“Share the burden.”
It’s a phrase that’s been uttered frequently by Premier Jim Prentice and Minister of Finance Robin Campbell over the past month or so. The government’s missing between $6 billion and $7 billion in revenue due to low oil prices. Everything’s allegedly on the table: new revenue sources dipping into savings and slashing spending. But to unions that last point — exacerbated by the recent five per cent reduction in MLA compensation — serves as a euphemism for public sector wage cuts.
“When we’ve asked Premier Jim Prentice point blank in meetings whether that’s what he’s looking for he has responded with bafflegab” says Gil McGowan president of Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL). “We’ve asked for clarity but are still waiting. But we have made it clear to him that we will simply not consider reopening contracts that have been duly negotiated and ratified.”
The rhetoric used as McGowan notes seems rather murky. When asked Campbell — a former union boss — says the premier has “made it very clear that we’re prepared to honour the agreements out there” noting that the government would “like unions to be part of the solution.” But that’s not the message that Guy Smith head of Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) has been hearing.
“We’ve been working hard to build a relationship” says Smith noting the current government has worked much harder than the previous administration on that front. “It’s tough under these circumstances when you hear the premier threatening to roll back our members’ wages and that sort of thing. Our relationship’s not amicable at the moment. But we’re keeping it professional.”
According to Statistics Canada data for January 2015 some 418600 employees in Alberta are unionized compared to almost 1.5 million non-unionized workers; unionized workers make an average of five dollars more per hour than non-unionized workers in the province. Exactly two-thirds of all employees in “educational services” belong to a union making up just under 32 per cent of union members in the province.
Mark Ramsankar president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) emphasizes that teachers have been held to zero per cent increases in wages for three straight years. “Teachers have more than done their load in this province” he says. “If the government at this point is rejecting any kind of tax structure or restructuring in lieu of balancing budgets on public sector wages they’re living in a dream world.”
That’s the exact strategy long used as a cost-saving measure by the province. Melanee Thomas a political science professor at the University of Calgary remembers when her mom received a pink slip in the early ’90s while Ralph Klein — premier at the time — was blowing up hospitals to save coins. Nurses who kept jobs were forced to take wage cuts. It’s a situation Thomas sees happening again.
“There’s an assumption that the inefficient parts of government are the schools and hospitals. In that is built in this idea of a lazy front-line worker who’s not necessarily doing their job” says Thomas noting that the overrepresentation of women in the public sector makes such an assumption gendered. “That’s a very political assumption to make about this kind of work. And I don’t think that’s borne out by the evidence.”
The three labour leaders all point to a multitude of alternate options for the province to consider in its coming budget rather than reopening contracts including the introduction of a progressive income tax increasing resource royalties and reinstating a higher corporate tax.
Campbell in response to the last two points argues that investment dollars are particularly fluid given the price of oil and a corporate tax increase would jeopardize investment.
The potential standoff comes at a particularly intriguing time: on January 30 in a 5-2 ruling the Supreme Court of Canada revoked a law in Saskatchewan prohibiting public sector workers from striking. Smith of the AUPE notes that it’s a considerable step forward for labour rights in Canada that if proclaimed renders Bill 45 — the infamous piece of Albertan legislation passed in 2013 that could levy massive fines against unions for illegal strike action — essentially dead.
David Camfield a labour studies professor at the University of Manitoba and author of Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement argues that while the Supreme Court’s verdict is indeed a historic shift in jurisprudence it’s by no means a salvation for unions. It’ll require public sector workers to get “much more militant” to ensure that such draconian measures aren’t forced through again he says.
“It’s important for public sector workers to reject the demands that they give concessions to employers and make the point that no worker should be required to see their standard of living rolled back” says Camfield. “It’s fundamentally irrational that we live in such a rich society and yet people are being expected to do with less.”
