In case people were wondering...

... if things had gotten any better.

Last week, the picketers were heard to talk about how much they were looking forward to Thursday - something their new propagandist somehow neglected to mentioned - because they somehow found out that Wednesday was the last day we would have security.

In typical Newspeak fashion, this is how they posted about it.

No, the security staff wasn't "removed" from Artspace (notice they're not even pretending that this is about SAIL anymore).  AUPE may have a bottomless pit of money to pay people stand around our homes all day, but we don't.  The money ran out.  Plain and simple.

That does not mean we don't have security, however.  We just don't have security guards on site.

So have have things been without security guards?

Since then, the picketers have been showing up early, seen around our home by 5:30 am.  They had quite a crowd that first day with the guards gone.  They even brought their kids out again, one of whom almost ran into the street while one of our members tried to drive by.

Then most of them left, leaving only 4 or 5 picketers to hang around for the afternoon.





The let their kids do chalk drawings on the sidewalk and play hopscotch.

You can see in this photo taken in the evening, where they were allowed to play.


















This view is rather more telling.

That's right.  They let their kids play in front of the parking lot entrances.

Which tend to be very busy.

Or, as one member put it...

They used their own children as human shields.

It's not like there was no place else for them to do so.  There was plenty of other sidewalk.

Not that children should be on the picket line at all, to begin with, but they've never had a problem with using their own children as props.  Scores more sympathy points.

I wonder if the kids where there to watch as 4 picketers surrounded and kept a replacement worker trapped for 20 minutes.  The worker was allowed to go only when another worker found out about it and was able to come out as an escort.

Over the next while, it's been a strange mix of them being here and making noise, to disappearing, to only a few being around.  

Mostly, they seem to be performing for their new friend, saysandra, who turns out to not be an impartial investigator at all, but is actively playing it up for AUPE, tweeting about how boring the picket line is, and posting more misinformation.  

This morning, the picketers showed up around 5:20 am, but were gone before 7:30.

Between 5:30 and 6am, they physically assaulted a replacement worker, who was grabbed by their umbrella and spun around.

Update Sept. 9: security video cannot confirm the above incident; while the replacement worker certainly feels that her umbrella was grabbed, it is possible they touched it but it cannot be confirmed that they grabbed it.  The incident still left the replacement worker shaken.

Somehow, I don't think saysandra was there to witness this [added: potential] assault.