Last week, more than 120,000 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada/Alliance de la fonction publique du Canada (PSAC/AFPC) – the union that represents many of Canada’s federal employees – went on strike. The unresolved bargaining issues include wage rates and the amount of remote work (“work at home”) done by PSAC members.

A PSAC member filed a complaint with the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board asking for the strike vote to be declared invalid, because PSAC shortened the voting period after the announcement of the vote. In their decision, the three Board members hearing the complaint noted that while “the respondent made no discernible effort to announce its reduction of the voting period”, and expressed misgivings about other aspects of the changes to the voting process, such as limited attempts to reach members without email addresses, and limited capacity at the mandatory information meetings held online prior to the vote itself.

Nevertheless, the Board members concluded, the vote was more than 80% in favour of striking and “the Board is satisfied that in the current circumstances, the vote result would have been the same even without the irregularities.”

A considerable amount of the news coverage of this case has focused on the low turnout in the vote – only 35% of eligible PSAC members participated. The underlying tone to much of this coverage is that because of the low turnout, the vote is somehow not representative of the opinion of the entire PSAC membership. It seems that some journalists and commentators could benefit from a review of some basic information about strike votes and democratic processes. Here it is.

• Most labour legislation in Canada requires a strike vote to be held before a union’s members can legally go on strike. If the vote is successful, the union that’s in bargaining acquires a “strike mandate”: an authorization by its members to call a strike.

 

• A strike vote resulting in a strike mandate doesn’t mean that a strike is going to happen. The strike mandate can, and is, used by the union to press its demands in collective agreement negotiations with the employer – as in, “give us what we want, or we go on strike”. It’s not uncommon for a strike to be authorized by a vote, and then for the strike to never happen.

 

• Both unions and employers generally want to avoid a strike. Really, no one wants to go on strike. It’s not a holiday; it’s very stressful for everyone on both sides of the dispute. Strikes disrupt the employer’s operations, and strikes hurt the union’s members financially because they’re not being paid by the employer while they’re on strike. (They may receive strike pay from the union, but that’s usually a much lower amount than they earn at their regular jobs.)

 

• If the union decides that it will call a strike, it’s required to give advance notice – 72 hours for federally-regulated unions – of when the strike will begin. This notice gives the employer, the union, and the union’s members time to get the workplace ready and to make alternative arrangements if necessary. If the union represents workers who perform essential services, like emergency health care, usually the union and the employer have to agree on a plan to keep those services functioning at a minimum level before the strike can commence.

 

• The question on the strike vote ballot is a simple “yes”/”no” as to whether the voter supports a mandate for the union to take strike action. Every employee that belongs to the bargaining unit (the group of employees represented by the union in bargaining) is entitled to cast a ballot in the strike vote.

 

• The standard for a strike vote to be successful in most Canadian jurisdictions is 50% + 1 in favour among those voting (also called a “simple majority”). So if 100 voters cast a ballot in the strike vote, 51 would have to support the strike for the union to have a strike mandate.

There is no minimum turnout requirement, in any Canadian jurisdiction, for a strike vote to be valid. As I wrote in my textbook, “Since unions are democratic organizations, every member of the bargaining unit has the opportunity to participate in the strike vote. But if individuals choose not to use that opportunity, that choice should not affect the outcome resulting from the votes of those who did participate.”

Disputes before labour boards about the conduct of strike votes are relatively rare, but when these have occurred, they tend to involve questions of who is eligible to participate in the vote and at what point in the bargaining process the vote has been taken. (This article is an excellent summary of Canadian cases around these kinds of issues.)

The media outrage over the low turnout in the PSAC vote seems especially misplaced when we consider that voter participation rates are generally low in many kinds of Canadian elections. Less than 50% of Canadian voters cast a ballot in the last few federal elections.  In my own province, just over 50% of voters participated in the last provincial election, and an average of 30% turned out for the last municipal elections. In Vancouver, the largest city in BC, the turnout rate was 37%.

Of course, concerns were expressed about all these low voting rates – as there should be. The right to vote and the opportunity to vote in democratic elections are freedoms that many residents of other countries don’t have, and it’s troubling that more Canadian voters don’t realize that and make the effort to get to the polls on election day.

But I don’t recall any outraged editorial writers or commentators contending that elections for Parliament, provincial legislatures, or municipal councils should be overturned, or that the results are somehow not representative, when the voter turnout rate is low. I can only conclude that this criticism is being levelled at PSAC because of stereotypes of unionized public servants as overpaid and lazy, and grabbing at any opportunity to not have to do their jobs.

PSAC is a large union that represents many different types of workers across all of Canada. Of course, just like in any group with tens of thousands of members, there will be different opinions among PSAC’s members about how the union should conduct its business, and about whether a strike is the most productive or effective way to back the union’s bargaining demands.

But unless someone has reliable evidence to the contrary, implying that a low voter turnout for a strike vote means that the union’s executive and bargaining team do not have the support of the union’s membership, or are pushing the membership into a strike that it doesn’t want, is misleading.