AUPE picketers targetting those with visible handicaps Updated with video

These are portions of a statement covering the first two days of the strike.  Like quite a few of our members, writing or typing takes a lot of effort and energy for this person to submit any report at all, never mind one as long as this one.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

I leave home at noon and see a group of 7 security guards being oriented for the strike on SAIL, nonprofit home care provider, for the people with disabilities where I live.

I wheeled back home to ###, Artspace.  A man leading the home care aides picketing in front of the building, pushing a handbill, confronts me.  "We don't want to be here."

Stunned, I respond, "I don't want to be here either."  And I left it at that.

...

Thursday, May 8, 2014

I am leaving for physiotherapy.  The same man was there with 6 complete strangers with human rights embroidered on their vests.  "Sir, change the minds of the SAIL board members."  Vindictive.  Perplexed, I said, "@&*#%"

I don't know what you think of this business.  "But here is my personal opinions on being an accosted bystander."

I think the home care aides here have been nice people.  Some stranger ruined my day for forcing his problems on me.  He forced me to protect myself.  Now my body is tightened up and I am vexed.  I have to keep his cause out of my life.  There is no surplus budget from Alberta Health Services funding.  Later I concluded  t he is doing the same things to other people with visible handicap.  Why else would he be approaching me other than I am using my wheelchair.  I had to stop everything, and write this letter to you.

Another man gets out of his truck and crosses the street to join the crowd rallying.  I returned home to find staff, themselves picketing.  I don't mind strikers doing what they have a right to do.  This union representative starts at me for the third time.  I just spoke bluntly, "are you going to intimidated me again?"

"You don't understand..."  Now I'm being insulted.

Now, I am angry; I can't say more.  And now, he is a nice mister humanitarian. A woman shouts out in an appeasing tone of voice, "K___"  I wheel past a lady, idly seated at a table.  This desk is setup near the front of the building.

The union is picketing everyone in general living in the building.  And we are people disadvantaged and panicking from individuals lost on their own agendas.

Besides feeling helpless, and humiliated, I can expect to be accosted by a union adjudicators wanting more than it has for itself, wanting more just like everybody else in this society.  The right to strike is good.  Now I'm being brought into people with a cause that has now bearing on me...

There is something ironic about someone visibly handicapped being accosted by a union picketer, while surrounded by people with "human rights" embroidered on their vests.

Obviously, they don't include the rights of the disabled, not to be harassed and intimidated by themselves.


Updated October 24:

This video, taken May 8, shows one of the striking care workers yelling at a SAIL user member as she enters a DATS vehicle.