Wages, worker safety among key demands
More than 40,000 residential construction workers are currently on strike in Ontario, and they have gotten support from Canadian educations.
The Cross-Canada Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee (CERSC) said it “unequivocally supports” the house frame builders, floor fitters, demolition workers, crane operators and others in the province who are “waging a courageous struggle against the greed of the construction and real estate corporations”.
“While all sections of the working class are exploited, overworked and underpaid, construction workers face especially hazardous work environments,” according to CERSC. “Accidents can have life-threatening consequences, and COVID-19 has been allowed to run rampant on construction sites over the past two years.”
CERSC claimed that teachers, school caretakers and administrators face the same problems that construction workers are struggling with, including the “staggering inflation made worse by decades of wage stagnation, no protection from the ongoing and worsening COVID-19 pandemic and increasing health and safety concerns”.
These struggles are on top of the risk of injury that workers face while doing their job. Ontario construction workers are also exposed to unsafe levels of a known lung carcinogen: diesel engine exhaust, found a previous report.
CERSC also hit construction unions that, they said, are looking to sabotage the strike by “refusing to call out all trades at once and even dividing members of the same union local by ordering some of them to remain on the job.”
“Their plan is to limit the impact of the strike as much as possible. If they can’t force through concessionary contracts before then, they intend to enforce Ontario’s anti-worker labour laws under which workers lose the legal right to strike as of June 15 and all contract issues still in dispute are automatically submitted to binding arbitration,” said CERSC.
The strikes began on May 1.
LiUNA is among the unions that have announced their members’ strike.
The carpenters’ union said it wants to see a “fair deal” for members whose “work was seen as essential during the pandemic and because of this, and because of spiralling cost of living increases, our union and our members believe that wages now have to be increased,” according to a report from Global News.
Construction workers continued working even when lockdowns were imposed. And with the opening of the economy and rising inflation, the trades are struggling, said Rafael Gomez, director of the centre for industrial relations and human resources at the University of Toronto, according to the Global News report.
“The trades, remember, have to purchase their own equipment a lot of times and they carry it around, so you’re carrying a lot of costs that increased — not to mention the cost of living,” Gomez said. “There’s a lot of frustration and resentment among this group of workers who have had to bear the brunt of all of our COVID measures.”
