Liquor store employees in Ontario may soon have a strike mandate following voting that concluded Tuesday night.

“Our members are coming out in good numbers,” Craig Hadley of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union said Tuesday night of the turnout. “They want good jobs and they want some form of guaranteed hours.”

The voting stations closed at 9 p.m. with the results of the vote expect by Wednesday morning.

Amongst the issues of contention in the contract negotiations is a plan to by the provincial government-owned company to impose a four-year wage freeze on the 7,000 members of OPSEU.

According to the union, 60 per cent of their members are part-time employees who make an average of $26,000 a year.

“A lot of our workers have to work six or seven days a week, and that’s to get 24 or 25 hours,” Hadley added.

Speaking with CP24 Tuesday night, a representative of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario said that she expects the union will get the go-ahead from its members for strike action.

“We do expect that the union members will give the union a mandate to strike,” Heather MacGregor of the LCBO said. “It does not mean that a strike is imminent, it just means that we can get back to the table and start hammering out a deal.

“We have been in this position before, and we have managed to negotiate a deal in both cases,” MacGregor added. "We’re very optimistic that that’ll happen in this situation too.”

The worker’s current contract expired March 31.