Civil Unrest In Saint John - The City vs CUPE 486 

There seems to be a disparity in the pay schedule of the CUPE employees themselves. Wanting a living wage is not unreasonable, if I make 40k I can't afford to strike like the ones making 150k, Hence the reluctance to strike for two years, IMO..

The CUPE President that you talked to doesn't even live in the city, thus they don't even pay property taxes to the city they work for. Quite a few of these inside workers live outside the city, and are part of the problem of Saint John's financial mess. Saint John taxpayers are paying salaries of city workers who don't even live in this city and have their property taxes instead go to funding communities like Rothesay, Quispamsis, and many others.

I'm not sure who you are referring to here as unskilled labour. Many of the people who perform the jobs of "inside workers" for the City of Saint John have at least one, sometimes multiple university degrees and years of on the job training. Even people who work to answer phone and redirect calls for departments and customer service often have college specific training for administrative purposes at the least. The hiring process for the city would be competitive and they aren't just hiring the first person who walks in off the street. I don't know how much more you would expect people working at this level to do in order to further their position in life. These jobs are essential and they also can't be done properly by uneducated, unskilled workers. But they are paid middle class wages for the most part, so I don't know what more you expect them to do. Not everyone is going to be an engineer in the city, not everyone can be mayor, we only need one. Not every worker can be the top paid IT employee as they probably only require 1 to 3 of them as well for top level. So saying they don't deserve to have a wage increase keeping up with cost of living to keep their average home and let their two kids have their own room each is a bit ridiculous, in my opinion. Also, many, many people in NB are paying more for rent right now than a mortgage, so saying living wage is enough to pay rent and not own a home is unrealistic in the current climate.

@@amandalinfield7676 so then who should take the pay cut or freeze to prevent runaway inflation? Don’t say the rich because that’s a cop out argument and statistically does not resolve the system wide issue of inflation. Year to year public servants maintain a better wage and benefits compared to that of the public sector. The trade off is that they should be the first to sacrifice economically when something like inflation happens. These people are not living without a living wage. They have that. What they want is a wage and benefits that will outpace their public sector peers and then expect the public sector to pay for that through required tax hikes, which then forces and continued rise in inflation. Public sector employees are important, but not more than the rest of the population.

@@daviddejong779 I mean, you can say it's a cop out all you want, but the reality is that it IS the rich. Inflation right now is being caused by corporations raising prices far more than they need to. Just look at how they're reporting record profits while families are struggling to survive. Current inflation is not being caused by wages, and at the end of the day, wages HAVE to keep pace, otherwise people can't afford to live. So you have to either pay people more, or force corporations to keep pricing in check.

@@QaetaI’m sorry but the “record profits” argument is also not usually true to what you are trying to argue. While the total dollar amount of the profits may be a record, the profit margins remain relatively constant. Labor needs to remain a relative constant percentage, as does all expenses, in order to maintain overall balance. This argument also doesn’t hold water when it comes to public sector because there isn’t supposed to be a profit. Taxpayers decide through voting on how much the public sector should get in exchange for their labor. That’s the whole point of the public sector. In the private sector, it is different. A steak that costs $10 to purchase, gets sold in a restaurant for $30. (Typical mark up). The other $10 goes to labor and overhead, then $10 goes to the owner who bares all the equity risk. That percentage doesn’t change. So now labor comes along and wants a 40% increase in pay. The farmer has labor also wanting more so passes that along and now the steak costs $14. Labor and overhead also now costs $14. The owner keeps the same profit margin so gets $14. So each part involved only goes up $4, but the consumer sees a restaurant steak go from $30 up to $42. That’s a huge increase to the consumer. That’s a new record profit on restaurant steak, but the owner never increased their margins. The price is just passed along. The part that bares all the risk (ownership and upper management) will not and should not ever be the first to bare the burden of trying to balance this because if you force that, then business doesn’t take risk and you stagnate an economy and everyone loses. So then who must absorb that burden? Honest question. To stop the runaway inflation, who do you think needs to absorb the short term loses to stabilize the economy? The answer is almost always the public sector average workers who year for year over the course of a lifetime will do better than the average worker year for year of anyone else. They are servants of the people who should not need to worry about profits. Do I agree if business is grabbing higher rates of marginal returns then we can look at raising taxes or removing incentives? Absolutely, but you must also be mindful that someone else may be willing to undercut your incentives and lower taxes, resulting in the business leaving, then everyone ends up out of a job. Ask the auto workers from the 70s and 80s how that worked out for them. They destroyed the auto industry because they demanded so much that the industry up and moved to more business friendly locations. That’s not their faults. They simply aimed to maintain their margins and couldn’t because the consumer couldn’t keep affording to pay for union labor in US and Canada to make their cars. The balance of labor, management, ownership, and public sector is always a dance, but labor time and again push until their bankrupt the system and end up with no jobs. The only people that never seem to lose their jobs in that case are the union leadership. 🤨 odd indeed

So lucky to have you come here. Pay up saint john

Unfortunately, they've been removed from their committees and duties for doing what all the councillors should have been doing.

