Now that it's over, you have to ask yourself, what did the strike at Community Living Mississauga really achieve?
Precious little.
It was a strange labour action from the start. The union talked about how it understood the provincial underfunding in its sector and how difficult it was to walk away from individuals you've known and befriended over the years.
CLM Executive Director Keith Tansley talked about how underpaid his workers were before the labour dispute took place. Indeed, you could argue that the root of the strike is the lack of value that the Ontario government, and we as a society, put on care for some of our most vulnerable citizens.
The CLM workers are among the highest-paid across the province but that doesn't say much.
It became evident, as the weeks wore on after the pickets took to the streets April 10, that the strike really wasn't about money. Most other jurisdictions settled by agreeing that the local agency would pass along all of the money designated for raises this year and whatever came along next year. That could have happened here and, indeed, it is what ultimately happened.
In the end, this strike was about power, as most are.
The 360-member Ontario Public Service Employees' Union Local 251 is made up predominantly of part-time workers. Their president, Grace Mungal, is a part-time worker and one of the main issues in dispute was how shifts were scheduled.
The union wanted seniority to be the determining factor.
The local obviously feels that Tansley has far too much control of everything that happens at CLM. Mungal talked frequently about how, “the employer” wouldn't do this and “the employer” wouldn't do that. She was referring to Tansley.
Since he and Mungal have had a rocky relationship since she became president, things didn't go well at the table. They seemed to become personal, something that never works to the advantage of either side.
Even when they worked out a deal, they didn't have a deal. The provincial mediator brokered a compromise, but Tansley and Mungal couldn't agree about the terms of the back-to-work arrangement.
Lost in all of these details, just as they were lost throughout the strike, were the individuals who rely on the CLM and its staff to make their lives bearable.
Many of them can't speak, can't express their outrage and can't even raise a finger in protest.
The inevitable confrontations on the picket lines outside group homes left some of those clients bewildered and frightened.
In a “plea for help” to his MPP, Mississaugan Terry Girard said his daughter Sabrina, who was forced to cross picket lines to get into her group home on Schomberg Ave., had experienced a form of “terrorism.”
“Sabrina is not sleeping properly,” her father wrote. “She is confused and as she is non-verbal, is exhibiting her frustration in the only way she knows when she is desperate and feels she is in danger. That being she defends herself, physically, usually in biting activity. It has been years since Sabrina has shown this behavior and in just a short period of time these picketers have destroyed her self-confidence and mild manners. As a result of all of this it has been impossible to keep up properly with Sabrina’s medications and she is in very real emotional turmoil and physical danger.”
Sabrina is just one of many individuals whose carefully-structured lives have been shattered by the strike that no one says they really wanted.
Signing a new collective agreement is one thing. Putting all of those lives back together again is going to be something infinitely more difficult.