How Did Premier Lose Public on Strike?

The furor over the Hospital Employees Union job action and the almost-general strike appears finally to be dying down. At least for a while. One might well suspect that the "truce" reached between Labour Minister Graham Bruce and B.C. Federation of Labour head Jim Sinclair should be compared not to the ending of a war, but to a brief ceasefire in which both sides can, without losing face, retreat, regroup and treat their wounded.

Labour battles before election

At least two more big battles are brewing on the labour front - and both must be fought before the fixed date of the next election in May 2005. One group involved is the teachers, the other the nurses.

Last time around the nurses became known for throwing shoes during a demonstration in front of the legislature.

The teachers have never managed to achieve a negotiated settlement since the current bargaining structure was first set up in 1996.

None of this bodes well for labour relations involving the Campbell government during the next several months.

All of which makes it worthwhile to look at some of the underlying factors involved in the HEU action in the hopes that British Columbians can learn from it some lessons that could reduce future levels of confrontation. For the Campbell government, that may mean looking beyond common assumptions about the strike, and grappling with some challenging answers to questions still lingering in a lot of people's minds. For example:

Did the government really win this one?

Most revealing is a McIntyre & Mustel poll that was taken only a few days after the truce was brokered. It is a given in political science in B.C. - and in most other places as well - that governments virtually always win public sector strikes, especially once the courts have ruled those strikes to be illegal. The public sees the union members on the picket lines, preventing them from getting access to health, education or other services they need. Independent courts have ruled the picket lines are illegal. In the court of public opinion, this is a battle that it should be nearly impossible for a government to lose.

But the McIntyre & Mustel poll (which was conducted for Global TV, not for any union-related party) showed clearly that Gordon Campbell had managed to lose it. The general view of the populace was "a pox on both your houses." But when push came to shove, just 51 per cent of those surveyed said they disapproved of the HEU's strategy an tactics, compared to 65 per cent who disapproved of how Campbell and his cabinet had acted. Asked about how they viewed Campbell's personal performance, a full 47 per cent said it had made them think worse of him as premier. Only six per cent said it had improved their view of him.Apparently, a large majority of British Columbians weren't impressed by the oversimplified union-bashing spin that Campbell was attempting to put on the issue. They realized that it was a much more complex event than the government was making it out to be. Even after the poll was released, Campbell and his ministers continued to put 100 per cent of the blame on the HEU for everything that happened.

Was this really about overpaid "hotel services"?

The fact is that an HEU dispute can rarely, if ever, be a simple dispute, because the HEU is not a simple union. It is not like, say, the B.C. Nurses Union or B.C. Teachers Federation, where all members perform essentially the same job. The government would have liked us to believe that all members of the HEU were performing what Health Services Minister Colin Hansen describes as "hotel services" - housekeeping, food preparation, and laundry. Those are the services that the health authorities, with the government's encouragement, have begun to contract out to private companies, which are planning to pay $10 an hour or less for front line workers.

Ironically, managers in the various health regions who took over some of those jobs during the HEU picketing were paid $50 an hour and more for the overtime they worked. Some of those managers also quickly realized that Hansen's description of them as "hotel services" was more than a bit of a misnomer. To be sure, hotel guests also need clean floors, clean sheets and towels, and healthful food. But those doing laundry for a hotel, for example, are rarely faced with sheets covered with blood and bodily fluids or bed linen that has been used by incontinent patients. But that's a regular occurrence in the hospital laundries.

Even leaving those working conditions aside, however, that group of workers is far from a majority of HEU employees. Hansen talked about the HEU as members who don't perform bedside services for patients - but in fact, thousands of them do. They are, for instance, pharmacy technicians, licensed practical nurses and mental health counselors - all of whom require special training and skills to do their jobs. It is this large number of subsectors within the union that makes HEU negotiations so complicated.

Why did HEU members reject earlier deal with government?

It might well be argued that HEU's stratified membership is also why the union members didn't vote in support of a compromise deal reached between the union executive and the government almost exactly one year ago. At that point, the HEU brass saw the writing on the wall - thousands of jobs being privatized, maybe as many as 20,000 among their members. The executive reached a tentative agreement with the government which would have limited the number of jobs to be privatized in return for a pay cut of one dollar an hour for those in the "hotel services" branches and 35 cents an hour for the rest of the membership. As well, the work week would have increased to 37.5 hours from 36, everyone would have received five days less vacation per year, and overtime rates would have been lower on statutory holidays.

Looking at it now, most HEU members probably think it wouldn't have been such a bad deal. Nearly every HEU member is now going to take a bigger hit from their pay-benefits package under the government's legislated settlement. For some, the difference will be significant. A skilled worker making, say, $22 per hour, is going to lose at least $3 of that in some combination of direct wage rollbacks and benefit cuts. That's at least four or five times as much as they'd have lost under the deal they rejected.

But at the time, most of the non-"hotel services" workers didn't see that they had anything to gain by accepting the deal. Because of their specific skills, they weren't in the line to see their jobs contracted out. And none of them appear to have anticipated that the Liberals would force larger rollbacks on the entire union.

What are real costs to taxpayers of layoffs, jobs with poverty pay?

Meantime, over the past year, the Health Authorities have continue their privatization of food and housekeeping services. On Vancouver Island alone, close to 1,000 members will be out of a job come September or October. In many cases, the government isn't in reality going to save all the money that was being paid to them in salary. Instead, they'll be receiving employment insurance or even welfare payments - just from a different pocket of the taxpayer. Meantime, they're expected to go back to work for four months or so, take the wage rollback - and still not have a job at the end.

The workers who come in to take the $10 an hour jobs will nearly all be living under the Low Income Cut-off line (poverty line, as we used to call it) as established by Statistics Canada.

This was a battle that no one won. And everyone in B.C. knows that it isn't going to get any better as the next skirmishes develop on the battle lines.

Barbara McLintock is the Victoria based contributing editor for The Tyee.