It is official, support workers are back to work and will stay working at the Catholic Board.
The Windsor-Essex Catholic Board's Board of Directors have approved the agreement reached with Unifor Local 2458.
The agreement saw workers losing their retirement benefits, but gaining job security until August of 2019.
Support staff voted to ratify the deal this past Sunday.
Executive Director of Human Resources Terry Lyons says things can now return back to normal.
He says one of the reasons that negotiations took so long was due to the Ministry of Educations' involvement.
"We tried the best that we could for what we could negotiated," says Lyons. "There were some items that we needed assistance with from the Ministry of Education and until we received that we could not resolve the local issues."
He says the hardest part of negotiations were the removal of benefits.
"One of the biggest things was post retirement benefits," says Lyons. "Nobody likes to take post retirement benefits away. Legislation had dictated that they were no longer able to have post retirement benefits. We had to come to some degree of settlement on that and that was probably one of the largest stumbling blocks."
He says he is relieved the strike is over.
"Most of the support workers that we have seen, we have a number of them that work in this building and they are in a very positive mood," says Lyons. "They are happy to be back to work and we are happy to have them back to work."
Lyons says in many cases workers have picked up where they have left off, making it seem like a five week strike never happened at all.