Major Setback for Canadian Workers

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his Conservative Party swept aside one of their nation’s many progressive labor laws last week in breaking a strike by about 70,000 government workers.

Many Canadians were inconvenienced by the strike, but there was no emergency--unless, as some suggested, the emergency was Mulroney’s plummeting rating in public opinion polls. And even strikebreaking may not help him.

By flagrantly setting aside public workers’ right to strike, the Mulroney government acted in the anti-union mode of the prime minister’s ideological pal, former President Ronald Reagan, who crushed a strike by U.S. air traffic controllers 10 years ago.

Reagan disrupted the nation’s air traffic and cost this country a bundle when he fired and permanently replaced 11,000 strikers. He didn’t deal fairly with the controllers; he fired them instead of asking the courts to impose lesser penalties on the strikers--whose aims, the Administration later admitted, were justified. But the controllers, at least, had violated the law that prohibits strikes against the federal government.

Unlike here, however, it was legal in Canada--until last week--for public workers to strike, unless their jobs are deemed essential to safety and health. About 45,000 are classified that way.

The Conservative government’s move to break the Canadian strike was unnecessary and violated the spirit of a reasonable law that had to be tossed out to avoid breaking it.

The action could, however, serve a useful, indirect purpose for the United States--if, that is, it draws our attention to Canada’s sensible labor laws and not the way Mulroney distorted them.

We also would do well to model some of our social legislation on the Canadians’ broad range of services, including their famed universal health-care system.

Not only are all Canadians provided with good health care, but they pay far less than we do for our system, which excludes millions of Americans.

The Canadians have contained health-care expenditures by eliminating the high cost of selling competing health-insurance policies. Administrative costs are a fraction of ours, because Canada has a single-payer system that cuts out the costs of billing, collecting premiums and evaluating insurance risks.

One result is that their per-person expenditures for physician services is one-third less than in the United States, according to a U.S. General Accounting Office study.

The Canadians have other social services that are worth a closer look from our Congress, such as providing unemployment benefits for a full year--a program far more comprehensive and compassionate than our own.

But it is Canadian labor law that is particularly interesting, because if differs so much from U.S. labor law.

Look just at the federal-employee law that was shot down last week. The principle behind it is that, in a free society, all workers--even those employed by government--have the right to strike, as long as their action does not endanger the public health and safety.

So some jobs are listed as essential, such as those in law enforcement; workers in those categories cannot strike. But they have an alternative--mandatory, binding arbitration in which neutral experts hear arguments from management and workers, and decide what they believe are fair contract terms.

However, most federal government jobs are not listed as essential, so the law gives them a choice when they begin negotiations for a new contract. They can decide whether to strike or go to binding arbitration if negotiations fail.

In the latest round of negotiations, the federal employees opted to strike if they could not reach agreement with the Mulroney government--wrongly convinced that the government would negotiate in good faith and no strike would be needed.

But the government immediately announced a one-year freeze on wages and only a 3% hike in the second year. As an alternative, it said that if the workers would agree to slash their ranks by 6,000, those left could get a first-year increase of 3%.

There were no negotiations. The government’s hard-line bargaining position was officially denounced by its own labor board as unfair. The government was found guilty of refusing to bargain in good faith and was ordered by the labor board to return to the bargaining table.

More meetings were held, to no avail. The government offered an almost identical contract and, as it almost certainly expected, the offer was rejected. The legal strike began.

Then the Mulroney government lined up its narrow majority in Parliament, and a new law was quickly passed ordering all strikers to return to work immediately or face a fine of $1,000 a day.

Not only was the workers’ right to strike taken away and no arbitration allowed, but their right to even try to negotiate a contract was eliminated for two years.

There may well be political repercussions. Mulroney backers hope his hard-line approach will help him, because the country has a high national debt. Taxpaying voters, they figure, might be pleased to see government workers get bashed.

But the strikers were asking only for a modest first-year raise, and the Conservatives’ action against them could galvanize organized labor into more political action than ever.

Labor’s New Democratic Party already governs the province of Ontario, and elections are coming up next month in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, where polls show the NDP ahead.

The Conservatives’ decision to repeal a popular, progressive labor law to break the public employee strike could increase the lead of the New Democratic Party and add to the influence of organized labor, which represents 36% of Canada’s work force, compared to just 16% in the United States.