Tom Says: “Don’t look the other way…”
Let’s say for a minute I operated some kind of a private learning institution and was invlolved in a labour dispute with members of my staff. Let’s say they bathrooms at my private school were in deplorable shape. There’s a strong smell of urine, plugged toilets, no toilet paper and no soap with which to wash my hands.
Let’s say the litter recepticales which are normally inside the teaching rooms were so overflowing with garbage that it was falling on the floor. Let’s say the smell coming from those litter recepticals was getting to the point where it would gag you. Let’s say the instructors have moved all of thos recepticales out of the classrooms and into the hallways. Let’s say the hallways and the classroom floors were filthy dirty and strewn with litter.
Let’s say one of the concnered parents called the health department and ask for an inspector to come in and examine the conditons that existed ion my classrooms.
How long do you think the health department would let me continue to operate my learning faciltiy?
The answer is — about as long as it took to get back to the office and write the report.
No we venture into the real world.
A member of our news department took a trip Tuesday morning to the New Brunswick Community College in Saint John. All of the above conditions that I’ve mentioned in this story and some which I didn’t even bother to mention, were very obvious and she took the nickle tour. I know that at this school at this time there is at least one known working custodian on duty because of enrolement size, but there’s no possible way she can do all the work required. She’s the only one working because community college custodians along with hundreds of other provincial civil servants are locked in a labour dipute with province and are off the job.
The question which needs to be answered is how long will government officials allow these public institutions to operate under these conditions when private institution like the one I explained above would have been told to close along time ago.
Let’s get back to the bargaining table and get back to work.
I’m Tom Young.