Nobody likes a strike. Parties on either side call them frustrating, gruelling and often confrontational. For union leaders, picketing is a last resort. Managers who must toe the company line can’t make too many concessions in a competitive era of cost-cutting. But most of all, it is the tax-paying public that’s held hostage by strikes as their access to services is extremely limited or snipped.
And the public is exactly who both governments and unions courted this week as Labour Minister Lisa Raitt’s tabling of the back-to-work bill helped usher in a tentative deal between Air Canada and its striking employees – a political hardball she said would serve the best interests of Canadians.
Locked out Canada Post employees may also be legislated back to work by Tuesday if weekend negotiations fail to bring a resolution. In the meantime, postal workers in Montreal, North Bay, Vancouver and Windsor strayed from their picketlines Friday and formed vocal rallies in an effort to shore up public support – something unions say is desperately needed if they want to strengthen their cause.
Good luck getting it, observers say. The new fiscally conservative political climate, the post-recession economy and an increasingly fractious labour market have weakened unions, seriously eroded public support and shifted society in a way that has made some conventional strategies and issues of union past seem almost anachronistic, experts said this week.
Stephen Harper clinched the majority in Ottawa he was hoping for by stressing his success in shepherding Canada through the 2008 recession. Fiscally austere Toronto councillor Rob Ford became mayor last fall on the promise of halting the gravy train (he’s also made the Toronto Transit Commission an essential service and is well on his way to privatizing waste collection in response to outrage over the garbage strike of 2009, largely hinged on the issue of bankable sick days.) Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are leading the polls for this October’s election and have already vowed to take a no-nonsense approach to unions that has found some favour with the current Liberal government.
Unions were already skittish about the impact of this populist political shift, fearing a sweep of Tea Partier efforts in the United States stripping public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights -a change that led to the massive general strike in Wisconsin this spring.
While private-sector unions have been on the decline for the past 20 years, public-sector unions have been on the rise, and now make up the bulk of unionized Canadians. That new reality means unions are indirectly accountable to taxpayers, said Satinder Chera, vice-president for Ontario’s chapter of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which advocates on behalf of owners of small-and medium-sized businesses. Governments have felt the pressure to help mitigate the conflict and make sure Canadians aren’t burned by any strikes.
“We’re coming out of a very painful recession, there are obviously dark clouds out there. I think the public generally are looking at their own circumstances and saying ‘We’ve taken a big hit and meanwhile we’re seeing government employees living a good lifestyle on our dime’,” he said, adding that the huge growth in small business owners and non-unionized workers in the private sector who don’t get cushy benefits packages or pensions has fuelled that perspective.
And even before Ms. Raitt and the Conservatives proposed back-to-work legislation in the House this week, Canadians weren’t suffering during the strike action as much as they might have been. Air Canada planes still took to the skies as management and non-unionized staff filled in for the customer service and call centre employees on strike. Until the full-out lockdown Wednesday, Canada Post was still delivering mail to certain markets and functioning on rotating strikes -they’ll also make a striking exception to mail social security cheques to seniors and low-income Canadians next week.
Competition has limited the impact too. Canada Post has a monopoly on personal first-class mail, but courier services and email have made traditional mail less relevant. Canadian air travellers can choose a different domestic airline aside from Air Canada.
Since the late 1980s, when globalization opened up a new international market and technology unveiled a whole new way of doing business, the effectiveness of strikes has been called into question -especially for the private sector, said Anil Verma, director of the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
“Strikes were effective when we had a national market and we had regulated industries more for a domestic market. Then, unions could corner the production of any particular good or service and they could then force the employer to come to the bargaining table and do what they wanted,” he said.
“But globalization essentially created alternate sources of supply. You can strike the car industry but there are 20 other people who are willing to sell your car and then when you come back from the strike you discover half of your customers have migrated for good.”
He expects to continue to see the growth of public sector unions and decline of private ones in the next 20 years -and the friction with taxpayers continuing at least until the economy turns around.
The greatest irony in the decline of public support for unions is that they depend on it so greatly in order to get what they want. In response to the relatively sour public and political mood, union leaders have had to strike a far more concilatory tone with management than in the past, said Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers union from 1992-2008. The culture in union shops has changed to become more cooperative than it has ever been.
“Leadership of the union is much more mature today, they want to be more productive. They do these overtures and the postal workers are a good example of that,” he said, referring to the rotating strikes that Canada Post employees carried out before the lockdown Wednesday.
Labour management researchers are trying to find new ways to improve the relationship between labour and management in the 21st century workplace.
Maurice Mazerolle, who heads up the new Centre for Labour Management Relations at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers’ School of Management, said more and more government officials, employers and union leaders are interested in making labour talk commonplace across the country while reforming the arbitration system and the way pensions are delivered.
Prof. Verma is among those who suggest public support for unions could be turned around if unions focused on productivity instead of things like holding onto bankable sick days, which was one of the more controversial elements in the Toronto garbage strike of 2008.
“Things that make us more productive are worth fighting for. Things that make us lazy and where we get paid for not working, those things need to be shaved and converted into other benefits,” he said.
“In other words, the workers don’t have to just give, give and give. They can shift the focus from one type of benefit to the other type, which is more investing in people while the other is about consumption.”
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