Twenty-two part-time warehouse workers at U of T Press have been on strike since last Friday.
Their union, a part of CUPE 3261, is asking for benefits and a raise of three per cent a year for two years. These demands are unlikely to be met, according U of T Press’s VP of administration Kathryn Bennett.
“They want a larger increase than we can offer them,” she said.
U of T Press offered yearly increases of two percent for the first two years and 2.7 per cent in the third, which would lift warehouse workers’ wages to $10 an hour in the contract’s third year, beginning November 2008.
U of T Press, which operates independently of the university, is a non-profit publisher of scholarly books and journals that are distributed to buyers and bookstores in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere.
The ten full-time warehouse employees at U of T Press make $16.57 an hour, according to Mary Catherine McCarthy, national rep for CUPE 3261.
“The reason I work here is because we have no baby-sitting,” said full-time employee Charles Murphy. But his family struggles to make ends meet. “Eight hundred bucks a month in Toronto? Your rent alone is $900.”
Bennett replied that many employees already work a full-time job, and work at the press to supplement their income. No talks are scheduled between the two sides.
“It’s early days and I hope it won’t be an unpleasant experience for both of us,” she said.
McCarthy said that in time, the remaining warehouse workers might find it tougher to cope with their workload.
“The work is piling up,” she claimed to have been told by a source inside.
The last major labour disruption at U of T took place in 2000, when employees at the U of T Bookstore (another subunit of CUPE 3261) went on strike for 13 weeks.
