The LCBO strike is over after some last-minute drama and an attempt to convince the government to pay workers for the time they were on strike.
Thankfully, the Ford government, via the LCBO, said no to that request and wisely the union is recommending union members accept the contract.
Once that happens, the strike will end on Monday and stores will open Tuesday.
It’s too bad for the LCBO workers who are the real losers in all of this.
Most Ontario residents made it through without regular trips to the LCBO. Some bars and restaurants felt the pain of limited product selection for their customers.
For the most part though, we all survived this dry summer, but LCBO frontline workers will be forfeiting more than two weeks’ pay for a deal that could have been accomplished without a strike.
Overplaying your hand is dangerous in a card game but at the end of the day, it’s just a card game. When a union leader overplays their hand again and again, it’s harmful to the workers they represent.
Trying to force the Ford government to back down on plans to sell ready-to-drink cocktails such as a White Claw or Ceasar in a can was never going to work. Governments decide public policy, not unions, and if JP Hornick and the rest of the OPSEU team want to make public policy, they need to get elected to the legislature, not a union job.
Yet, that’s what the strike was all about, stopping the sale of RTDs.
To make the union’s case, Hornick was fighting a Doug Ford that only exists in the imaginations of his biggest detractors. The union claimed Ford was expanding the sale of alcohol to make his billionaire buddies rich and tried using images of a Galen Weston look-alike in their ads.
Doug Ford and Galen Weston are not buddies.
More than two-thirds of Ontario’s convenience stores are independently owned and operated, either as stand-alone shops or as franchises. Most Ontarians know this because they know the shops they frequent; they know the people behind the counters.
Hornick and the union also repeatedly claimed Ford wanted to privatize the LCBO despite his repeated public comments to the contrary.
“I’m going to make two things very, very clear. We’re not privatizing the LCBO. We’re not selling the LCBO,” Ford said days after the strike began.
In addition to stating he wouldn’t sell or privatize, Ford encouraged union members to look up the contract offer the LCBO had made but that the union leadership had not presented.
By not presenting the offer and not staying at the bargaining table, Hornick and the bargaining team overplayed their hand. The deal that was on the table, in terms of wage increases, was not that far off what was eventually agreed to.
The strike will have lasted 18 days in total and for a full-time worker putting in five days a week, they will have lost 4.6% of their annual wages for this year. The first year of the contract only sees a 3% increase with 2.75% in the second year and 2.25% in the third.
That means frontline workers lost money on this strike and accomplished little they couldn’t have achieved by forgoing the strike and staying at the bargaining table.
The union overplayed their hand again in trying to sneak in a last-minute deal, after the tentative agreement was signed, to have workers paid for their lost wages during the strike, their vacation time accrued and their time in lieu. That proposal, according to one government source, would have cost $15 million.
Had the Ford government agreed to that demand they may well have faced a tax revolt and demands to privatize the LCBO or shut it down.
The drama of the last few days was unnecessary.
One veteran of collective bargaining said they’ve concluded at least 100 agreements but never seen anything like the final 24 hours of the LCBO strike.
Hopefully Hornick learned from this experience, otherwise, more frontline workers will be harmed in the next foolish strike.