By Nicolas Maltais 
In the spring of 2023, I found myself pacing on a chilly picket line outside my workplace. The air was crisp, filled with the rhythmic chants of my fellow union members, but beneath the resolve in their voices I could sense an undercurrent of worry. During one of those mornings, a colleague turned to me with tired eyes and confessed, “I can’t afford to stay out here much longer.” She meant financially — even with the small strike pay our union provided, she was struggling to pay her rent and support her two kids at home. Her words hung in the cold morning air, a stark reminder of the true cost of the stand we were taking. At that moment, the weight of what a protracted strike meant settled heavily on my shoulders. It wasn’t just about figures on a bargaining table; it was about real people with real bills, anxieties, and lives on hold.
No one ever truly wants a strike to drag on. We certainly didn’t. We had reached that point only after months of fruitless negotiations and mounting frustration, feeling that we had no other choice but to walk off the job. The cause was just — we were fighting for fair wages and respect — but even a necessary stand has a steep price. In those drawn-out days, I came face to face with how layered that price was. On the surface, it was about lost income for workers and lost productivity for the employer. But as the days turned into weeks, I realized the deeper toll was measured in something more human: the strain on our union as an organization, the hardships in each of our personal lives, and the pressures mounting on the employer’s side as well.
For my fellow union members and me, the personal stakes were evident and immediate. The first day on strike felt almost exhilarating — a surge of solidarity and righteous purpose. We gathered with picket signs and hopeful hearts, believing we could hold out as long as it took. But by the second week, reality was pressing in. Each morning, we bundled up and headed to the picket line instead of our offices, our routines upended. Instead of logging into our computers to serve the public, we were standing out in the wind and occasional rain, hoisting signs that grew heavier with each passing day. Conversations on the line that once centered on our demands and hopes slowly shifted to worries about how we were going to manage at home. I recall people trading advice about deferring mortgage payments, calling banks to explain why bills might be late, or cutting out any little luxury to save money. One coworker admitted he was putting groceries on his credit card and dreading the bill. Another mentioned quietly that her teenager might have to skip an extracurricular activity that month because the family needed to tighten spending. These were not abstract inconveniences — they were personal sacrifices, piling up day by day.
Financial stress was only part of it. There was an emotional and psychological toll that settled on all of us in different ways. I could see it in the slumped shoulders of friends who, a week prior, had been energetic strike captains leading chants. The uncertainty of not knowing when we’d return to our normal pay and routine gnawed at us. Some nights I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, running numbers in my head: How many more days could I pay my own bills if this continued? That mental calculus became a grim bedtime ritual for many of us. And with the worry came a creeping sense of doubt. We never doubted our cause — fair pay and better conditions were worth fighting for — but we worried about our own endurance. It’s a hard thing to grapple with: feeling pride in standing up for yourself and your colleagues, while simultaneously feeling afraid of the very stand you’re taking because of what it might cost you personally. I remember catching myself in a moment of quiet guilt, wondering if I was being selfish for wanting to end the strike soon, even though I knew the fight was bigger than just me. It was a strange, bittersweet mix of emotions: solidarity and fear, hope and hardship, all swirling together every day on that picket line.
Through all this, the union as an organization was our backbone and our lifeline. I gained a new appreciation for what our union leaders and staff were going through behind the scenes. The union had planned for this possibility for a long time — we had a strike fund built up from our dues, and they were using it to provide us with that modest strike pay and even things like coffee and pizza on the coldest days. But I knew every dollar spent on strike pay was a dollar out of our union’s reserves. With tens of thousands of workers across the country on strike, the burn rate of the fund had to be enormous. Each passing day, our union was effectively bleeding resources to keep us all going. The union didn’t collect dues when we weren’t getting our regular pay either, so they were running on finite reserves. I imagined the treasury of our union, carefully saved over years, now draining away steadily in service of this cause. It was an investment in us, in our collective future, but it was expensive in the here and now. And it wasn’t just money; it was energy and time. Our union officers and negotiators looked as exhausted as we felt. I saw our national president on the news one night, eyes heavy, voice hoarse from both the weather and from constant meetings, yet still speaking resolutely about why we had to persevere. They carried the weight of all of our hopes and fears into those bargaining sessions each day.