They are the heart of this city and took 0 for many years and now rhe city has record growth and they now dont want to pay up Shame, sj

This, 1000%

Jordan, imagine if Pro hockey worked like the Public Service.

The city should consider the cost to losing talent to other cities, which it has. Brent and Joanna are well spoken - now I’m wondering if there are structural reasons this is the lowest paid union because it’s made up predominantly women.

as I stated in my comment average wage is 65k highest paid 150k which makes the lowest paid far less than 65k, who gets the fries and who get's the gravy on their fries is what I would like to know. Haven't had a chance to review it, but it should be on the Cities website.@@travelport7868

Is the Royalty in NB paying their fair share of taxes, or have they use their clout to lessen the tax burden on their Empire.

Trickle down economics by itself may not work, but to be clear, if you don’t keep taxes low, incentivize business through higher profitability to set up shop in NB, then they will leave. When that happens you don’t have to worry about trickle down anything, because there will be nothing to trickle in either direction. Like it or not, people need to entice the wealth in order to benefit from it. Name one industry that unions got what they wanted and it thrived? Just one

also many of them (including the CUPE President in this video) don't even live in Saint John. These city workers who live outside the city don't pay property taxes to the city of Saint John, and are part of the reason why the city faces such a dire financial situation.

They only get three day weekends if they work a compressed work week. Which means they are still contributing the same amount of full time hours to the employer but in fewer days, so that's irrelevant. Also most of the jobs are requiring university or college education to get even entry level positions, so they should not be paid similar to the average low income jobs in the same city. The benefits they currently have are previously agreed upon points in old contracts and sometimes in the bargaining process for wages items like that are reduced or taken away, so they sometimes end up losing it, in order to keep making a wage that allows them to pay bills that were previously more affordable when they were making lower wages. I agree, garbage should not have been blocked but the other points I don't agree on. Definitely not out to lunch. And they are currently on week three of losing a lot of income while striking because strike pay doesn't come close to a worker's normal wage. Many of them will likely be running into lots of trouble financially within the next few weeks if this doesn't resolve soon and city officials know that as well.

This is the only video on this channel I have not personally replied to every comment. But I will address yours as it's pointed at me and not the content at hand: 1) A strike is indeed civil unrest to the people striking and to the people affected by said strike. This is by definition. Of course it's likely that cruise ship passengers have seen a picket line - but is it unreasonable for them to wonder why the picket line is there? 2) A picket line is a form of protest. This is by definition. It's a matter of semantics. I will however correct my language here if it helps people focus on the real issues. 3) It's more difficult than you think to capture both sides evenly. Having 2 city councillors and 2 members representing CUPE was as close as I could get to balance. I don't control or know what they will say when I start asking questions. If you watched the video you would have heard me asking all parties to provide a 'steel man' argument for the other side as another attempt to get closer to the truth of the issue. Is that something you didn't notice? Or just chose not to acknowledge? 4) For the record - my Freedom Convoy video was not deleted by me. It was removed by RU-vid. The people in the video were good people too, as most people are. Just because you do not agree with them does not degrade them as humans. 5) Watch what you would like. These black and white pieces are filmed this way to show that nothing is ever truly black and white - only the many shades of grey in-between (which make up the image on the screen). They require us to look at the world with an open mind. If you pay close attention you'll notice that everyone is speaking truth from their perspective. I know videos like this you tend to take personally Les. Anything that doesn't show SJ as a garden utopia. It's because your identity is forged around showing SJ in the best light. Sorry for this - but I make videos about things that I'm inspired to create. I make videos for me first and foremost. If you don't like what you see you can watch something else - no love lost. Degrading folks and underhand slights against myself are not welcome here. This channel is steeped in love and unity and videos like this are here to help us understand each other better. I hope to refine my process the next time with this type of work, as I do with all my videos.

@Johnsmith-zk6qz 0 seconds ago You did a great job dont listen to Wendy and Les they are full of shit and paint Saint John as a city witout issue, they only do this fake shit to get people here and use them for commission. You were fair and gave a light to our valuable 486 workers. Great job at trying to sewer others les ans Wendy shame on you for putting down another SJ youtube. There is a 3 to 1 ratio of managers to 486 workers, they have reclassified position and bump their pay up by upward of 40000 a year and eliminated several positions. The avg manager salary is 110000 per year :) I feel like an outsider to from Ontario and these folks are great at making people feel this way.

@@atribecalledowens Jordan, I have a great deal of respect for you as a person, athlete and creator. My comment was not a slight at you or meant to degrade you. I watch almost all of your videos and will continue to do so. I leave very positive comments most of the time and my comments are always about the content. I can assure you my identity was formed decades before I moved to Saint John, so my comment also had nothing to do with defending the "garden utopia" of the city. Labour disputes are part of life in Canada and a positive aspect of living in a democratic society. The content of this video is blatantly one sided, and the title highly exaggerated. That is what I found disappointing. This in itself would be fine if it was presented as a support piece for the union, but as pseudo journalistic content it fails.

@@WeLoveSaintJohn CUPE President in this video doesn't even live in Saint John, and same goes for many of the inside workers wanting a raise. They aren't paying city taxes, but want city tax payers to pay for their raise.