When I was a university student, the faculty went on strike in the middle of the year.
They were contending that their salary structure was below the national average -- which was true -- but what they weren't telling you was that they were comparing their salaries to large universities in expensive markets like UofT and UBC (I went to a small university in a tiny town in New Brunswick). If you compared their salaries to other small Atlantic Canadian schools, they were paid relatively equal to their peers.
And of course there was no reason at all that they couldn't strike over the Summer break, but they chose to use us students as pawns, forcing the administration to cave (and therefore raise our tuition more to cover the increased cost of faculty salaries) lest the entire semester be cancelled.
In the end we lost over three weeks of classes and they extended the semester for about a month. That's a month I sould have been working at a Summer job. Naturally I didn't receive any compensation for the lost income.
That was six years ago and I'm still bitter about it.
I'll be the first to admit that unions are necessary in countries with developing economies and poor labour laws, but that battle has already been fought here. Unions are now an anachronism in modern, Western nations.
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