Dalton McGuinty is no friend of the working class
So after a remarkably long strike at York University, the Ontario government announces it’s going to legislate the 3300-odd teaching assistants, research assistants and contract lecturers – members of CUPE 3903 – back to work.
Recall that from the outset, the administration has been asking that the dispute be arbitrated. Presumably they figure that an arbitrator will split differences or do ‘what’s done elsewhere’ and otherwise hold the line on whatever progress CUPE 3903 is trying to make.
Now, Dalton McGuinty has just handed them their main demand. I suspect the moment that happened, York President Mamdouh Shoukri told his negotiating team to go home, take a rest and thanks for a non-job well not done.
And yet scarcely a week later McGuinty is in the Globe and Mail dissing Shoukri for refusing to resume talks while waiting for the back to work legislation to pass?
That’s rich. Can Dalton McGuinty actually be that naïve or simple minded? Or is he trying to keep his reputation as a friend of labour alive? In which case, how naïve does he think we are?
In actual real life collective bargaining, both union and management know that the best deals are the ones that are hammered out between the two parties alone, disruption or no.
After all it’s the union and management that know the workplace, the market, the clients, whatever. Arbitrators seldom understand what’s behind the issues and the demands of both sides and yet they’re being asked to make pronouncements which will affect the way the two sides work together for several years at least.
Often their awards are non-sensical (say ‘don’t importune me’ to a postal worker if you want to get a laugh) and unworkable as they try to make compromises that cannot be made.
It’s often a guarantee that there will be more strife next round of bargaining as both sides will be vying to fix what the arbitrator screwed up.
So it’s possible that back to work legislation is a bit of a “be careful what you ask for” situation for York’s administration. They actually do have an incentive to bargain in the shadow of back to work legislation.
But clearly York’s bargainers don’t think so and I suspect they’ll be hung over from their victory party as they prepare the first of their voluminous briefs for the arbitrator.
McGuinty’s criticism of York’s unwillingness to bargain might have helped the situation a month, two months or even two weeks ago. That would have seemed sincere and would have earned him some creds from a bunch of people who aren’t normally fans of his.
But now the teaching assistants and contract lecturers who, despite years of service never know from one semester to the next how many classes they’ve got if indeed they have any at all, are no doubt going to be angrier than ever at York and now at McGuinty for this little bit of political theatre.
