My full support to cupe. When did 2% become impossible when we see huge bonus and wage increases for Management.

Totally agree with you. The liberals just spent huge amounts of our tax dollars to further their re-election efforts. That could easily have paid for wage increase for people who actually work, versus steal from the general public.

ohhh they look so cute in those pics, tougues mittens fresh fallen snow. By all means, they should get some of that pie.. Wish we were union too, maybe we wouldn’t have wage freeze for five years :(

a big “WTF” – yeah thats professional looking…

I am totally unsympathetic to striking teachers,support staff workers and anyone else that holds students hostage to their demands, instead of the government.

— Come to think of it, I’m probably against every union member in every union, striking and demanding higher wages.

Actually the teachers are not on strike, they are just honouring the picket line. So the teachers are not holding the students hostage. It is the support staff who has gone without any wage increase for 4 years and have had no contract for 2 while the management has continued to get bonuses and hefty wage increases every year. When is enough enough? Sure there are some who are in the union getting a wage that is totally out of line, but there are more that are just making standard wages. So I guess in some peoples eyes if the management and SOME staff are making lots of money the rest should just suck it up and forget it, right?

Hey mytwobits. What a horrible thing to say. What is wrong with standing up For what is right? Corporate greed and their brainwashing have people thinking that the unions are the ones at fault. Keep freezing the wages and pretty soon nobody will have the ability to maintain a family. Shame on you for your narrow minded post.

Just give the workers their wage increases and raise the cost of tuition to cover the costs. Simple.

Seems odd that UNBC (also CUPE Local) signed a contract but not CNC…

Because Cupe at CNC wasn’t offered the same deal.

John… thats how a regular business would do it, but, a lot of people see education as a right not a product and things get… sticky when you treat it like a commodity.

To those who are talking about huge bonuses for managment, is this a fact or your belief? Just curious, CNC has had fiscal problems for a number of years now and I do not know if they have been giving out large bonuses. Not saying you are wrong, I just don’t know.

On the whole union strike thing, there is an ugly side to union action just look at Hostess, they are in Chapter 11 right now becuase the union wouldn’t budge.

fact…6k yr increase in salary for some dept managers is a little more than a pay increase…sounds more like a signing bonus.

Except porter, the CEO of Hostess gave himself a 300% raise from $750,000 to $2,250,000/year and some other management types got from 35-80% raises, also $1.75 million in senior management bonuses, all while this company has been restructuring, Bain Capital like. Hostess stopped funding the retirement fund to the tune of $160 million. At the same time they asked the workers to take 8% wage cut and a further 17% cut in benefits. This isthe second banruptcy, perhaps it is just sh%tty management and not the fault of the workers.

At the end of the day. The Student, the Family and the Taxpayer foot all of the bills. So don’t forget where all of the raises and increases end up. Back in our own lap. Are we still willing to pay more? Do we still have the ability to pay more?

This has been a decade plus of attacks on unionized labour. The bc liliberals have manufactured this crisis in order to gain public support to blame unionized labour. We are not the issue or the problem. Healthy economies and communities rely on a strong well payed labour force. Without a strong consumer base there is no growth in our economy. This is really simple economics. Pay labour less, labour spends less. Small local business suffer.

If management and executive types at CNC really are getting salary increases and/or bonuses, then the rest of the employees deserve similar treatment.
Management and execs should lead by example. If things are really tight money wise, NO ONE should get a raise or a bonus.
metalman.

The whole election in the US was based on that metalman! The Republican party’s whole campaign centered around a candidate who has made a career out of sucking labour dry as he pocketed the cash. At least the majority of the people in the USA saw it your way this time metalman

Cupe at the Universities in BC get the raise but Cupe at the Colleges don’t! Why is that? They haven’t even been offered the same deal. I guess the government thinks more highly of the folks that work at Universities.

Government has no role in negotiating raises for CUPE since the funding formula is finite and there will be no further dollars going to the school. Instead, the institution must take money from some other place to divert it into a raise for the union. In the case of UNBC, because it is a bigger institution, this may be a little easier than it is for CNC. But CNC has great staff, so I hope for their sake the deal gets done.
As for raises and bonuses for CNC management, I’m not so sure. They had one person doing the jobs of two vice-presidents for nearly nine months in order to save money, so if that person got some sort of bonus it was probably well-deserved. Aside from that, what are the facts?

Bond: “This is really simple economics. Pay labour less, labour spends less.”

For someone who claims it is ‘simple economics’, you missed the fact that it is the taxpayer who pays labour’s wages in this case. In your world, we could fix all of our problems by hiring 10,000 more public employees.

Krusty: “Instead, the institution must take money from some other place to divert it into a raise for the union.”

i.e. the students.

“from the students”? Seriously? Apparently you don’t understand much about post-secondary education and the way it functions. Tuition is set at a fixed rate and can only be raised 2% per annum, which doesn’t even cover the increase in the cost of living, which affects colleges just as much as it does everyone else. The colleges can’t raise tuition whenever they feel like and CNC’s tuition is the second lowest in the province, a problem that started years ago and which the government has never seen fit to remedy. Nope, it has to come from somewhere else, whether faculty cuts, cuts to administration (or their pay), or cust somewhere else in the operating expenses. Think of it like being a waterbed: push down in one spot and it rises in another.

For what it’s worth I agree with your post. Post secondary education is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. I know people don’t like to hear it, but something has to change if operating costs keep going up. The money has to come from somewhere.