Hi, I'm the self-interested scum that many of you are referring to. Just thought I'd come here and clear some stuff up. 

First of all, any university student in this province who follows the news has at least one bone to pick with McGuinty. After all, it was his administration that lifted the freeze on tuition fees and sent them soaring up in the first place.

As for freedom and a worker's right to strike, I personally agree with you on that. I think workers should be allowed agency, especially in the face of unfair treatment from employers. It's shameful and irresponsible for any employer to tell some of its employees they aren't entitled to the same treatment as others just because they're last in line. 

But in a union of 24,000 representing a diverse range of jobs, you have to respect that people aren't going to see eye-to-eye on everything, especially when some of them see no immediate gains for themselves at the end of this strike. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but using rhetoric like 'solidarity' and 'brothers and sisters,' and evoking imagery of workers united, arm-in-arm fighting against tyrannical employers doesn't work for people whose only frame of reference to these things is in a history textbook. 

That's why there's a petition pushing back-to-work legislation. I'd love to the see the City and the union reach an agreement, but right now they don't seem to be anywhere close to that. For a lot of us summer workers, we have only eight weeks of full-time employment with the City before we go back to school. The strike in Windsor has already lasted three weeks longer than that. If this strike is resolved in September or even late August, it'll be a hard fought victory for City workers. But for us summer employees, we'll get nothing. No benefits, no wages. And despite the easy stereotype, many summer workers aren't spoiled, wealthy kids whose parents pay for everything.

By the way, we've also started a letter-writing campaign to our mayor and city councillors to get them off their asses and pushing for a fair end to this strike, and I encourage everyone to let their elected officials know they disapprove of the City's arrogance during this strike. 

We're not strike bashers or anti-union activists, we're a group of like-minded people who love their jobs and want to get back to work and on with their lives. I would be surprised to find a single union member who would rather walk the picket line than return to work. And in a case such as this where the employer's behaviour is so clearly out of order, surely any reasonable arbitrator would give the employees a fair deal.

After reading so many ill-informed and downright stupid anti-strike comments on other websites (my favourite was one that suggested we all be fired and replaced with robots), I always assumed the union crowd to be more intelligent, unwilling to consider an issue as multi-faceted as a city-wide strike with a two-dimensional, 'you're either with us or against us' mentality.

Oops.