Inside our union, the pressure was immense to get a good deal before we all reached a breaking point. The leadership had to balance two truths: that we needed to hold out long enough to win something meaningful, and that we had members on the line — literally and figuratively — who were nearing their limits. It’s a delicate tightrope for any union. Push too hard for too long and you risk people losing faith or falling into financial ruin; settle too early for too little and all those sacrifices feel squandered. I did not envy our bargaining team one bit. They were not only up against the employer’s negotiators; they also bore responsibility to thousands of families who were struggling each day the strike continued. Behind closed doors, I’m sure they worried about whether our solidarity would hold if it dragged on much longer. Morale is as much a resource as money during a strike, and I could feel that our collective morale was being tested. Yet the union did everything it could to keep our spirits up — organizing big rally days where members from different picket lines all gathered together, inviting community allies to join us on the line, and sending out regular updates so we knew that progress (even small progress) was happening at the table. Those gestures helped remind us why we were doing this and that we weren’t alone, even as the days piled up.
Meanwhile, across the negotiating table (and across the picket line), the employer was facing its own trials as the strike wore on. It’s easy in the heat of the moment to paint the employer as a faceless adversary, a monolith of managers and executives who only care about budgets. But the truth is, on the other side were human beings under pressure too. Our strike had effectively ground the work of our department to a halt. Each day the offices stayed closed and phones went unanswered, the backlog of work grew. For a public service like ours, that meant citizens were waiting longer for services and growing frustrated. I remember seeing a news report about long lines at the passport office and thinking, “This is what our employer is dealing with now.” Managers who normally oversaw teams of employees suddenly had skeleton crews or no staff at all to do the job. They were likely scrambling to prioritize what little they could get done and putting out fires left and right. I suspect our higher-ups in government weren’t sleeping well either, knowing that critical tasks were not being performed. They must have been fielding calls from concerned stakeholders and the public, trying to explain or justify why things had come to such a standstill.
There were direct financial costs for the employer with each passing day too. In a private company, a long strike means production deadlines slip, orders aren’t filled, and revenue is lost — it can even mean losing customers to competitors. In our case, as a public employer, it wasn’t about lost sales but about mounting delays and the expense of eventually catching up. We all knew that once the strike ended, an enormous effort would be needed to get back on track. That might involve paying some employees overtime or hiring temporary help. Ironically, those costs could end up exceeding what it might have cost to meet our demands earlier. The longer the work stoppage continued, the more everyone lost in one way or another. I also thought about the individual managers and supervisors we left behind when we walked out. Some of them had quietly empathized with our situation before the strike began, and I suspect they felt torn as the days dragged on. They had their own jobs to worry about and orders from above to hold firm. It couldn’t have been easy for them to see their projects derailed and their teams out there in the cold. Just as we strikers were anxious and weary, the employer’s representatives across the table looked increasingly fatigued as well. You could see the tension in their faces in photographs and interviews as the dispute persisted — a mix of resolve and the strain of being in a prolonged standoff.
A protracted strike truly tests the fabric of everyone involved. As those two weeks in 2023 showed me, the costs run far deeper than the visible impasse on the surface. For the union, it was a trial of its strength and solidarity. For individuals like me and my coworkers, it was a personal trial of endurance and conviction. For the employer, it was a test of their ability to withstand disruption and public scrutiny. All sides had to confront uncomfortable truths about their dependence on one another. I realized in those days that a workplace is a lot like an ecosystem: disrupt it long enough, and every organism in it starts to suffer in some way. The union and the employer might have been on opposite sides of the bargaining table, but we were both dealing with strained finances, frayed nerves, and mounting incentives to resolve the dispute.
The psychological toll is one aspect of a long strike that isn’t talked about enough, perhaps because it’s harder to quantify than dollars and cents. I saw firsthand how the stress of uncertainty can wear a person down. Colleagues who were usually cheerful and patient found their tempers growing short. Small disagreements on the picket line — like where to stand or how loudly to chant — flared up more easily as our nerves frayed. I felt it in myself too; I had to consciously remind myself to be patient and kind, both to my fellow strikers and to the people driving by who maybe didn’t understand why we were out there. The employer’s side likely had their own version of this stress: managers feeling frustration or resentment, or higher-ups under immense pressure, all of which can sour the atmosphere. Trust, I realized, was another casualty of a long strike. The longer we were out, the more some workers began to deeply mistrust the employer’s intentions — some wondered if the employer would ever have bargained fairly without this pressure. On the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if some managers started to view the workers as adversaries in a way that wouldn’t disappear easily even after we returned to work. This kind of emotional rift isn’t visible on any balance sheet, but it’s real, and mending it can take a long time.
