Current penchant for legislation will have future repercussions at negotiating table
The future of collective bargaining in Canada is being jeopardized by the federal government’s intervention in several recent labour disputes, say some top labour relations experts.
“You have to go back in history to see a government this involved,” says Bob Hebdon of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management who has done extensive research on government intervention in labour relations.
He says while there is a legitimate public interest in the dispute at Air Canada, intervention ultimately does more harm than good.
“It changes the parties’ expectations at the bargaining table,” he says, “and it destroys future rounds of collective bargaining.”
Hebdon says when the parties believe there’s a possibility of government intervention they don’t come with their best offers, knowing an arbitrator will look for saw-offs.
“They hold back knowing if the government intervenes they’ll have padding,” he says. “So the union doesn’t really get the last best offer. The behaviour is changed.”
Often irreparably, according to Richard Chaykowski, an industrial relations expert at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
He says the precedent being set by the federal government — threatening back-to-work legislation four times since winning the May election — is creating two significant problems.
“One, there is the threat that future terms and conditions will simply be imposed on people and two, that instead we’ll send all labour disputes to arbitration,” he says. “That’s only good if the arbitration system works well. But arbitrators are like judges. They will always make trade-offs — and not in either party’s best interest.”
Hebdon says government intervention should be reserved for truly “essential” services as defined under international labour law.
“We’ve had internationalization in the economy so maybe we should be internationalizing labour law as well,” he says.
Already essential services legislation across Canada is arbitrary, Hebdon says. Teachers, for example, are an essential service — and therefore without a right to strike — in some provinces, but not in others.
He says there are times when intervention may be justifiable from an economic perspective, e.g. strikes by grain handlers where there is a perishable commodity, but he says the economic argument can only go so far.
“It’s a stretch to say that in a case involving an airline where there’s competition and an alternative,” says Hebdon. “It’s bad policy even though it may be popular (with the public).” And he predicts there will actually be more future intervention as a result of this current behaviour.
“My fear is that it will make things worse,” he says. “There will be more strikes, not less, because there will be an expectation of intervention.”
Chaykowski adds labour-management relations are “tough” by their very nature, yet the strike rate in Canada is actually quite low.
In 2010, labour disputes caused the loss of about 0.3 hour per year per employed worker compared with 1.9 hours in 1991 and 10.6 hours in 1976.
Chaykowski and Hebdon say it’s inevitable that the Supreme Court of Canada will be asked to rule on whether the right to strike is protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an argument already being advanced in the lower courts by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
Meanwhile, Chaykowski also questions the federal government’s insistence that the Canada Labour Code requires updating, as Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt has recently suggested.
He says the Code was updated following the Sims Task Force in 1995 with the agreement of government, industry and unions.
“If the government feels the Canada Labour Code needs review, then it needs to find out what is or isn’t working,” he says. “People are suspicious when changes are done ad hoc.”
