There is a march starting at Science World at 10 a.m. tomorrow, Wed., Aug. 29th. It will be followed by a rally from 12:00 to 12:30 at City Hall. It is intended to show support for CUPE and to pressure the City to settle the strike.
CUPE members who attend will receive picket hours.
It is a bad day for a rally as it is welfare day. After five weeks without a cheque, the poor -- some of whom would like to go -- have shopping to do.
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So, yeah, I'm missing the plot here. As I read it, welfare people are supposed to go out on the one day in 35 that they have some money, and with that day, rather than go shopping, they should support CUPE members striking for higher wages and more benefits. Missed it altogether.
As I understand it, CUPE strikers want nearly 20 per cent more per year over what they get now for the next five years. That says to me and my poor math-skilled mind that in five years they'll have gotten another year's pay on top of it for just being themselves. They must be special.
I understand that some CUPE members, those very people who wish to have welfare recipients march with them in solidarity, which I have to confess I don't grasp the meaning of, this not being the 19th century last time I looked, some CUPE members want welfare people to march with them to make the people of the city pay CUPE more money on top of what they have already, and that since CUPE people aren't making much now, some of them are hurting financially. To that I have a solution, one fair and equitable and just, if I do write so myself.
Any CUPE member who is facing starvation because of "Sam's Strike" should forthwith hie his self to the Carnegie Centre and sign up for work as a volunteer. For one hour's work as a volunteer, (and no one is putting a gun to that hungry person's head, now are they?) for just one lonely hour of work, the volunteer can get a -- not all at once folks, savor this -- a piece of carrot cake!!!
So I'll sleep well tonight knowing that no CUPE member has to go hungry from want of work. And for an extra hour of work, the CUPE member can buy a cup of coffee.
Whoa, I'd better slow myself down here or I'm going to be running over there to volunteer myself for such a fair deal, which wouldn't be fair because there are likely CUPE members who need that food stamp more than I do.
Dag,
Lucy Alderson, the teacher in the Carnegie Learning Centre, a BCTF member who worked with CUPE members to get a homeless man barred from the Learning Centre for exercising his right to free speech, sent out a mass e-mail the day before the CUPE rally. Many of the people she sent it to are on welfare. She told them that she would be at the CUPE rally and she gave them the start time for both the march and the rally -- hint, hint, nudge, nudge.
But you know what?
Even if a low income member of Carnegie showed up to support CUPE at the rally, when the strike is over and the status quo is back in place, don't expect CUPE to remember. CUPE members at that rally will quickly get back into the groove of barring low income people from the Carnegie Centre. For guess what? Free speech. The sort of thing you do at a rally. It happens all the time. Speaking up vigorously in defense of yourself at Carnegie in a way that demonstrates that you are not deferring to authority is sufficient to get you barred from this city building.
There are numerous cases in which cheap labour (80 cents an hour in food vouchers) is pumped out of low income people at Carnegie hour after hour, but the minute the cheap labour vigorously talks back to the unionized labour, they get barred. It's usually CUPE members who are doing the barring. And it's CUPE members who enforce it. And it's a CUPE member with seniority, Skip, whom you have to go and speak to, grovel to, in order to get the barring lifted.
Seeing these 80-cent an hour dish-washers and table-wipers barred after they've put in hours makes me associate CUPE with the expression, "No good deed goes unpunished."
It will do no good for those wiping table to quit in a huff simply because they get used as filler for CUPE theatrics.
Don't agonizize, organizize.
And look for fellows in the same predicament, perhaps those who frequent the Gathering Centre. Everywhere CUPE is one will find a similar example of CUPEdidty.
(That fine pun might be lost without an explanation, so here goes: cupidity \kyoo-PID-uh-tee\, noun:
Eager or excessive desire, especially for wealth; greed; avarice.)
Meet off-site and talk among yourselves.
I like the term "CUPEdity" because it sounds like stupidity, a form of stupidity that CUPE has taken to new heights.
Like on August 28, the Vancouver Sun reported CUPE President Barry O'Neill announcing at a press conference that 'our members are hurting out there, as are taxpayers'. That's CUPEdity, this self-serving nonsense that CUPE expects people to be stupid enough to believe.
Barry, taxpayers aren't hurting by not having to pay the huge wage bill CUPE demands. If we have the CUPEdity to believe your spin, we will end up almost bankrupt like Toronto.
Another example of CUPEdity is the spin by a CUPE member working at Carnegie Center that bloggers reporting on CUPE members were creating an "unsafe environment" in the workplace. (Not all CUPE members liked the new accountability as bloggers were blowing the whistle when CUPE members locked the doors to computer and educational services at Carnegie in mid-day.) This safety argument actually resulted in a WCB judgement. Unbelievable CUPEdity!
I think there should be another word added to the Canadian dictionary too: CUPE-ocrisy. The type of hypocrisy that is too often associated with CUPE brass like O'Neill who allow people speaking up about practices by CUPE members to become the targets of police harassment or political psychiatry.
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