User:Steverook1/sandbox

= Warren (Smokey) Thomas =

Warren (Smokey) Thomas is President of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), one of the province’s largest public sector unions, having first been elected on April 20, 2007. He is currently serving a record seventh two-year term.

Personal life
Thomas was born on September 10, 1952, in Kingston, Ontario, one of seven children. Thomas lists his mother, Marie Thomas, as one of the greatest inspirations in his life, along with Tommy Douglas. He attended Queen Elizabeth Collegiate and Vocational Institute.

Thomas is married to Val Friend. The couple have three sons: Andrew, Jesse and Scott. Thomas has two sons from his first marriage, Danny and Matthew. Thomas has one grandson Brady.

Early Career
During his career, Thomas worked as an apprentice auto mechanic, a salesperson for Canadian Oxygen Ltd. and was hired by Kingston’s Ontario Psychiatric Hospital in 1970. Thomas worked on the wards in the mornings and took classes in the afternoons to become a registered nursing assistant.

His interest in developing an employee assistance program at the hospital led him to become active with OPSEU Local 431. He was elected a steward before becoming acting vice-president and then president. He represented more than 1,000 members until 1993, when he was elected to the union’s Executive Board as a member for Region 4 (Eastern Ontario).

In that capacity, Thomas was an outspoken opponent of the social contract imposed by Queen’s Park in 1993. He was also heavily involved in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) strikes in 1996 and 2002.

Presidency
In 2001, Thomas began serving the first of three terms as OPSEU’s First Vice-President/Treasurer.

Following the retirement of Leah Casselman in 2007, Thomas was elected OPSEU President on a pledge of putting the interests of the union’s members first. During his presidency, the union has experienced unprecedented growth in its membership, going from 115,000 to 165,000 today – a 43 per cent increase.

One of the great accomplishments of Thomas’s term as President was the certification of about 20,000 college part-time support staff in 2018. After a dogged 14-year campaign that saw the Ontario government, through the Ontario College Council, throw up a series of legal roadblocks to unionization, some 20,000 college part-time support staff voted to join OPSEU in 2017. As such, it stands as the largest union organizing drive in Canadian history to date. Thomas is a periodic lecturer at the School of Industrial Relations at Queen’s University, where he shares his knowledge and expertise in collective bargaining and labour relations.