Some managers in here are awful.
Quite frankly, they should be fired. They have no idea what they are talking about, and are easily bamboozled. Sometimes they get caught up in stupid schemes that are a waste of money, just like the picket signs say.
Besides that, there are just too bloody many of them.
There, I said it.
And while I’m swinging: George Smith is a cruel freak, by anyone’s estimation.
Which is not to say he isn’t the right person for the right job.
But as it stands, there are few mechanisms to get rid of these people, besides backbiting.
This needs to be fixed.
You should all be nodding along right now.
Now here’s what the good managers in the CBC (you know they exist) are saying:
They would love to hire young, smart, energetic people with great ideas and fresh outlooks, just like the glossy propaganda pamphlet says. They would love to give them bona fide jobs.
If you are smart, they want you. If you are dedicated, they need you. But they have a budget and can only hire so many people. So if the union is protecting some useless wingnut hired in the 80’s, where does that leave the new kid?
And you know they are in here: the unionized duds who can’t work, don’t want to work, or refuse to work. You know exactly who I mean. CMG knows exactly who they are, too.
But these people cannot be fired because it is the union’s job to protect them. They get shuffled around for years. They get dumped into unwitting departments. They complain every day about work until they finally, mercifully, retire.
It doesn’t take a genius to know there is something fugazi about the CMG.
They aren’t being totally honest with their younger members, and I think some of them are starting to figure it out. I mean, I used to be in CMG myself, but it doesn’t mean I ever bought into all that comrade business. I just wanted to work at thwe CBC. I’ve spent toomuch time in Communist countries: that crap makes me uncomfortable.
The CMG knows that when these old guys in the union are removed, or when they retire, the union itself will expire. That’s a fact. They will be left with a lot of people like me who couldn’t give a flip about the union. Or the guild. Or whatever.
I think CMG is afraid of this. They should be.
And in my more cynical moments I think they are more interested in protecting their own asses than they are in getting my generation real jobs.
And really, comrade, none of us ever counted on you to find us jobs anyways.
110 Comments
Most of the unionized CBC “deadwood” I have seen is neither lazy or incompetent.They are just opportunists without a work ethic who know that they can put the minimum effort into their job,maximize their sick leave time and still take home the same size paycheque.They don’t pull up their socks because the reward for improving their attendance record or doing a good job appears to be non-existant.
Ouimettt…come out come out wherever you are…our have you taken your ball and gone home?
WHAT HAPPENS ON THE LINE……WILL STAY ON THE LINE….Management will NEVER know
Hey Neutron…
If in fact management is reading this blog, then I have a message for them…
We are solid and will be here out for as long as it takes.
Question is, How much more can management take?
Hello from Neutron
1) Forget getting much sympathy from the board. It as been completely stacked by Paul and Bobby prior to the planned Lock-Out. Founier has been verbally declared as the new Chair but only because the CBC looked bad with Bobby at the helm of both wheels during a Lockout. Fournier is still not inaugurated yet ( gee who is still acting as the board Chair I wonder)
2) Even if we add a REAL CBC board with non-govt appointed positions : This is the only BOD that has not the right to fire the Corp. President. (Which in this case makes Paul our PM responsible for any wrongdoings of the President- not too cool when you are a minority govt.(but hell… after so many years in politics its probably good for Paul to learn something new anyways !!!)
3) This Blog will be used for management’s purposes a)in collecting infomation from picketeers – anything from strategies to mood swings. b)To deliver messages to manipulate moods and strenghts as events happen.
4) This Lockout has been blessed, orchestrated and guided from the start by Paul as he has put his fingers before in the past in the affairs of CBC union negotiations.
5) IMO this Lockout will end a)when they have saved the amount of money they need from the bi-weekly Treasury Board cheques originaally appropriated for salaries.( Why hasn’t the Treasury Board stopped sending money yet ?)
OR
when Paul tells Bobby it has to end earlier than expected because of certain situations resulting from strategies successfully initiated by the CMG.
This Lock Out is more like a Saw-Mill lay-off to all the workers in order to save money as business is slow BUT without letting the bill go to Paul’s Employment Insurance budget and letting the union pay for the tab with picket pay.
Yes this is a very politically assisted Lock-Out in more ways than what meets the eye or in ways that has not even been mentioned on this Blog as of yet.
How about we just move from 5-10% non-permanent staff, then we’d be twice as flexible as before.
