INDEPTH: STRIKE
Public sector unions: back in the spotlight
CBC News Online | February 22, 2006
Parks Canada workers picket outside Banff National Park on the TransCanada Highway in Alberta on Aug. 13, 2004. (CP Photo/Larry MacDougal)
|
There weren't many strikes in the public sector across Canada in the 1990s. After years of cutbacks, most public sector workers focused on hanging onto their jobs.
But in 1999, Saskatchewan nurses staged a 10-day illegal strike. A year later, licensed practical nurses in Alberta walked off the job until they government came up with a better contract offer. In the spring of 2004, public sector workers in Newfoundland struck for 27 days, returning to work only after the government brought in back-to-work legislation. It was the same story in B.C., where hospital workers were forced back to work after staging a legal strike. The government imposed a contract that rolled back wages, lengthened the workweek and allowed some jobs to be contracted out to the private sector.
Later that year, unrest rippled through the federal civil service, as hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike or threatened to do so.
Nearly 5,000 Parks Canada employees and more than 25,000 Canada Revenue Agency workers took to the picket lines in September, while 10,500 Canada Customs workers began working to rule in the summer.
And in February 2006, more than 100,000 public sector workers in Ontario threatened to stage an illegal strike after the provincial government introduced legislation that would allow some public sector workers – including police and firefighters – to retire early with the same level of pension benefits as those who worked years longer.
Civil servants reach boiling point
Federal and most provincial employees were forbidden to strike until 1967, more than a century after Canada's first labour unions formed.
By the early 1960s, frustration was high among civil servants. Many workers were aggravated by private-sector management techniques imposed as governments swelled into huge bureaucracies.
Others struggled to keep up with technological changes. And salaries began to fall behind those in the private sector, with which they had historically kept on par.
Yet their attempts to form unions antagonized the federal and most provincial governments, which refused to give them the right to bargain collectively.
Things came to a boiling point in 1965. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers defied government policies and staged an illegal strike across the country, demanding collective bargaining, the right to strike, higher wages and better management.
The strike, one of the largest "wildcat" strikes in Canadian history and the largest involving public employees, lasted more than two weeks.
Ottawa grants the right to strike
The postal strike forced the federal government, and eventually the provinces, to improve their treatment of workers.
It ended only when Prime Minister Lester Pearson agreed to extend collective bargaining rights to the public service.
In 1967, Ottawa passed the Public Service Staff Relations Act, which formally gave the right to bargain collectively and to choose between arbitration and the right to strike.
The legislation excluded certain workers, such as the RCMP and the military, and set limits on when strikes could be used.
Still, most federal employees had won the right to strike.
Workers flock to join unions
The act spurred civil servants to unionize in record numbers.
Federal employees joined the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSCA), whose membership peaked at more than 180,000 in the 1980s.
As provincial governments passed similar legislation, workers flocked to the National Union of Provincial Government Employees and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
By the mid-1980s, CUPE had become the largest union in the country, representing 330,000 workers.
Teachers, nurses, social workers, professors, and others involved in government-related jobs also increasingly unionized.
Turbulent strikes rock the 1970s
Huge and sometimes violent strikes tore through the public service in the 1970s.
One of the largest and nastiest occurred in Quebec, where the labour movement had struggled for years against Premier Maurice Duplessis and his anti-union government.
In 1972, three public service unions united in the Common Front to negotiate with the province. They demanded big wage increases and better working conditions.
When the province refused, 250,000 union members in the government, education and social services struck. Sympathetic private-sector workers flocked to join them.
The workers won higher wages and more benefits, but the unrest alienated supporters among the public.
Elsewhere in the county, unions struggled to combat wage and price controls.
In October 1976, the Canadian Labour Congress staged a national one-day strike to protest year-old legislation that limited wages. An estimated one million workers throughout the country waved picket signs and marched.
The event forced concessions from the governments, but did little to slow an increasingly hostile attitude from Ottawa and the provinces.
Recessions, neo-conservatism erode workers' rights
Postal workers Don Chartraand, left, and Shane Tourangeau try to stay warm as they picket during a strike in Ottawa in 1997. (CP Photo)
|
A general economic recession in the early 1980s combined with conservative economic policies to erode the power of civil-servant unions.
Critics of "big government" urged the public sector to downsize, while calling for cuts to government spending on education, social services and health care.
Strike activity virtually disappeared until the mid-1990s, as workers tried desperately to hang onto their jobs.
Both federal and provincial governments increasingly used legislation to end job actions that did occur, including a general strike of 100,000 federal employees in 1991.
The governments also actively campaigned against the labour movement.
Not surprisingly, union membership declined quite a bit during this period.
^TOP
|
|
 |
 MENU |
|
|
| EXTERNAL LINKS: |
|
|
| MORE: |
|
|
|
CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites. Links will open in new window.
