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Strike
Gentlemen, beat your chests!
We already know the outcome of the Vancouver civic strike. What it's really about is throwing sand in the sandbox
By Kevin Potvin
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Everybody knows the City labour negotiators will never agree to a contract with workers that ends just prior to the Olympics. The risk of a devastating civic strike on the eve of The Big Show is too great. The union negotiators know this too and that’s why they’ve upped the ante by demanding big 18% pay hikes at the opening bell of bargaining.
City negotiators know that achieving their terms on the length of contract is going to cost them on the value of the contract. And union negotiators know that winning a richer contract will cost them the opportunity to strike at a much more critical, and potentially much more fruitful, time in the winter of 2010.
And so we know that eventually the strike will end with the term of the contract ending somewhere after the Olympics and somewhere before the 2011 election campaign, and that the value of the contract will be somewhere less than 18% but somewhere more than, say, 14%.
That is, you, me, the Mayor, the councilors, the City negotiators, the union negotiators and the workers all know what the eventual contract will look like give or take a couple of percentage points, and we all know that that will be the case whether it is signed tomorrow or in October. It’s the same with virtually every labour conflict in Canada: the eventual settlement in almost every instance always ends up within a couple of percentage points of both sides of where they were when the conflict started.
The terms of a contract therefore are not what strikes are usually about. What strikes are usually about are the egos of certain people and the opportunities the conflicts offer for those individuals to beat their chests, show leadership, demonstrate strength, get in the newspapers and build their future careers. Geoff Meggs doesn’t mind at all being pegged in the press as the mastermind behind the Machiavellian plot to engineer a strike now to leverage whatever the Olympics offers in terms of pressure on the City; and Sam Sullivan equally doesn’t mind being criticized as a cold heartless ruler who regally doesn’t rank the health and comfort of the citizens as a high priority. These are both middle aged white guys trying to resuscitate failed schoolyard careers as bullies of boys and favorites of girls and their type fill the executive suites and political offices of the country.
Because of them, neither side would ever agree to the sensible solution of binding arbitration because arbitration takes all the drama out of the fight and produces no showdown at the OK Corral when the pickets go up.
The best model for arbitration is that developed in the world of professional sports, ironically enough the very heart of testosterone-charged breast-beating. Both sides first agree to abide without appeal to the decision of a neutral arbitrator. Then, both sides submit their contract proposals. The key to this arbitration system is that the arbitrator must choose either one or the other position in its entirety; he cannot come up with his own solution found somewhere between the two proposals. In the present case, an arbitrator would either choose the City’s proposal in its entirety or the union’s proposal in its entirety.
The genius of this system is that both sides are compelled to submit what they guess would be the most reasonable proposal to the arbitrator. Ask for too much and the arbitrator will be forced to choose the other side’s proposal completely. What happens in such systems is that both sides’ proposals converge toward each other, and the choice of the arbitrator ends up being within a couple of percentage points of where both started. Which is where contract negotiations always end up whether a destructive strike ensues or not.
In professional sports, both parties get to go back to the rink to display their toughness, which is probably why they don’t feel compelled to display it at the bargaining table and so can choose instead the much more rational and far less destructive path of binding arbitration. For the Sam Sullivans and Geoff Meggs of this world, the bargaining table is their rink of play and so we must all suffer while the boys throw sand in their sandbox.
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