I was reminded of an email that I got in 2020 when I was still at TELUS. A woman who had been working there for 20-odd years was sending out a farewell email for her retirement. In her email, she waxed poetic about how the company treated her so well and how proud she was of crossing the picket line during the strike because of how well the company treated her. She loved that Darren Entwhistle (our ceo) served her an ice cream cone. She used the word proud.
At the time she wrote the email, in 2020, union membership at TELUS had shrunk across the country from 20,000 to 8,000 in that 14-year period. Since that email was written 5 years ago, almost 6, the membership has plummeted to maybe 3,000 across the whole country. That's people answering phones, people working jobs across the cities and towns.
These are all union jobs that disappeared. The vast majority of them have been offshored out of the country, but the ones that remain through contract work are paid garbage with no benefits and no pension. I didn't think this person needed to love the union or even like the union, but more times than I would care to admit, I thought to myself, I wonder if she has any sense of regret for her actions during the strike or at least being proud of it afterwards. The very job and the benefits and her pension and all the things that made that place somewhere you could earn a modest middle-class lifestyle and have a dignified life, she participated in bargaining that away. She climbed the ladder and then kicked it over when she was done. And the gleefulness with which she bragged about being proud to have crossed the picket line still bothers me, and it's been years and I don't even work there anymore.
I hold grudges. My gears remain ground.
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