Nurses deal!

A tentative deal in the nurses labour dispute.

Achieved at 0528 hours Wednesday morning.

Who blinked?

More to follow.

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Count down to H Hour

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.

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Government follows through on promised AbitibiBowater corporate subsidy

Premier Danny Williams and a gaggle of cabinet ministers took the trip to central Newfoundland on Tuesday to announce that the provincial government will pay former AbitibiBowater workers money owed to them by the company.

That’s pretty much the logical result of government’s announced intention in late April to subsidize AbitibiBowater:

2.  If that’s the case, why doesn’t the government just cough up the cash and then sort it out with AB later on, rather than leave the workers hanging?

The announcement comes as discontent grows in central Newfoundland.

Meanwhile in totally, completely unrelated news, the provincial government’s pollster is currently in the field collecting the quarterly poll goose and the nurses are about to go on strike. 

In other totally, unrelated and completely coincidental events, the provincial government is threatening to legislate the nurses back to work in the event they take strike action.  Government has committed to paying the nurses according to the template agreement which would be considerably less than had been negotiated. Government is also insisting on two clauses which the union has said are deal-breakers.  The nurses have suggested sending the two disputed clauses to binding arbitration.  The provincial government has refused.

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It’s war!

After lengthy talks on the weekend aimed at averting a nurses strike, the provincial government refused to change it's position at all.

A strike is now guaranteed, in apparent fulfillment of government’s agenda. The provincial government appeared to change positions on other language and provisions but consistently refused to change its position on two controversial clauses. 

One would enable government to set different wage scales for nurses based on recruiting issues.  The other would allow government to fire nurses injured on the job who hadn’t returned to work after two years and been deemed to have a permanent injury. These two provisions were aimed from outset, it would appear, at the nurses.  Other public sector unions accepted the government’s position whole, without change.  These provisions did not affect their workers.

The premier has promised that if the nurses strike (as opposed to buckle to government’s diktat), the government will introduce legislation imposing a settlement that includes all the provisions nurses have rejected. As well, the government has committed to eliminating all the pay raises and incentives that were negotiated.

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