Newfoundland Strike - sick leave?

I read on CBC that one of the sticking points in the NF strike is the union refusal to move on the concession regarding sick leave. The union members currently have 24 days of paid sick leave per year.

Holy SHIT! Who on earth is so sick that they can't go to work for 5 weeks every year? You've got to be shittin' me. And who else besides government workers would get that kind of benefit worked into the bargaining agreement to begin with?!

Unbelievable. The pioneers of trade unions are undoubtedly turning in their graves to know that their noble intentions have led to such greed and unbelievable stupidity.

Anyone have any local insights to the strike? Did I misread the article? Was it inaccurate?

m

Here is the link to the thread

You want to know somthing. The union members in Newfoundland are like sheep and they do whatever the union leaders say. They don't question or agrue they just agree. So when the union leadership are a bunch of fools that wont take a great dlea when they see it the whole idea of the union makes less and less sense. Danny Williams knows what he is doing andi trust him. The union leaders are fools and i wouldnt trust them if my life depended on it. The Newfoundland economy is growing so fast we cant fill the job here, new subdivisions are being up faster then you can say subdivision. But the liberal goverment ran a huge deficit ad now the Tory goverment is trying to get it under control. But these unions seem to think money grows on trees.

The problem that the two Unions have here is that they fought to get the benefits they currently have. In previous negotiations the Unions accepted lower wage increases for better benefits.

The government says that all current concessions are off the table. Which they are for current employees. For any new person hired by the government the concessions are still on the table. For example they want to give workers only 12 sick days per year.

The thing that is causing problems is that there is no clear answer to the question 'what constitutes a new worker'?

A lot of the people working for the government here are temp workers. So the question is 'will these temp workers be considered a new employee even though they may have worked for the government for years?'

This looks like it's going to be a very long strike. The Unions will not talk to the government until ALL the concessions are off the table. The government of course says there are, leaving out the part that they are off the table for only current employees. Also the Unions want to meet with the government officials in person, but the gov won't do this because they want EVERYTHING in writing. The gov said that during the talks before the strike (in person) both sides misunderstood each others's offer when leaving the meeting.

Both sides are playing hardball on this one.
The gov has lowered its wage increases offer from what it was before the strike. They say that the higher offer was in place only to avoid a strike.
The union countered saying they no longer agree to a 2 year wage freeze (something that both sides once agreed upon) for the same reason.

It's messy and it's already 2 weeks old today.

One thing is for sure poor ol' Danny Williams is going to have to pull money out of his arse to get re-elected. A LOT of people will never vote PC (CPC) again.

Just a little note on the sick leave thing. A lot of companies, unionised and not, give a half day a month sick leave. That's six days a year. It can generally be accumulated within reason. One company I worked for gave 1 day per month. That's twelve days a year. It could be accumulated indefinitely, but a doctor's note could be required. The last large company I worked for offered 2 days per month for illness and personal appointments. Not only could it be accumulated to up to 24 days, but when I left they paid me for the days I hadn't used, all 24 of them. That's without a union.

I've heard of other companies, also non-unionised, that are even more generous with sick and personal time. The thing is that they usually only offer it to higher-level employees...mid-level management and so on. That's always seemed silly to me because front-line workers are more likely to become ill or injured because of their duties and tend to be younger so they may have to stay home with sick children and so on.

That raises some questions in my mind. How many paid sick days do senior provincial civil servants get per year in Newfoundland? Is it 24 or more? At what point are they required to bring a note from the doctor? Who keeps track? I don't know the answer, but has anybody checked?

I don't know Rev, but sick days is a real thorn in the goverments side, to many people abusing it.

[Edit]

I don't mind that Danny raised the prices of everything, if it help curb the dept why not. My only beef is that a case of beer is going to be going past $20. All i have to say is why. Why must i need to have change on hand to by a case of beer, make a half case $15 if you want but please don't make a case over $20, its so much of a hassle.

Wow, $30/hour. That's a whole $62,400/year. Before taxes, too. A decent buck, sure. Not exactly an outrageous wage in a world where even small houses run $100,000 and a relatively modest vehicle goes for $20,000. A dozen beer here goes for just under $20.00. In Adam's world it goes for over $20.00.

Gas was 76.9 last time I filled up, and I'll bet it's more in Newfoundland. There's PST and GST to be paid. A decent pair of jeans costs over $30.00. The last time my wife took me to the grocery store the bill was $150.00...for two people, for one week. The bucket of tobacco here beside me has a tag that says $62.21 on it...that for rollies, the cheapest way to go.

We live in a world where $62,000 isn't a lot of money anymore, Mukluk. $30.00 an hour is just a decent living wage in most parts of the country.

Maybe that's where the real problem lay? We want to pay people 1980 wages in the year 2004...

62,000 a year in Newfoundland is above average though we have the highest unemployment rate in the country. And thats big news in Newfoundland but i don't see it, we dont have any homeless. Tax in Newfoundland is GST+PST=HST which is %15 on EVERYTHING.

RevBlair, I'm beginning to believe your understanding of economics is in line with my understanding of early Malaysian pottery... :wink:

Anyways $62K a year I believe is higher than than the Canadian *household* average and would be considered a small fortune in Newfoundland and is actually pretty fair coin even in the most expensive part of the country that I live in. I currently earn about a third less than that and am better off than a lot of people.

I'm not saying that it's a small wage. It is a little above average. I am saying that it isn't an insanely high wage the way it is always suggested to be.
It's funny...I know people who make $100,000 a year ($48.08/hour) and I know people who make $9.00 or $10.00 per hour. Most of us are someplace in between.

Anybody who has held a job long enough to be making $30.00/hour has been around for a while too. It isn't a starting wage, especially for "unskilled" employees. They aren't the rule, as they are presented to be, but the exception. They also generally aren't "unskilled" the way they are presented to be. Those are the kind of wages skilled trades bring in. Any "unskilled" people earning them have some skills that others don't.

As for my grasp of economics...it's just fine. We've had de facto wage controls instituted on us by business, but there have been no price controls to match them. We've seen our real wages and standard of living erode because of that. We've seen the tax base shifted onto the shoulders of the average Canadian more and more. We've seen the gap between the rich and poor grow dramatically at the same time we have cut back social programs.

I may not be an economist, but I can tell that we're being screwed, that the current system is not working for an increasing number of people. The solution being offered is to try to find a way to pay even more people even less.

So tell us about your collection of early Malaysian pottery, Rosco.

RevBlair, the world economy has been in a state of fiscal crisis for nearly 30years now, due to the effects of the 1973 Oil Embargo and ill advised charges to our economic model, in Canada's case that combined with high debt incurred by a socialist welfare state and a declining economic competetiveness are the main reasons our real wages are dropping.

Additionally there has been a glut of people in the workforce since the Baby Boomers came of age, which drove down wages in unskilled labor jobs especially, as when a commodity is readily available it also tends to be cheap.

The reason $62K doesn't seem that much to you is because we "need" insanely high taxes and steep tax brackets to support all those socialist programs, so much so that the actual take home pay of a Canadian earning that amount isn't exactly vastly higher than someone earning half as much.

I'd go as far to say that in Canada the $25K-$85K span of income supports a roughly similar lifestyle.