A Crisis in Public Sector Bargaining

Governments face two dark choices in dealing with unions – surrender to their demands or see the public deprived of important services, which we’ve already paid for through taxes.

The problem has spread across Canada, from the far east to the far west. In Nova Scotia, union militancy closed health care facilities and threatened the long term health of the provincial health care system, until the government, in effect, caved in.

In New Brunswick, Premier Bernard Lord refused to let the Canadian Union of Public Employees close down the health care system. He imposed a settlement. CUPE’s national union president vowed revenge. “Now he must be confronted by the full force of the labour movement,” Judy Darcy told reporters.

Ontario faced years of strife from teachers unions over such things as teacher testing. Unions apparently believe our kids should just suffer if they have a teacher who doesn’t have a clue what he or she is teaching, so long as the teacher is a union member. This turns upside down the whole purpose of the education system, with priority on providing unionized teachers jobs, not on providing the best education possible for children.

In Vancouver, the best paid bus drivers in Canada struck for over four months, not to gain more money but rather to maintain union power. The only issues powering the strike were the union’s opposition to part-time work and contracting out. The aged and the poor suffered most from the transit strike.

Provincially in British Columbia, the head of the nurses union accused the government of acting like a “wife-beater” for imposing a wage increase of at least 23.5 per cent over three years. Many of us, myself included, would like to have a boss “impose” such a raise.

In previous negotiations, the ideologically driven leadership of the nurses union betrayed its own members by agreeing to a 2 per cent increase over three years, apparently because the leadership supported the then NDP government. The union gave the NDP bouquets for a 2 per cent raise and but reacted with threats and disturbing language when given a 23.5 per cent raise from the current government.

At the federal level, civil servants across Canada launched a series of one day strikes during the summer, foreshadowing more militancy and job action this autumn if Ottawa doesn’t raise the white flag.

Our way of negotiating with public sector unions is broken. The key problem is one of power. Contracts are not settled on economic merit, but purely on the power of the union and its willingness to use it. Governments have virtually unlimited paying ability, if only the union can extort the money

This is much different from private sector bargaining. If unions make unreasonable demands, unrelated to the economic merit of the work, the company either can’t pay up or, if it does, will find itself bankrupt. This usually ties union demands to reality, though too many union members have lost jobs when union militancy forced a company into bankruptcy.

What’s the solution to public sector wage setting? Unions seemed to like – a lot – the pay equity reviews undertaken in Canada. These reviews compared totally different jobs to ensure that woman and men were paid the same.

Let’s use this concept in a more straightforward way – to compare comparable jobs in the public and private sectors. There’s no reason why public sector workers should be paid more – or less – than private sector workers.

Establish a wage board to set public sector wages in accord with private sector wages. Union bargaining would remain alive since pay in many categories would be determined by union bargaining in the private sector.

The system is undeniably fair. It would end the viciousness seen with public sector strikes and allow us to get on with business.