January 10, 2023
Sault Ste Marie, ON -Members of CUPE 4148 are caretakers, maintenance workers, carpenters, educational assistants (EAs), early childhood educators (ECEs), and clerical staff employed by the Huron Superior Catholic District School Board (HSCDSB).
There are very few, if any, other organizations to which workers supply so much personal information as they provide to their employers.
The executive committee of CUPE 4148 remains concerned about the impact of identifying info and financial details of members, including their full legal names, home addresses, dates of birth, social insurance numbers, bank account numbers, and more, being stolen from the school board in December.
Frontline education workers are the lowest-paid employees of school boards throughout Ontario and are the lowest-paid HSCDSB workers.
The theft of personal and financial information from the employer’s files is disproportionately hard on 10-month employees – including EAs, ECEs, and most secretaries, who are laid off every Christmas, and casual employees who work on a call-in basis – because this ransomware hack caused delays in the submission of records of employment for Employment Insurance and board payroll problems.
The CUPE 4148 executive committee is taking this matter seriously. They will be investigating it further and advocating for their coworkers with the goal of preventing any further hardship from the unauthorized disclosure of members’ personal information while it was being held in the care of the employer.
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For more information:
Ken Marciniec
CUPE Communications
1-416-803-6066 (cell)
:kw/cope491
