and finally regrets it.
Who knows?
Point being, I took his actions, ostensibly directed at me, with a big grain of salt, knowing that whatever the case is, he couldn’t possibly be that angry about only this strike.
Here’s the thing, folks: The bottom line is that LCBO workers went on strike because Ontario Premier Doug Ford continues to erode LCBO’s business model by letting other companies, such as grocery and gas station chains, carry more and more (and more) categories of alcohol. Ready-To-Drink (“RTD”) cocktails were the latest of those categories and became a focal point of the strike talks.
In brief, all of the profits from those grocery and gas sales go entirely to the grocery and gas chains. Whereas when the LCBO sells them, all of those profits go into the provincial coffers to get used to pay for things like education and health care costs, to the tune of about $2.5 billion per year (and up to sometimes twice that in good years).
So we were striking to help keep that money for public services. So if you have a kid in school or have ever used a doctor or gone to the hospital, part of LCBO profits helped pay for that to happen.
Is that worth getting upset about? Flipping off strangers about? Yelling at them about?
I wouldn’t think so.
Then there was job protection. With the eroding of the LCBO’s usefulness as a provincial cash cow due to more places getting the chance to sell alcohol, the union became concerned that it would affect how much work the LCBO store staffers, union members, are getting. It wanted to ensure that less draw to our stores didn’t translate to less work for union members.
But it goes way farther, which I don’t think people realized: If the LCBO dissolves in favour of privatizing all alcohol sales in the province, it’s not just the 9000+ union members who lose their jobs (as many anti-union newspaper article responders seemed to think), it’s everyone in the entire company, from the union upward.
Managers would lose their jobs, because there’s no staff or stores to manage any more.
District Managers would lose their jobs without managers to handle.
Every job that the LCBO entails, from the front-line staff like us to HR to magazine production to distribution and product picking and shipping and warehousing… all of it goes away.
So people are… upset that we want to be able to keep working? And keep many, many other people working? Or that we want job security (as I touched on here)?
Like… what’s the complaint there?
And, by the way, this shows just how out of touch the drive-by-yellers were who thought that, “Get back to work!” or “Get a job!” made any sense at all: We wanted to get back to working at our jobs. We wanted to make sure the jobs were still there and would hopefully remain there. That was kind of a key part to all of this. But thanks for your… super helpful advice?
You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet (even when it’s all bitter for you and only sweet for compatriots)
I’m not sure I have the legal right to get into precise details of the agreed-upon contract. Suffice to say there were definite gains (for new and expecting parents, for bereavement leave, with an old and beneficial employee category that is making an unexpected return), but definite loses that were of course barely touched on in the long Zoom meeting the union had about the tentative agreement.
I’m unfortunately squarely in the group that will be taking those definite loses. There’s a very good chance I’ll be directly, negatively affected by it, potentially in a huge way. I can’t be sure, and don’t know that I ever will be sure, of if or when it may happen, which makes for a new level of background stress about an already stressful job I could do without.
But I still voted Yes to accepting the tentative agreement. Because, just as I was picketing not for myself but for people who came before me and want to keep working there, and for people who may come after me to give the LCBO a shot as a job that should still be there for them, the contract is better for way more people other than just me.
So it’s a bit hard being back at work and even earnest, supportive people asking if we got what we wanted in the contract. Because for some yes, but for many like me, really, really no. But I nod and tell them that yeah, it’s better for a lot of people now. That much is true, even if it’s not the whole truth.
Suffice to say, I’m much happier being back at work. I’m still not making enough money there, but for now it’s all I’ve got. And the strike wasn’t easy, but despite what you may read or hear — from people who have no clue what our jobs actually involve, or in the likes of op-ed pieces by people looking in from the outside of all this — for the greater good, it was absolutely worth it.