Health and School Workers Refuse to Pay for the Crisis as they Defend Wage Parity and their Right to Strike
Karen MacKenzie, president of CUPE Local 2525: "We are not going backwards"
Negotiating Committees for 4,100 hospital workers and more than 3,000 school board workers in Nova Scotia, Canada, have announced a strike deadline of Monday, January 18, 2010. They are represented by CUPE, The Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents 600 000 public sector workers across Canada. Both groups are already in a legal strike position.
The CUPE hospital workers are in 33 hospitals in rural Nova Scotia, outside of Halifax. The key outstanding issue for the hospital group is maintaining wage parity with their counterparts in Halifax, something they have had for 10 years now.
The school board workers are in eight school
boards, also outside of Halifax. For the school board group, the issue is a contract offer that’s inferior to ones that have been given to other workers in the sector.
And a group of 3,500 long term and community care workers are not far behind them, facing similar issues in bargaining.
As the deadline for the strike approaches, pressure is building on the government of Nova Scotia to reach a settlement and avert the strike. The government is led by the New Democratic Party (NDP), which is a social democratic party generally considered sympathetic to organized labor.
But while Premier Darrell Dexter said recently that he is trying to restart talks with CUPE, Deputy Premier Frank Corbett has said the unionized workers' wage demand is unrealistic because the government is facing a $500 million deficit.
This is a theme that resonates globally. Workers did not create the financial crisis, the economic conditions or national government policies that have resulted in public budget deficits. Yet, they and the public they serve are being asked to pay for the consequences. Whatever the size of the Nova Scotia budget deficit, it will not be solved by restricting the incomes of hospital and school workers.
“We’ll do our part to help the province out of this mess but we’re not going to bear the whole brunt of it," says Karen MacKenzie, president of CUPE Local 2525, which represents basically all primary health-care workers within the hospitals. "And he (Premier Dexter) is not going to balance his budget on the backs of Nova Scotia health-care workers. That’s just not happening.”
To ask them to sacrifice while they see that those who benefited from the global economic policies of the last few years continue to enjoy obscene compensations, is unacceptable. It is also unreasonable when the Federal Canadian government is launching plans to implement tax cuts that will disproportionally benefit corporations and the wealthy, increase budget deficits and threaten the viability of public services.
There is a second issue at play which is of global significance. If wage parity is not maintained, over time, out of economic necessity, health and education workers will find less incentives to work in rural areas.
"We can’t recruit and retain people out here now,"says MacKenzie, the president of CUPE Local 2525. "If they get paid less than them (in Halifax), we’ll never be able to get skilled workers here.”
The wage parity policies in place in Nova Scotia have helped alleviate the serious problem of disparities in the access to and the quality of health care and education that is prevalent in many places around the globe. This is a serious enough problem that in May 2010, the WHO's World Health Assembly will be discussing policies intended to address it. Some of the recommendations are to implement the kind of policies that have been in place but are now threatened in Nova Scotia:
"Member states should consider adopting measures to address the geographical mal-distribution of health workers and to support their retention in underserved areas. These measures could include....providing a decent wage, as well as appropriate financial incentives." (WHO draft code of action for the ethical recruitment of health workers, 2010).
A third issue at stake is the right of public employees to organize and to use their collective power to negotiate their terms of employment. The Conservative Party in Nova Scotia --whose national leader, Ron Harper, holds the office of Prime Minister--, argue that health workers should not have the right to strike. When they were in power, they tried to pass a bill outlawing health sector strikes.
The Conservatives are using the looming strike and the possible negative consequences for the public, to try and build support for their view.
Conscious of that threat, health and school workers have made preparations to minimize negative impacts on the public they serve. “We will provide what we call emergency services,” MacKenzie says. In addition, back in November, when Canada was at the height of the H1N1 pandemic, the hospital workers gave the public an assurance they would not strike before January 11.
But the union is determined to fight for their rights. While strike action “is the last thing we want to do,” says MacKenzie, "the union is not prepared to give up wage parity gains achieved a decade ago."
“We negotiated this 10 years ago,” she said. “We’re not going backwards, are they nuts?"
[Based on extracts from CUPE (http://cupe.ca/), the CBC (www.cbc.ca) and the Truro daily News (www.trurodaily.com) ]
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