Coffeemaker:
You are right to doubt Ouimet’s motivations or who s/he really is, but I think it’s still useful to have this forum precisely because George Smith et al. read it. They need to know what we think.
So does the union, so here’s a suggestion. We’ve all heard all the bullshit from management about how there are only 5% (or whatever) contract employees at the CBC. Let’s use this to our advantage. We need to take a step with the public and politicians to show that we’re willing to compromise. So why not say that we’re ready to take the bold step of formalizing that 5% figure to 20% or 25%. Think of the headlines! “CMG allows for 500% increase in contract workers!” “UNION CONCESSION — 5 TIMES MORE FLEXIBIITY!” The key condition is that the number of permanent employees never fall below 70-75%, which is what it is today. The public and even politicians don’t understand all the complicated aspects of hiring and re-hiring of temporary or continuous contract workers. But they would understand these numbers, and the union needs to make a public gesture to put pressure on management to react and show their willingness to compromise.
Now that Ouimet has disappeared or has been disappeared or has fallen out of favour..I’m in. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Tea Makers’ Ouimet is Really George Smith
If you’ve been getting a creepy feeling reading the blogs coming from The Tea Makers you are not alone. I have had my suspicions from the beginning but now my spider senses are tingling. The Tea Makers was beginning to feel like a chat room run by a middle aged man posing as a 16 year old girl.
I don’t know who Ouimet is or, for that matter, cbcinsider, or Guylaine Saucier, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it was George Smith himself. Tod Maffin has asserted that he knows Ouimet’s identity and I have no reason to doubt him. Still, there is this other “voice” that comes through in the posts that makes me doubt that this is on the level.
Here are my reasons.
Writing any correspondence out of the TBC or anywhere else in the system would have been traced by now.
If this is written outside of the CBC, then references to meetings with any of the senior managers like Cathy Sprague would have provided a strong set of clues as to Ouimet’s identity – unless the meetings themselves were B.S.
The early blogs were teary, sentimental things that were designed to win trust so that “outsiders” would confide in Ouimet. This would give a fairly “ground level” sense of what the sentiment is on the line.
The outburst where Ouimet told a blogger to go *&#! themselves was a bit of theatre. It caused concern on the part of the regular readers of the blog. It also was a distinct turning point in the tone of Ouimet’s opinions, a decidedly pro-management and anti-union tone.
With the hook now set and Ouimet established as someone who “tells it like it is”, she (he) is venturing into publishing screeds which have so far attacked unions in general, CMG in particular, dead wood, meaning anyone who is male, balding and over 50 and because of this cannot possibly be pulling their own weight, anyone who wants CMG protect them from indiscriminate management decisions regarding their careers, or anyone who disagrees with her (him) on virtually anything.
The tone is also now a mocking one where she (he) openly states that she (he) loves doing struck work. Another bit of theatre intending to enrage and chip away at the unified front. Reading the responses, the desired result is being achieved.
Although the recent string of comments has provided some interesting discussion (without further posts from Ouimet) I am personally going to abstain from The Tea Makers blog because I firmly believe that the site is a plant. There is too much evidence to suggest otherwise. If George Smith is not Ouimet, then I’d bet he certainly knows who is.
For your own mental health and peace of mind, I recommend leaving the tea alone, go get a coffee, and stay alert. If you need to feed your blog addiction, check out CBC Drone, CBCunplugged.com, the Garrett Tree, or my home town favourite, Employee 10000223. At least these people are really on your side.
I must weigh in on the previous loggers comment which was: (in part)
….lets get beyond the passionately misguided blame game and give a little to take a little…or it won’t be long before a million people watch the leafs on a Saturday and management will become even more delusional in their belief that all is progressing smoothly…and two months of bills weigh
1) We could go on with blame game for days
2) We were LOCKED OUT at management’™s discretion
3) We voted on principle, yes it was about their need to hire more contract employee’s but is also about quality programming that Canadians have come to expect.
4) About giving “a little”, takes two to tango. And if the corp.’™s position remains true, which they are not disputing, the question is why you need this language when it already exists in the current agreement? Why did you lock out 5500 employee’s to get language that you cannot explain to the membership? If it is that important to the CBC and there is a good reason to have it then let us and the bargaining team in on it and then maybe we could progress. CBC mentality at present seems to be one of ’œmy way or the highway”. How can bargain with that?”.