With compost and recycling on ice, some Yellowknifers are wondering what to do if the strike continues
It’s been nearly a week since Yellowknife city workers officially announced they’re on strike, and that’s about the amount of time it will take for compost and recycling to start piling up at a coffee shop.
Rami Kassem, the owner of Javaroma, said the cancellation of compost and recycling pickup hasn’t impacted his business yet, but he expects to feel the impact after the strike passed the one-week mark.
Composting and recycling are some of the many city services that have been suspended while workers remain unemployed. Many unionized workers went on strike just after 12pm last Wednesday as negotiations for a new collective agreement collapsed.
The union was expected to return to the negotiating table with the city on Monday.
“So far it doesn’t affect us. But there will surely come a time when everything will be full and we don’t know what to do,” Kassem said on Friday.
They’re working as usual for now, although he did notice it was much slower than normal. He wasn’t sure if it was the strike.
“If someone doesn’t go to work — downtown businesses, they depend on traffic,” he said. “If fewer people go to work, it will affect every business downtown.”
Houseboat drivers are waiting
Benjamin Mochar, who lives on a houseboat on Great Slave Lake, said he doesn’t mind garbage piling up for now, but other solid waste is a different story.
“[Trash] is something we can wait to pick up again, but the honey bucket is getting a little full,” he said on Friday.
Unlike other garbage services, the city hasn’t collected honey buckets for over a decade. Instead, many houseboat drivers and people living along the Ingraham Trail are forced to dump their rubbish at the landfill, which is currently closed to the public.
It’s not ideal, but luckily it’s winter, he noted. That means if it gets to the point where the bucket overflows, so to speak, Mochar plans to freeze it and “make sure the birds don’t get it.”
By early Monday afternoon, neither the union nor the city had commented on the progress of the resumed negotiations.
Although the landfill is closed to the public, residents with full buckets of honey have the opportunity to dispose of them once a week. According to the city, the landfill is open between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Wednesdays for people to empty their buckets.
