collective bargaining

Ratification

One of the biggest recent news stories in my region was the strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) locals that represent port workers on Canada’s west coast. Not only did this strike severely affect the flow of goods entering Canada from overseas – after all, part of the point of a strike is to cause economic disruption – but it also had an unusual and prolonged ending. The initial tentative collective agreement was rejected by a council representing the union’s locals. And then, when a another tentative agreement was reached, it was approved by the council but rejected by the membership. The dispute finally ended at the end of August when the members accepted another version of the agreement.

This was an extremely complex collective bargaining situation, with several different union locals in several locations, many different occupations represented by those locals, and an association representing 49 different employers bargaining on the management side. I’m not going to get into all of the specific details of the dispute – this is a very good summary and overview of it – but I’m going to discuss the issue of ratification votes on tentative collective agreements, because some of the media coverage of the dispute didn’t explain this accurately.

First, it’s helpful to understand (more…)

The BC Public School Employers’ Association and Its Bargaining Dispute with The BC Teachers’ Federation

This week, the British Columbia Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA) – the employers’ representative in the current collective agreement negotiations with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) – released a background document analyzing the BCTF’s most recent bargaining proposals. In the same week,  The Tyee news website featured several past bargaining participants saying that the two parties’ attitudes have always been a barrier to concluding an agreement. In that context, the BCPSEA backgrounder deserves some closer attention, because, in my opinion, it is (more…)

Getting It Right About Canadian Unions’ Rights

The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) is a Calgary-based organization that bills itself as “Freedom’s defense team”. Although the CCF claims it is “non-partisan” and “politically neutral”, the legal cases it undertakes have a common theme of anti-government-regulation  – cases involving challenges to the Canadian health care system, challenges to government food safety regulations, and challenges to aboriginal self-government.

With that questionable record of “neutrality”, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised by a column written by Karen Selick, the CCF’s litigation director, which strongly criticized Canadian unions for allegedly having a “battery of privileges that should have no place in a free society“.  Well, expressing a strong opinion is one thing. Using selective and misleading information to support that opinion is another thing altogether.

The context of Selick’s anti-union diatribe is (more…)