OPSEU's History

 

Our history begins at the hearth in 1911, in cooperation. Coal for heating was costly; there were big savings if working people bought in bulk. To do so, provincial government employees set up a purchasing cooperative and social club, the Civil Service Association of Ontario (CSAO).

 

CSAO activity soon addressed pension issues, salary increases, a classification system and group life insurance. By the early 1930s, CSAO began fighting government cutbacks. In the 1940s, the association argued grievances and demanded better working condition. Next came full-time staff and voluntary union dues (25 cents a month). In 1959, for the first time, CSAO brought members from across the province to demonstrate in Toronto for full bargaining rights.

 

Province-wide bargaining for community college staff began in the late 1960s. By 1971, CSAO represented hospital laboratory groups and ambulance officers. Other hospital workers followed, then employees in children's aid societies.

 

In 1975 the association took a new name, in recognition of its changing membership and its changing role the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. OPSEU affiliated with the National Union of Public and General Employees, the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress.

 

Despite legislated denial of the right to strike for the 60,000 members who work in the Ontario Public Service and the 9,000 who work in hospitals, OPSEU members never hesitated to use the strike weapon when all else failed. In 1979, support staff at community colleges walked out in the first large legal strike in the union's history. The same year, correctional officers took the first province-wide action in defiance of anti-strike legislation.

 

In the 1980s, OPSEU worked against cutbacks, divestment, privatization and closure plans that threatened service to the public in colleges, jails, psychiatric hospitals and other facilities. It worked to protect care for the developmentally handicapped, it halted government plans to sell off the provincial parks system and focused attention on the delivery of provincial welfare benefits. It took up social issues such as the struggle against apartheid, and the plight of the homeless, while continuing its ground-breaking activity in pay equity, employment equity, pension reform and health and safety.

 

Strikes by college teachers led to improvements in the quality of education; action by correctional officers forced government decisions to ease overcrowding in jails.

 

Challenged by ultra-conservatives, the union won a court decision confirming its right to use union dues to promote its members' views on a broad range of issues.

 

Into the 1990s, OPSEU continues its work to maintain the quality of public services that Ontario residents want and need. These efforts have focused on such issues as improving the quality of ambulance care, and protecting health care, education, training, child care and other social services from erosion due to cutbacks.

 

And in 1994, the union achieved its decades-old goal of winning for its Public Service members full bargaining rights, including the right to strike. It also won joint control of the pension plans of its public service and community college members.

 

After the election of the Harris Conservatives, OPSEU took its resistance to the streets in a huge province-wide public service strike in 1996, in an effort to negotiate a fair collective agreement. The union has also played a large role in the series of days of protest mounted by the Ontario Federation of Labour in protest over the government's harsh cuts and destruction of labour legislation.