LCBO employees get ready for potential strike
Posted May 14, 2013 01:04:54 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
You may want to get to the LCBO ahead of the long weekend as employees gear up for a potential strike as early as Friday morning.
Twenty-four stores would be impacted in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph if a strike were to take place, with around 275 employees picking up signs.
Ontario Public Service Employees Union representative for Local 285 Chris Patterson tells 570 News they are fighting to keep what employees currently have.
“We are not asking for anything further we are just trying to maintain were as the employer has come to us and their offer of concessions is nothing more than cut backs and claw backs.”
Workers voted 95 per cent in favour of strike action with job security, improved health and safety as well as benefits still needing to be resolved.
Patterson explains that if a strike were to happen, employees would be targeting a hand full of stores open for business Friday morning.
“There will be at least one store in each of the four cities that would open for business that day …to be staffed by management and those would be the stores that we would be targeting in terms of our picketing.”
Both side have been at the table since February after the most recent contact ran out in March.
This is not the first time the LCBO and its employees have been at opposite sides of the bargaining table. They underwent contract talks in 2005 and again in 2009, both being resolved.
This is the first time in the LCBO’s 87 year history that employees would be preparing for a strike.
Sally Ritchie, a spokesperson for the LCBO contacted 570 News to make some clarifications and counters to Patterson’s statements.
Ritchie tells 570 News the LCBO has not asked for any retail job cuts or downsizing.
“There’s nothing of that sort being planned or proposed in this round of bargaining. On the contrary in fact, we’re expanding. So this is going to create more opportunities for full and part time unionized workers.”
Ritchie adds the LCBO does have a plan to offer some levels of service at stores across the province on that day, but says they cannot confirm which stores will be open and staffed.
“That part of the plan has not been released, I don’t know it, and as far as I know that’s completely untrue. The fact is we want to offer some level of service, but the full plan will be revealed when it needs to be.”
Ritchie says they want to be able to open the stores, but that will only happen is staff and customer safety is ensured, and stores are properly staffed.
