this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
14 points (81.8% liked)
askTO | Ask Torontonians Questions
274 readers
1 users here now
A community for people to submit questions to Torontonians about Toronto and receive constructive responses.
INFO
- Please be civil
- No spam
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Are you young? I notice that those who are would rather have the extra money. But older people, especially those with children, will take any excuse to take time off to enjoy life.
As with everything. Monday is arbitrary. Loblaws is arbitrary.
There is nothing special about anything, but some people like to celebrate anniversaries. Birthdays, weddings, and in this case it is the annual celebration of Canada allowing unions – which is something people who like to celebrate, and who are in unions, are apt to want to celebrate.
I'd like to think I am still young, but I take exception to that because I actually strongly value time over money. The thing is a lot of people don't and they no longer have the option.
In BC at least the law is you get the day off, or a day off lieu, or overtime pay. So there is a choice, but if the union negotiates for only time off on holidays, workers no longer have any choice.
Being in that very same union myself I find it very unlikely that this has come from the workers themselves. The union makes no effort whatsoever to communicate with workers. They have not negotiated for raises to the payscales in over twenty years. UFCW is a corrupt and worthless union. Actually they are worse than worthless because I believe they weaken the stance of all unions.
And besides all that, Labour Day in particular isn't really a time of celebration for anyone I've ever known; it's just another long weekend. It's the last major camping weekend in my area, which doesn't exactly strike me as a celebration of labour rights.
Then why are you at work on a holiday?
Them's the breaks of adopting the single desk. Removing worker choice is kind of the whole point of a union. That is how it gains its strength. A worker being able to choose may be empowering for the individual, but comes at the cost of weakening the position of other workers in competition. It is easy to see how workers being able to choose to work on holidays can, in some circumstances, pressure those who do not want to work into working.
What is the explanation, then? Obviously Loblaws doesn't close as a rule. It seems most of their locations, including those across Ontario, were open on the holiday. It was just a small handful of locations in Toronto that were closed.
Because I get a different day off in lieu, that's what I just told you.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. A untions strength comes from collective action and bargaining, not the removal of choice. You don't happen to be an official at UFCW, do you? Because that's exactly the kind of bullshit I'd expect to hear from those corrupt turds. "You don't need a choice because I already made it for you!"
I don't know. But if it's not all the stores in the local, then it definitely didn't come from the union, and workers are not allowed to act collectively outside the union. So it must have a been a corporate decision.
Yes, the single desk. If you give employees choice then they will offer greater and greater concessions towards the employer (accept lower pay, accept fewer holidays, accept more dangerous working conditions, etc.) to beat out the next guy, and that means the next guy gets screwed over. The union seeks to remove individual choice, instead selling the services of a collection of workers as a whole unit in an effort to level the playing field for all workers, thus giving greater power to the collective.
What choice the union decides to remove from the individual is up to each union. A union is just the people in the union, after all. It's not some magical power that descended from the heavens. They, as a collective, can do whatever they want. But it's easy to see how allowing the choice to work on certain holidays could become a problem for some unions and why its members would seek to have nobody work on holidays.
But that's just it, the stores that were open appear to be in different union locals.
What's the explanation, though? Do people in Toronto not eat on holiday Mondays? There were a handful of other locations outside of Toronto that were also closed, but they appear to be in the same union local.