Essential Service

I am a unionized government healthcare employee working for a public service (Advanced Care Paramedic). Our union can be found liable for allowing or preventing its employees to neglect essential services. As emergency health care providers, we also can be held liable, with respect to public safety, for failing to report to duty. We can be mandated to work without notice and mandated to work overtime. This is a measure in place to ensure emergency services continue no matter the political state of the country.

I’ve been on strike before because the “non-essential” (80% + of union) union workers decided it would be “fun”. As essential workers, the union quietly reminded us we would still be required to provide uninterrupted services as normal, but will only be paid strike pay. We worked twice as hard for 1/4 of the pay because some people thought they were entitled to more and chose an asinine way to go about it. We had to walk across picket lines while being called every kind of obscenity by our co-workers. Colleagues vehicles were vandalized by and destroyed by people too uneducated and uncivilized to even know why they walked away from their government, full-benefits, jobs to sit in a snow bank around a burning oil drum. To this day, while still in a union I do not support, I have very little respect for those willing to strike and fail to provide their employer the level of work they agreed to when they were hired.

All this said, if you feel like you are essential enough to think that demonstrating to your employer by refusing to work will elicit the response you desire, than you are essential enough to be held accountable and liable for the lives you have physically, emotionally, and mentally harmed in the process of your actions.

I have not been affected by this protest in any way, however, the mail is an essential service to be provided no matter how one “feels” about it or regardless of pay or benefits. If postal workers feel their jobs are important enough to protest by striking, then their job should be important enough to at least provide the minimum of service throughout said protest. That is a way you earn respect from the public and also get the attention of your employers and government legislators.

Rant over…