If the nurses take any strike action, the provincial government will legislate them back to work with a vengeance.
Sure the Premier and finance minister have drawn a dozen lines in the sand and made countless threats all of which came to naught.
But when it comes to the point where the labour struggle is, this provincial government will use the power of the legislature to smash whatever it needs to smash in order to get its way.
Just ask the Abitibi workers who thought the expropriation bill was about helping them out and not about skimming off the cream of Abitibi’s assets for the Premier’s pet crown corporation.
Plus, they’ll change the current legislation to make sure that there is as little chance of a court challenge as possible.
But…
It’s hard to imagine that the provincial government would follow on one aspect of the Premier’s latest threats simply because it would only have the result of making an already tough labour environment even tougher:
"So, there'll be no standby increase, there'll be no shift differential increase, there'll be no educational leave. There will be no additional steps for nurses coming into the system, and there'll be no additional steps for nurses that are already in the system."
No educational leave?
No additional steps? That would have the effect of making recruitment and retention even tougher even allowing for the union busting provisions government will take for themselves so they can cut one-off deals with individual nurses.
Then again, in the Great Game of Chicken that is government’s negotiations with the nurses, logic and sense just don’t apply.
-srbp-