Wednesday will mark two weeks of strike action for school support workers in Halifax.
“My kids are not doing well in school, they’re not passing all their classes,”says African student support worker, AJ Simmonds. “We’ve got prom coming up, we’ve got graduation coming up and I’m not there. I’m not in school to prep them to do scholarships and do bursaries so it’s really affecting our kids.”
With no negations scheduled between CUPE Local 5047, the union representing the workers, and the province, there is fear that the strike will continue until the end of the school year and throughout the summer.
“For myself, I think there’s a great concern that we’ve been out even as long as we have been or that we even had to leave,” says picket captain Terra Crowe.
This is troubling news for Louannda Dominix.
“My daughter has cerebral palsy, she has ADHD, she has autism and she has intellectual disabilities,” says Dominix.
As a result, her daughter, who is in Grade 10, requires 100 per cent care in school.
Dominix supports the staff who works with her on a daily basis. She says since the strike, her daughter hasn’t been the same.
“This is having a very brutal effect on her. It has increased our meltdowns and moods and she’s very upset. She thinks there’s something wrong with her or she is different,” says Dominix.
Wages are keeping the sides apart. The province’s offer of 6.5 per cent spread over four years was originally rejected by all eight locals across Nova Scotia.
A counter offer from the province was eventually accepted by seven of the eight bargaining groups.
“The major difference between that contract and the original contract that was otherwise rejected was a dollar wage increase for certain classification,” says Ellis Pickersgill, a community outreach worker in the Cole Harbour family of schools. “All of the jobs that were in those classifications applied to other locals but they do not apply to ours. We don’t have any of those jobs within our CUPE union so that contract didn’t actually benefit us any better than the original.”
There’s also a discrepancy with the cost of living in Halifax compared to other communities in the province.
“We are looking at rural areas having a cost of living around $20-$22 an hour for their living wage where in HRCE, HRM residents, where we live and work are looking at over $23 an hour for a living wage,” says Crowe.
