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Western University’s librarians and archivists have given their union a strike mandate, voting 97 per cent in favour of walking off the job as they continue contract talks.

The strike vote comes less than a year after Western’s 1,650 faculty members set a strike date and came to a last-minute agreement on the day the strike was supposed to begin.

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While the librarians/archivists’ contract ended June 30, negotiations have been ongoing since early June when the school was presented “a very fair proposal together,” said John Ciriello, president of Western University’s faculty association.

Years of budget cuts, he said, have reduced the number of librarians by 20 per cent since 2010.

“The major issues – and I do not really understand how they cannot agree to this – are some professional autonomy and governance, decreasing the workload by hiring some people they should have hired many years ago to replace those that have retired or left the institution. The last one was fair compensation,” Cirello said.