Looks pretty good right now, doesn’t it Mr. Cornellier?

Ottawa’s Amalgamated Transit Union voted against the city’s latest offer yesterday, prolonging their strike indefinitely. They claim it is not about money, but about their ”quality of life” eg. the scheduling.

Right now, scheduling is in the hands of the drivers (union). They can pick their own shifts based on their seniority, currently resulting in $8 million dollars a year in overtime pay because senior drivers pick the lucrative shifts, some booking more than 60 hours a week (resulting in about 30 hours/week of overtime pay) while junior drivers are sitting in the garage waiting for work (and being paid). Some workers are now being paid for 12 hour shifts while they only work for 6 or 7. The city wants the scheduling back to save the $8 million overtime pay.

(As a side note: how hard is it to make a friggin’ schedule that has everyone working a solid 7 hours a day/40 hrs a week? They do it in every company in the world that has shift workers, yet OC Transpo cannot make it work. Who do they have working over there in scheduling?)

If this is really about quality of life, and not about money, take a pay cut of about $8 million dollars, and you can have your current scheduling. City will get their savings, and you will get your quality of life. Everybody happy.

Court decision lets limited number of OC Transpo drivers picket at the World Junior Hockey Tournament in Ottawa. The picketers are allowed to hand out flyers. I am sure a hockey fan from Kazachstan will be very interested to read about the plight of the Ottawa Bus Driver. “Just hang in until next week, then the Hockey comes to town” said local ATU official Andre Cornellier a few weeks back. It seems that was what Andre was trying to blackmail the city with and he was hoping the city would be panicked enough to cave in order to “save” the tournament.

He was wrong.

With Christmas over, a limited picket at the tournament, and people getting used to car-pooling, walking and living down town, I think it is time to let the OC Transpo strike just linger until, say, March, and let them freeze their butts off picketing outside in the cold, rather than sit in a nice warm bus.

It is unfortunate the 25,000 people from all over the world visiting our city in the next two weeks will have to find alternate transportation, but I have seen a number of restaurants and hotels offering free shuttles to the teams’ venues, so as usual and in true conservative fashion, free enterprise steps in where government fails.

About 400,000 people in Ontario are just about to lose their jobs. And that is in the auto sector alone. Thousands upon thousands of people are worried that they’ll be jobless within the year. I myself am worried if I still have a job (or a company for that matter) at the end of next year, since our company supplies, amongst others, GM and Chrysler (I am btw disappointed the government has a bail-out plan for the big three AMERICAN companies operating in Ontario–throwing money at a bad company isn’t going to save it, they will have to change structurally first, starting with the unions).

Against this depressing backdrop, several unions are currently on strike for things ordinary people would only wish they had access to: PSAC @ Canada Post is striking for a better benefit package (and wage increases), and OC Transpo, Ottawa’s transit company, is on strike for the right to keep scheduling their own shifts (and wage increases). The auto workers’ unions will not talk about decreasing wages, because they say the wages are not the problem, and lowering wages would admit some sort of guilt.

As to the title of this post: I know we tend to blame unions and their bosses like Layton-pal Buzz Hargrove and the incredibly moronic  Andre Cornellier, however, I am wondering why union members continue to vote in favour of these strikes with overwhelming numbers: Canada Post voted 88% for a strike, OC Transpo voted over 98% for a strike. In this day and age, where people have to fight to even keep their job, these members are on strike not to keep their jobs, no, they are on strike to be able to work less and get paid more. Union members must know about the recession. They read the papers. They watch the news. They must know ordinary people in this country are fearing for their jobs? Do they not know that striking for higher wages will only jeopardize their own jobs or even an entire industry?

So, would people with a fully working brain vote to go on strike at the eve of one of the biggest recessions this country has ever seen?