By Mark Squibb/July 29, 2022
While other communities go full tilt with summer festivities and Come Home Year celebrations, Mount Pearl is focused on more mundane tasks like getting garbage collected in a timely manner, due to a union strike that has led over 200 CUPE workers to the picket lines.
The City issued a statement on Friday July 22, regarding the strike, which entered it’s fourth week this Thursday.
“The City of Mount Pearl respects the right of its unionized workforce to strike,” read the release. “They have the right to picket and the right to respectfully protest the City’s position within collective bargaining. However, in 2022, no one has the right to bully, intimidate, humiliate, or disrespect the non-bargaining workforce who are crossing the picket line each day to go to work.”
The release alleges that “there have been repeated instances of disrespectful behaviour that continue to go beyond legal picketing to bullying and intimidation. City managers, contracted workers, and staff with community groups have been followed, filmed, and physically confined while being ridiculed, taunted, and berated,” and calls upon CUPE Local 2099 to immediately stop such behaviour.
The release echoes the words of Mount Pearl Mayor Dave Aker, who told media outlets, including The Pearl, that there had been reports of picketers bullying and harassing staff members as they went to work.
In an interview with The Pearl last week, CUPE Local 2099 President Ken Turner said those accusations were a mere tactic used by the City to turn the general public against picketers.
In speaking with The Pearl, Aker said that City benefits are ‘second to none,’ including 42 days of paid leave (21 sick-days, 14 paid holidays, and seven special leave days) along with 15 to 30 days of annual vacation.
Those benefits, along with many others, are reiterated in the City’s statement — including management’s proposal that sick leave be reduced from 21 to 18 days for existing employees and that new hires receive 12 sick days instead of 21.
Turner, along with other union leaders both local and national, who spoke at a rally last week, said they refuse to accept a two-tiered system.
The City maintains that changes to the health and dental plan for either current or new employees has never been tabled.
