LILLEY: LCBO workers in line for 8% wage hike before tentative deal collapsed

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If LCBO workers were angry with JP Hornick last week, they should be furious this week.

Hornick, the head of the Ontario Public Sector Employees Union, led liquor store employees on a worthless strike. Then, OPSEU announced a tentative agreement without a win on the union’s key demand but with a significant wage boost only to pull the whole deal late Friday.

After announcing a tentative deal early Friday afternoon, the whole thing was called off by 3 p.m.

OPSEU’s leadership is refusing to take the tentative agreement to the membership saying the LCBO has refused to sign a return-to-work protocol. The LCBO says the union added in millions in new demands, including that workers be paid in full for the time they were on strike.

“To introduce a new set of demands after reaching a tentative agreement amounts to bad faith bargaining. LCBO expects to file an unfair labour practice in short order,” the LCBO said in a statement.

The deal the two sides agreed to is one the rank and file membership would likely ratify if they had a vote. If that happened, stores would reopen Tuesday morning and regular deliveries to bars and restaurants would resume.

This deal is a partial win for the workers – but due to bad leadership at the union level, it’s an overall loss.

Hornick decided to stake the entire strike on reversing government policy on expanding the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails in grocery and convenience stores and lost badly.

The LCBO management wisely informed OPSEU they could not negotiate that issue since it was government policy that came from the legislature. Hornick made it personal against Premier Doug Ford and claimed the union would reverse this policy.

Ford won on this front, Hornick lost and the frontline workers who wanted better wages and working conditions lost.

The new contract offers 8% over three years, an increase from the offer presented before the strike of 7% over three years. Under the deal OPSEU agreed workers will receive a 3% raise in the first year, 2.75% in the second year and 2.25% in the third year – a settlement well within the average of public sector contact settlements over the last year, according to Statistics Canada.

That’s good and the kind of improvement that workers were looking for, but this could have been achieved without a strike.

A full-time worker off the job for 12 days, which is what they will have lost by the time this strike ends, would have needed to receive a 4.6% raise in the first year of the contract. That’s not happening, meaning the frontline worker walking the picket line has lost money as a result of Hornick deciding to try and make a political point rather than negotiating for better working conditions.

All that Hornick has achieved with this strike is to ensure that an awful lot more people across Ontario are now questioning the wisdom of a government monopoly on liquor.

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Both public and private polling showed decent public support for the workers’ wage demands. What polling also showed was that there was strong support for expanding the sale of beer, wine and ready-to-drink cocktails to outlets other than the LCBO.

Hornick was fighting a losing battle from day one but rather than consider the best interests of union members, dug in on a personal political issue. With Hornick at the helm, we can expect more strikes from the various parts of Ontario public service and Hornick tries to show that the union and not the elected government is boss.

Given how that went for LCBO workers, other parts of the union should be wary of following Hornick’s lead.

In the last contract offer before the strike, the LCBO had agreed to move 400 positions from part-time casual to full-time. In the new deal that workers will now need to ratify, that number has been increased, but it’s not clear what the new number will be at this point.

blilley@postmedia.com