Showing posts with label ontario collective bargaining rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ontario collective bargaining rights. Show all posts

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Thomas Walkom Today

The union movement is one of the last remnants of the great postwar pact between labour, capital and government.

That pact provided Canadians with things they still value, from medicare to public pension plans. Good wages in union shops kept pay high, even in workplaces that weren’t organized. Unions agitated for and won better health and safety laws that covered all.

True, union rules made it more difficult for employers to axe slackers. But they also ensured that when someone lost his job, it was for real cause — not because he or she had refused to sleep with the boss.

This brief excerpt from Thomas Walkom's column in today's Star serves as a timely reminder about both the historical and contemporary importance of the union movement. Entitled The teachers’ dispute and the war on wages, the piece posits that the Ontario McGuinty government's theft of collective bargaining rights under Bill 115 is really part of a much larger and endemic assault on good-paying jobs as governments and the corporate sector work together in advancing the latter's agenda.

One may rightly ask how an attack on public-sector workers advances that agenda. According to Walkom, well-paid teachers and other public-sector workers are a reminder of what is possible. As the writer asks, "How can employees be encouraged to accept the discipline of this new world when they see some, such as teachers and other public sector workers, still making good wages?"

Both federal and provincial governments, of course, are counting on the rabid resentment and antipathy against the public sector that is vigorously and consistently fanned by the business community.

And yet, there is evidence that the current Ontario teacher battle with the government, and the federations' argument that theirs is everyone's fight, is achieving some public resonance. A story by Robert Benzie and Kristin Rushowy reports that 49 per cent of Ontarians support the teachers.

If that is true, perhaps the collusive strategy between government and business needs revisiting.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

McGuinty's Magical Thinking

“We’ve been through tough times before. This is one more.”

At his leadership review yesterday, that was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's rather understated response to his recent string of political misfires, misfires that include his costly efforts to win seats in the last election by shutting down two gas-fired power plants at great expense to the taxpayer, his failed attempt to bribe his way to a majority government in the Kitchener-Waterloo byelection, and his hamfisted and unnecessary strategy for reducing the provincial deficit by stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights, despite the fact that teachers had offered a two-year wage freeze.

Apparently, Canada's answer to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker remains upbeat about future prospects, even though the teacher bill and the proposed broader public-sector wage freeze could prove very costly through court challenges to their constitutionality.

Indeed, it would seem that McGuinty's groundless optimism is infectious. As reported by Martin Regg Cohn,

Happily for the premier, a solid majority of party delegates (85.8 per cent) backed him in a mandatory leadership review — even as public opinion polls show he has the approval of less than a third of all Ontarians.

Perhaps the Premier's political instincts are failing him; at the leadership review, he seemed to think that a few platitudes about teachers would undo the political fallout of his folly as he reflected on “working with the best teachers anywhere — Ontario teachers.”

With his party now sitting at 20% in the polls, I suspect he is going to have to do a lot more than that to mend some seriously-damaged fences.