I am writing this column on the spot after reading Caroline Touzin’s text in The Press on Friday. A text about three state employees who testify to their food insecurity1because of their insufficient salary.
One of them does the unthinkable in this report: she poses openly with her guys, under her real name. Pascale Castonguay is a special education technician, a TES as they say in the school environment.
Mme Castonguay only works 30 hours a week. She worked 24 last year. She is “precarious” in the sense that she does not have permanent work, no full-time work and unemployment in the summer. In reality, TES Castonguay cannot make ends meet. She is part of the 12% of school support employees who used food banks, according to the CSN.
I said above that Mme Castonguay committed the “unthinkable” in this Caroline report. In this day and age where people are opening up about everything from abuse to addictions, revealing one’s poverty is something of an ultimate taboo. And Mme Castonguay does it with obvious courage. Of food banks, she says: “It’s very hard on the ego, but I have no choice. My teenagers are hungry. And me too. »
The two other women who testify in the paper do so anonymously. Like Nathalie, daycare educator in a primary school. Why anonymity? I quote my colleague Touzin: “She asked that her name be kept quiet out of concern for human dignity.”
I ask the question: why do we accept this, collectively?
Why have we come to accept, collectively, that fellow citizens are chronically struggling? Why do we accept that state employees are poor because working conditions within the state (and therefore, us) condemn them to precariousness?
Did I write “employees”? Sorry, I have to say “employees”. The majority of strikers are women.
Women have made exceptional progress in society over the past 40 years. I say “women”, generally. Fairness is not achieved, of course. But look at universities: women dominate in several faculties, such as medicine. It’s amazing.
There are still boundaries to cross. In professions that do not require so much study, the contrast is striking. Join the police at 21, you will be generously pensioned in your early 50s. Same thing in a fire station. But enter the daycare service of a primary school and the conditions are very different.
Nathalie, the childcare educator, has some insightful thoughts about the gap in conditions between women’s and men’s professions. She explains that she spends part of her work outside, “rain or shine” without an allowance for her winter clothes. Firefighter and police uniforms, she notes, are provided.
We would say that it is a peripheral issue. I do not agree. I think it’s because in life — not all the time, but often — you get what you bargain for, not what you deserve. It is clear that men negotiate more closely.
A flash: teachers supervise sales of chocolate palettes to finance school lessons worthy of the name…
Show me firefighters who do telethons in this country to pay for fire hoses…
I repeat: in so-called male professions, we negotiate more closely. I should say: in a more muscular way.
The firefighters? Firefighters have already vandalized the hoses when the negotiations do not work to their liking.
The police men ? The police will stop giving tickets, they will even go so far as to demonstrate in the faces of deputies with their guns. It was seen. And it is imprinted in the memory of the politician. Maybe that explains the offer made (and refused) to the provincial police, who knows…
Blue-collar workers? Blue-collar workers invaded Montreal City Hall without ever hiding their desire to come to blows to force Montreal’s administrations to bend.
In the private sector, when newspapers were gooses that laid golden eggs, pressmen “dropped” hammers into the presses when the bosses did not share the spoils, which led to huge costs. And it was resolved!
The dock workers at the ports? They take the economy hostage by going on work-to-rule strikes when they are not outright beating bosses in parking lots. Average salary of a longshoreman in Montreal: $150,000.
Put it end to end and it gives working conditions in traditionally male professions which are, from convention to convention, from decade to decade, better than those of women’s professions, with equal qualifications. Or no diploma at all.
The women who are currently on strike work with humans. Children, old people, sick people, very often.
To their immense credit, they are not going to burst fluids, they are not going to vandalize a magnetic resonance machine, they are not going to send children into the schoolyard unsupervised and they are not going to read Tolstoy to children of 8 years pretending to do their job to protest against negotiations that drag on.
Their lever, their only lever, is to go out into the streets in this winter, almost (or completely) without strike funds.
I say: don’t give up, ladies.
I finished this column and I read that Prime Minister Legault, on this Friday morning, implored the teachers to stop their strike under the pretext of not hurting the children.2…
Bullshit: when he was in the Opposition, it’s funny, Mr. Legault had all the solutions. PM, well… Let him find them.
Bullshit, again: what hurts children is neglecting public schools as the Quebec state has been doing for decades.
And in the fall of 2023, the bill has just arrived in the form of walkouts in the form of fed up women who have state services at arm’s length.
Evoking “harm done to children” is nothing but manipulation.