Western Standard - April 24, 2023


About 1,200 Calgary federal government workers protest


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

195.24696

Word count

419

Sentence count

38


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Some of the most secure and well paid people in the country now have the gall to get out and say, we re going to refuse to work. We re holding picket signs out and whining for a raise because we want more days working from home.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 these guys are their massive pensions, their massive vacation times, the huge amount of sick
00:00:05.160 days they're allowed to have. They've already been working from home. You have to wait, what,
00:00:09.180 four or five, six months to get a passport renewed from these guys. They screw up your tax returns
00:00:14.040 half the time. And then they said, you know what, we're going to walk out while everybody else is
00:00:17.760 tightening their belts because we want more days working from home. And we want as much, as much.
00:00:24.240 And it depends on which category, as high as a 47% wage increase. With the CRA, they're looking
00:00:29.720 for 30%. CRA, that's, you know, Canada Revenue Agency. These are the ones going after you to
00:00:33.760 pay more taxes. They want a 30% raise. Over three years, 10% a year. Come on, guys, that's a lot of
00:00:40.540 money. Now, already, on average, government workers make almost 9% more than your comparable private
00:00:47.180 sector worker. And then, of course, once you bring in the other benefits, they're doing very well for
00:00:52.540 themselves, guys. They tend to retire two and a half years earlier because they have those huge
00:00:56.520 extra pension plans. Let's see, they get, for personal reasons, they average 14.9 paid days off a
00:01:03.320 year. That's on top of the vacation pay they already get. And of course, all the premiums and perks and
00:01:09.160 benefits. So the other problem is this, the amount of them. I mean, just since 2015, I mean, in 2015, we had
00:01:17.060 3.5 million, 3.6 million federal government workers. Now there's 4.2 million. It's growing
00:01:26.740 massively, the number of them. And really, are your services getting better? How many things can
00:01:31.380 you look at from the federal government? Boy, they're doing a much better job than they did a
00:01:34.680 few years ago. These civil service unions, guys, they're gonna bleed us dry. We got massive deficits,
00:01:40.000 we got taxes going up, we got inflation going bad, hitting the rest of us as it is. And some of the
00:01:44.780 most secure and well paid people in the country now have the gall to get out and say, we're going
00:01:50.780 to refuse to work. We're getting off our couches for a day. And we're holding picket signs out and
00:01:55.400 whining for a raise. Unfortunately, they have us over a barrel. It's tax time. Trudeau will probably
00:02:00.680 cave. He's not exactly known for his backbone. And they'll get their raise and we will all pay a dear,
00:02:07.200 dear price for that.