Tensions boil over at Community Living

OPSEU leaders speaking at a demonstration outside constituency office of MPP Dave Smith on Aylmer Street. (Photo by Gabe Pollock)

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Greetings, it’s co-editor Gabe Pollock, here with your weekly Peterborough Currents newsletter.

It’s a strike! OPSEU 358, representing over 300 developmental service workers at Community Living Trent Highlands, is entering their fourth week on the picket lines.

It’s part of a coordinated campaign of labour actions across the province, an Ontario-wide boiling-over point following a decade of underfunding of the public sector by the provincial government. The impacts of the strike affect some of the most vulnerable people in our society, as well as the precarious workforce they rely on.

Head to the website to read the full article, “Tensions boil over into a strike at Community Living (and across the province)”, or keep reading to find out a bit more.

I’ve been interested in the challenges faced by developmental support workers for some time.

They are among our society’s most “essential workers” – often not in the legal sense of the term, but in the wider, truer sense: people who devote their lives to assisting some of the most vulnerable among us: those with developmental disabilities and their families. It’s a remarkably complex profession, requiring a wide variety of skills, a deep level of emotional intelligence, and relationships of trust and understanding that are built over years.

And, like so many care professions (and so many professions dominated by women and minorities, by coincidence!), it happens to be a sector that’s chronically underfunded, where workers are asked to make herculean sacrifices for minimal compensation. Burnout rates are high, and many workers are forced to leave, simply to find something that pays better.

And then, three weeks ago, the workers of OPSEU 358, representing the developmental support staff at Community Living Trent Highlands, went on strike.

I will admit that, at first, a strike story didn’t really interest me for Currents. A strike tends to thin out the nuance of any issue, turning it into an us-versus-them, he-said-she-said battle of spin. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized just how complex this strike was, and how deeply it struck at the heart of the issue.

First is the fact that this isn’t just Peterborough on strike, but a growing movement of (so far) 27 union locals across Ontario, representing 4,000 workers across the entire public sector, with more actions to come. In the article, OPSEU local president Jessica Bushey calls this “Ontario labour history.”

And it’s made all the more complex by the way these organizations are structured: Community Living is funded almost entirely by the province. So you have a provincial government telling employees they need to go back to their employer to negotiate, and an employer saying their ability to negotiate is tied by their provincial funding.

It’s a story that reveals long-term cracks in the way our province delivers social services, as well as deep wounds in some of our most essential workers, and as the strike drags into weeks with no apparent end in sight, it’s some of the most vulnerable people in our community who are most affected.

Also, spoiler alert for the end of the article: in an issue centred around provincial funding, with strikers gathering outside his office, MPP Dave Smith declined our request to comment on this story.

Read the story