Is it a strike, a lock-out or just a labour dispute?
Is it part of an agenda by nurses - directed by the national nurses union - to see “Newfoundland and Labrador taken to court over its principles”? That little bit of dog whistling was part of the Premier’s scrum today outside the legislature.
The “principles” the Premier is referring to are not principles as most people would understand them. They are actually just clauses in a contract that are, like all other clauses, subject to negotiation, clarification or other action to ensure that the parties come to agreement.
Whatever you want to call those two clauses there is no question that the provincial government is insisting on them unaltered and that the nurses are rejecting them with equal vigour.
One would almost believe that the provincial government had intended to push this to the wall all along, given that they’ve caved on everything else except those two clauses.
Take the wage portion, for example. Not so very long ago newly minted finance minister Jerome Kennedy was insisting that the 21%-over-four-years template every other union had signed was the only thing there was.
Listen to the scrum and count the number of times the Premier and finance minister refer to 31%. They didn’t miss-speak. They’ve actually sweetened the financial portion in an effort to get nurses off the objection to the two clauses so important to government.
Incidentally, the government was not intent on a strike all along so they could legislate the settlement of their choice. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the Premier assured us all in a very peculiar bit of self-praise/pre-emptive denial:
We’ve bargained in good faith.
That would be as opposed to bargaining bad faith.
Lots of people are going to pay a steep price for this dispute. In all honesty, it would be difficult to imagine that anyone outside government or the union could give us the simple explanation of why government is insisting on the right to pay new employees more than old ones doing the same job.
Aside from creating an incentive for new employees, as claimed in the scrum today, or union busting as the union has suggested, the idea of paying new employees coming through the door the same or more than long-service employees just smacks of the most backward-assed labour policies. it tells long-serving employees their loyalty and experience and dedication are worth exactly nothing.
Consider how unappealing is the scenario the Premier painted today, that of a nurse being able to attend a child’s wedding because there would now be a nurse to replace her on the shift. The price for that nurse – with more than two decades of service – is to have someone hired off the street be paid more than him or her.
And for all the finance minister’s efforts to dismiss hypothetical scenarios, it’s pretty easy to see the concern. The finance minister confirmed that government is developing a policy that would see just that situation: new employees paid off the grid set out in collective bargaining. Kennedy basically admitted that what the nurses have claimed is true.
For all the insistence on patterns and policy, it’s interesting, too, that the provincial government didn’t apply the same rule to other employees - working close to ministers every day –recently, especially when those employees who received across the board upward reclassification weren’t unionized. Same problem – difficulty recruiting – produced an entirely different solution.
In another sense, though none of this matters. The claims and counterclaims are irrelevant. It doesn’t even matter if what starts tomorrow is a strike of a lock-out.
The only things we know for certain are that this could have been avoided and that a whole bunch of people across the province are going to pay a price for it.
-srbp-