By Kim Siever
Education support workers in Fort McMurray announced on January 7 that they are going on a full strike.
The education workers are represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees. They’re employed with two school divisions – Fort McMurray Public School Division and Fort McMurray Roman Catholic Separate School Division – and belong to separate locals of CUPE: Local 2545 and Local 2559, respectively.
They include education assistants, administrative support workers, childcare services workers, custodians, tradespeople (such as HVAC technicians), library workers, IT workers, food services workers and so on.
Workers organized with Local 2545 represent about 450 people, and they have been waiting for over 3 years for a new contract. Their last one expired in August 2021.
Local 2559 workers, on the other hand, number about 425 people, and their most recent contract expired a year before that, in August 2020.
On top of that, Local 2559 workers haven’t had a raise since 2015, and the last raise Local 2545 workers received was 1.25 percent back in 2020.
Over the last 11 years, Local 2545 workers have had 8 years of wages freezes and Local 2559 workers had wage freezes in all but one of those years. Some of them are still making less than $30,000 a year.
These education workers are tired of being ignored. They’ve been trying for years to negotiate a new contract, but it’s not working.
So, striking is all they have left. They tried striking back in September, but the provincial government forced the workers to the Dispute Inquiry Board, which effectively pauses any striking for at least 30 days.
CUPE workers continued to picket, however, but outside of work hours.
On November 4, members of Local 2545 and 2559 voted to reject the results of the Dispute Inquiry Board. Then they reached out to both school boards to invite them back to the table.
The school boards said, unfortunately, that they had nothing new to offer. This shouldn’t be surprising, since the government is dictating how much public sector employers are allowed to offer workers.
As a result, CUPE issued a 72-hour strike notice on November 7.
And 6 days later, their strike began. It started with a two-day strike, beginning on November 13, followed by rotating strikes the next week.
During this first round of striking, the school boards brought in scab workers and paid them more than they had been paying the CUPE workers.
To make it more difficult for the school boards to use scab labour, CUPE workers decided for the final week of November to post striking locations just the night before. Previously, they had posted all the locations at the start of the week.
This practice continued into December, right up until schools closed for the holidays.
This latest escalation, however, is going further than rotating strike and after-hour picket lines.
These nearly 1,000 workers are going on “a full strike and will not be returning to work until there is a fair contract.”
Hopefully, this will finally wake up the provincial government. People can’t keep living off frozen wages. And if the government doesn’t respond with increased funding so these school boards can adequately compensate these workers, they may get their hands full if tens of thousands of nurses and AUPE workers go on strike this year, too.
Originally published at Alberta Worker
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