A reply to ‘Arbitration and Collective Bargaining’

The core thesis of the Employer’s November 7 letter ‘Arbitration and Collective Bargaining’ is that arbitration is preferable to strike/lockout on grounds that the former utilizes ‘fairness and reasonableness’ while the latter is merely ‘about power’. While BUFA strongly prefers settlements bargained at the table, as opposed to those imposed by arbitration, we also believe that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with strikes and lockouts, and nothing intrinsically wrong with arbitrations. The relevant question is what is appropriate in a general or particular case.

As the Employer mentions, negotiations involving police officers, firefighters, paramedics, teachers and others do not contain the option of strikes or lockouts and instead must defer to arbitration when an impasse is reached. The well-known reason is because they have been deemed essential services, which means that these industries do not ever have the option of selecting strike/lockout over arbitration. By contrast the Employer believes that they simply ‘accept arbitration as the best way to decide their new contracts’. The fallacy is straightforward: ‘choosing’ the only option available is not evidence for it being ‘the best’ option.

Teachers in the Brandon School Division enjoy one of the poorest benefits packages of teachers across the country. In recent years, their bargaining has been delayed for so long that their 2007-10 collective agreement was only ratified one month before it expired. It is hard to believe that our teachers see arbitration as ‘the best’ option, and we would be surprised if police officers, firefighters and paramedics felt differently.

Additional concerns about removing the strike/lockout option arise from a brief glance at recent settlements procured off the negotiating table. Recently, through arbitration Air Canada’s flight attendants were handed their Employer’s last offer, with no compromise on any of the terms, an offer that was rejected by 65% of the membership in the ratification vote that occurred prior to arbitration being imposed. The Canadian Postal Workers were given a wage settlement by the Federal Government that was less than their Employer’s last offer. It is not difficult to take this as evidence against ‘fairness and reasonableness’.

Perhaps most importantly, in our case the Employer to this point has not been fair and reasonable. They have consistently defended their financial position by appeal to a Provincial mandate and to a demand for parallels with the University of Manitoba and Winnipeg settlements. Throughout the mediation process the Mediator impressed these claims upon BUFA as cornerstones of the Employer’s position, claims that have now been refuted by Premier Selinger. He has stated that a Provincial mandate has never existed, and that the suggested wage imposition should not be expected given the 5% annual grant increase. The latter is an implicit recognition of the fact that our current negotiations are not occurring in the same context as did those of the other Provincial Universities.

Further, it now seems likely that the Employer has favoured arbitration from the outset. Their declared strategy of deferring monetary discussions until all language issues have been resolved, and then burying BUFA in over eighty pages of language proposals, led to monetary matters and BUFA’s initiatives being barely discussed before the eve of the strike, when the Employer proposed arbitration.  The evidence now before us indicates that, since that time, there was still plenty of room to continue negotiating.  Their press at that time for arbitration had nothing to do with having reached an impasse.

The option to strike/lockout helps ensure that both parties take negotiating seriously. In our case, it is not that, as the Employer suggests, we want the ‘power’ of strikes over the ‘reason’ of arbitration – categorizations BUFA finds regrettable –, it is that we now have ample evidence for how the Employer would behave within arbitration, and ‘fairness and reasonableness’ should not be expected.

BUFA Bargaining Team

Derek Brown, Joe Dolecki, Elisabeth MacDonald-Murray, Bill Paton, David Winter