Stock, you suggest windfall, I state NO windfall, 3 months pay, cut almost in half for taxes, is not gigantic. Moreover, there would be NO taxes paid, if there were no banked time available, so in actual fact one can see banked sick time as a plus to the taxation system. :D
But frankly, I am out of this thread as the classist anti-worker anti-union sentiment is pukable.
at my brothers unionized place of employement if you utake 2 sick days in a row or more or if the sick day is a friday or a monday to make a long weekend you require a doctors note.
But the union agreed to that in their collective agreement in exchange for the banking of sick days.
What is the requirement here?
The current agreement provides that if it's more than 3 consecutive working days, you need a doctor's certificate.
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It's always improper to cherrypick one provision from a collective agreement and consider its "reasonableness" in the abstract and in isolation from context. That context includes not only what's in the rest of the agreement, but also what is common practice elsewhere, what tradeoffs may have been made in previous negotiations to obtain the provision in question, and whether the provision may have been obtained as the result of an independent arbitrator's decision (for example, where an end to a strike is legislated, with binding arbitration to settle the outstanding issues).
I don't know the context to the extent necessary to form the kind of instantaneous opinions that armchair babblers like to indulge in. But consider this: perhaps the union would be prepared to scrap the sick-leave banking system in exchange for a real short-term disability plan. Perhaps they had to settle for this in a previous negotiation, where the employer may have refused to provide such a plan.
Perhaps a real STD plan, involving premiums paid to an insurance company, would cost the City significantly more than the sick-leave banking plan. Would we then hear Stockholm, the outraged taxpayer, bleating about how his hard-earned money was being given to insurance companies to pay for an STD plan, when simply banking sick-leave credits would be a lot cheaper?
After all, to our taxpayer (and to the City), the only thing that matters is the total cost of the compensation package for the City employees. How they divide up that amount - as between salary, vacation benefits, health benefits, sick leave, dental plans, maternity leave, and dozens of other bargaining items - is really none of the taxpayer's concern. It may be that the CUPE negotiators had to give up something in wages and other things (like an STD plan) in order to get the "ridiculous" sick-leave banking plan. For all the taxpayer knows, the City's negotiators in a previous contract round may have actually made a good bargain for the taxpayer by including the current sick-leave plan in the contract, while getting concessions on more costly items.
And if the union gave up something in return for the sick-leave plan, wouldn't it make sense that they would now refuse to give it up without something valuable in exchange from the City? And yet, the City is not offering any quid pro quo - they are demanding a unilateral concession on this from the Union as a precondition to negotiation on other substantive issues.
It's the City that is making this strike about the sick-leave plan, not the union.
Of course there are always people who prefer to blame the unions and side with the bosses, even when they don't know all the facts (the "context"). They think it's "unfair" that unionized workers should receive benefits that non-unionized workers don't receive. They like to throw in the faces of the union members the fact that the economy is in a slump and thousands, if not millions, of workers are hurting. They want everyone to hurt, even the ones who have formed unions to bargain collectively by using the power of their numbers and the threat of withdrawal of their labour.
Never mind that the same "taxpayers" are giving hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate welfare bums to keep their wealthy creditors and shareholders happy. God forbid taxpayers should have to fork over twenty grand to a retiring garbage collector who showed up for work every day for 15 years.
I've started a new thread in Labour and Consumption for part 2. Please continue the discussion here.
"Perhaps a real STD plan, involving premiums paid to an insurance company, would cost the City significantly more than the sick-leave banking plan. Would we then hear Stockholm, the outraged taxpayer, bleating about how his hard-earned money was being given to insurance companies to pay for an STD plan, when simply banking sick-leave credits would be a lot cheaper?"
What you would hear from is that it sounds like a good idea. People should have generous short term disability plans and they should not have to go through this absurd charade of banking unused so-called sick days. I don't care if it costs more if it is a better program and it seems more ethical. The problem with relying on banked sick-leave credits is what then happens to people who have no banked sick leave because they get sick a lot?