Despite all this hardship, something beautiful revealed itself in the midst of the struggle, and it’s an important part of the story. On the picket lines, we forged a camaraderie that perhaps only comes from facing a challenge together. People who had barely spoken to each other in the office before were now sharing thermoses of coffee and offering one another rides home. One rainy day, when the downpour was unrelenting, someone’s spouse showed up with a trunk full of homemade chili to keep us warm; I’ll never forget that gesture. It was empathy in action — workers and our families, even strangers from the community, looking out for one another. That solidarity was a kind of emotional paycheck that helped sustain us when the actual paychecks were absent. The union, too, took care to remind us of why our sacrifice mattered. They shared stories of what we were fighting for — for instance, highlighting co-workers who had been barely scraping by even before the strike, struggling with rising costs of living. It put into perspective that our fight was for a more just future, not just for ourselves but for those who would come after us as well. That sense of purpose was crucial. Without it, I don’t think we could have lasted even as long as we did. Purpose doesn’t pay the bills in the short term, but it can fortify the spirit.
In the end, we did go back to work after what felt like a very long time — though it was just a few weeks on the calendar, it seemed much longer in our minds. I remember the morning we got the news of a tentative agreement. There was this rush of relief as we woke up and read the news — had we been on the line, I’m sure there would have been cheers, hugs, even a few tears as people would have realized we’d soon be returning to our normal lives. We were exhausted, and some of us were financially bruised, but we had made it through together. The contract we won had improvements we could be proud of; not everything we had hoped for, but enough that we felt the sacrifice had yielded something real. Walking back into the office that first day, I felt a mix of triumph and trepidation. Triumph because we stood up for ourselves and made concrete gains; trepidation because I knew things might never be exactly as they were before. A protracted strike leaves a mark. In the lunchroom that first week back, conversations between staff and management were polite but a bit cautious, as if we all needed to get reacquainted. We were all sincerely trying to move forward, but it was clear that the experience had changed our workplace atmosphere, at least for a while. It took time to rebuild the normal rhythm and a sense of trust in our daily interactions.
Now, looking back with some distance, I’m struck by the dual nature of what we went through. Yes, we paid a price for those weeks of collective action — financially, emotionally, and in terms of sheer fatigue. I won’t sugarcoat it: the experience pushed many of us to our limits. Some of my coworkers had to make difficult personal choices during that time, and they were still recovering from those decisions months later. The union had to expend enormous resources that will take time to replenish. The employer had to reckon with operational losses and a workforce that, while more empowered, was also worn down. These are the true costs of a protracted strike, costs that don’t always make the headlines or bargaining bulletins. And yet, knowing all that, I still believe it was necessary. That is perhaps the most complicated feeling of all: recognizing the hardship and still feeling it was worth it, for the principles and the improvements we secured. It taught me that collective action, like so many things in life that matter, comes with sacrifice. It’s never easy and it’s never tidy. But when done for the right reasons, it carries a purpose that can sustain people through even the toughest moments.
The experience left me with a deepened compassion for everyone involved in such disputes. I find myself less quick to judge now. When I hear about other workers on strike — whether it’s teachers, factory workers, or nurses — I immediately think about what they’re going through behind the scenes, beyond the headlines and picket signs. I think about the union rep losing sleep while crunching the numbers of the strike fund, about the single parent striker nervously checking their budget, and yes, even about the manager on the other side anxiously refreshing her email for any sign of a deal. Strikes are often portrayed as battles, and in some ways they are, but they’re also profoundly human events. They reveal how interconnected we all are, and how the pain of one group’s struggle eventually reverberates through everyone connected to the work. The strike I experienced in 2023 showed me that while a protracted strike can feel like a trial by fire, it can also illuminate the core values we hold and the strength we have when we stand together. It’s a costly way to learn, no doubt. None of us who went through it would want to do it again anytime soon. But in that reflection lies a final truth: we fight so hard in hopes that we won’t have to do it again — at least not for the same reasons. We carry the lessons forward, scarred but wiser, exhausted but proud, knowing firsthand the true cost of a protracted strike and the precious worth of what we were striving for.