OPSEU President, First Vice-President/Treasurer vow to vigorously fight Bill 124 in "both courts"

TORONTO, Nov. 8, 2019 /CNW/ - As the elected leaders of one of the largest public sector unions in Ontario, we vow to vigorously fight the Ford government's draconian and sexist wage-cut legislation in a court of law and in the court of public opinion.

In both cases, we will win.

By unfairly targeting public sector workers – the majority of whom are women – Bill 124 is an attack on women. At a time when government should be actively working to make the gender wage gap smaller, the Ford government is actively making it larger.

Bill 124 is also a clear violation of public sector workers' Constitutional right to free and fair collective bargaining. How can bargaining be free when it has been hamstrung by a cap? How can it be fair when some workers – those in the public sector – are targeted with a cap while other workers – those in the municipal and private sectors – are left untargeted?

Bill 124 doesn't just fail constitutionally, it also fails economically.

A large and growing number of economists – including one who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics – have found that economic growth is driven not by austerity, but by ensuring wealth is broadly distributed.

Bill 124 does the opposite. According to the government's own Ministry of Labour statistics, public sector wage growth has been below inflation in eight of the past 10 years – an effective five per cent wage cut over the past decade. Bill 124 extends and deepens those wage cuts for another three years.

For a government promising to "put more money back in people's pockets," why is it taking money out of the pockets of more than a million working-class Ontarians, including most of OPSEU's 165,000 members? Why is it robbing them of money that they would have been spent in local businesses and groceries stories?

At OPSEU, we will make sure that these questions are front-and-centre in citizens' minds for years to come. If Conservatives thought the 2019 federal election was a flop in Ontario, just wait until the next provincial election. Warm up the moving vans, Mr. Ford. 

SOURCE Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU)