Where's Norma Rae When You Need Her?

So the City of Toronto's municipal workers are represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE- pronounced KYOO-pee). The city workers' collective bargaining agreement expires this year, and the CUPE negotiators have been at the table with the City of Toronto to hammer out a new three-year contract. The deadline to reach an agreement was 12:00midnight last night, and unfortunately, neither side blinked. So all of Toronto's unionized public employees are now on strike.

Since I'm new here, and I don't really have much to do with the day-to-day life of the city, the only way I'll be affected by this is that there will be no garbage collection for a while. Thankfully, I don't generate too much garbage, but it will still be a pain. The good news is, the house has a basement that stays quite cool, which will hopefully retard the decomposition of the nasty. The larger problem is, trash bins around the city are also not going to be emptied, and the garbage and recycling is already overflowing onto the streets.

The issue at the heart of the strike seems to be what to do with unused sick days. Municipal workers accrue 18 sick days during the year. Some workers, like police officers, firemen and teachers are able to bank the sick days, and either carry them over to the following year, or cash them out upon termination/retirement. Other workers, like garbage collectors and city hall employees, do not have the same option. It sounds somewhat reasonable to me; my most recent employer had a similar policy. Being able to carry over a whole 18 days seems excessive, but that just means there's wiggle room to negotiate. Here's hoping they can come to some kind of compromise soon. A similar strike has been running in Windsor, ON for the last three months already...