“inflationary pressures” that are causing things like after school programs to be cut, are the union’s negotiated salary increases.

if you can’t afford to pay people a fair wage to deliver a service, that service is too expensive… this isn’t the fault of people asking for fair compensation

The wage increases that they negotiate, are also way higher than most of the increases I’ve seen / heard of in the private sector.

okay but that is an argument that the private sector should be unionised though

union workers still get their ~20% increase over 3-4 years or whatnot.

that 20% is pretty peanuts since it covers the last however many years of unmet CPI increases, as well as the next 3-4 years and probably accounts for another 5 years or more of unmet CPI increases after that

CPI is on average around 2%ish, so that’s 10 years of CPI adjustment total - that leaves 6-7 years, so really only 3 years before and after the time… strikes don’t happen right away - people have been unhappy about their wages for years before

This creates animosity towards what’s essentially a privileged worker class

perhaps, but the capitalist class has done a great marketing job then: it’s not unions that’s the problem, it’s the capitalists that aren’t paying people!

(australian, so i’m sure there are canadian specifics with this case but the general concepts don’t differ at all)