BC Burning? Profiteering Pigs Go Too Far
Campbell blew 0.8, HEU members blew 15! That's from a sign on the picket line at one of the 330 struck health care facilities in BC this week. It resonated for a lot of reasons.
An especially egregrious assault on health care workers and, by extension, on health care took place this week in BC. Three days into a massive strike by 43,000 members of the Hospital Employees Union, the BC government legislated them back to work. It's not that public safety was in jeorpardy. Essential staffing levels were being maintained in the Province's 330 hospitals and long term care facilities. According to some workers, the levels - set by the government - were considerably higher than in previous disputes. Nobody's life was in danger, no one had been denied medically necessary services, there was no imminent threat to the safety and health of the public. Back-to-work legislation was swiftly imposed however - and that's not all that the business-friendly administration of Premier Gord Campbell laid on the workers.
In addition to the back-to-work order, the workers were slapped with an 11% wage cut and an extension in their weekly hours of work which brings the net effect of the imposed concessions to 15% - and - it's all retroactive to April 1, 2004. Apart from having their wages cut a whopping 15%, the workers will also have to pay back to their employers 15% of whatever they earned during the month of April!
The use of back-to-work legislation in Canada, while not unheard of, is relatively infrequent. We discussed this subject in some depth a few months ago in an article about the Campbell administration's use of this tool in a dispute involving another group of militant public service workers in a newly privatized ferry service. The BC Ferries Workers militancy was contained by a mediated deal that packed the dispute off to binding arbitration.
The legislation that was passed to bulldoze the hospital workers makes the round-up of the ferries workers look tame by comparison. The use of legislation to roll back wages is exceedingly rare (I can't think of an occasion in recent history when it's happened). The use of legislation to impose retroactive wage roll backs is unheard of. As if all of this isn't bad enough, the legislation permits the unlimited contracting out of the workers jobs and allows for binding arbitration where further concessions are possible.
How does a government fire workers, and let's face it is the largest mass firing of women in our history, but that is not good enough, they are also making our members pay back their wages retroactive. Fired, and now we pay back money for that privilege. People are fired, and they now must pay back the money. How? Who feeds the kids, pays the rent, how? Borrow money?
The arbitrator they refer to is an arbitrator THEY appoint.
The benefit roll back, this must also be paid back.
I can't believe that anyone can fire workers and then make them pay back wages.
I have to get back to the line, and have no idea at this point what is going to happen, it worries me that we are so tired, and we are trying to make decisions, and whatever.
I cried when bill 29 went through, but this, this is unbelievable, between the tears, I am stunned.
I once referred to an article from MFD that spoke about tallying up the broken lives, and when the crying is done, and I stated that the tally was incomplete and there would be more tears to shed, I had no idea how true this would be. I thought more jobs would be lost, I had no idea that we would also be saddled with what effectively is a fine, pay back money, for being fired, as I said, I can't even explain.
Amounts to the government firing us, and then stealing our money. From the picket line.
The privatization-obsessed Campbell government has been work hard on the McJobification of the health care sector for the past couple of years. That it went these extra few miles in this dispute is astounding nonetheless. It could have just ordered the workers back to work, hustled the dispute off to some trustworthy system guy/arbitrator and forgotten about it. Months - maybe years - from now, when the arbitrator's decision is handed down the boys in the legislature could rub their hands together gleefully about the outcome or wash their hands of it. But they chose not to do that. They chose instead to engage in an act of oppression of working people that is without precedent in this country.
Maybe they felf that the hospital workers were too militant or too numerous or too something to be boxed up and packed off to arbitration and that a swifter, nastier legislative fist was needed to contain their growing militiancy. Or maybe they felt emboldened by their success in shutting up the ferries workers and wanted to really do something over-the-top this time around. From a report in the Vancouver Sun on Friday, April 30th (the day after the back-to-the-salt-mine law passed), some may have even felt that they were doing God's work:
As the B.C. legislature resumed sitting Thursday afternoon, the back-to-work bill was law, labour was considering its options, and the government whip figured it was time to enlist the Almighty..
"Thank you father God," began Liberal MLA Kevin Krueger as he led the house in the prayer that opens each day's sitting.
"We thank you for the work we got done last evening," he continued in a vein that sounded more political the more he went on. "We pray for the Hospital Employees' Union members as they come back to work -- that you'll help them to carefully appraise their opportunities and make choices that will be the right ones for themselves and their families. And we pray that you'll bless the outcome of this . . . ." Vaugh Palmer, Retroactivity and flexibility tarnish Liberal bill, Vancouver Sun, April 30, 2004).
It's hard to say how Krueger figures that he and his privatizin' proselytizers are doing "God's Work" by soaking the citizens so that the can a bunch of corporate porcaccione can put their snouts even deeper in our pockets. But then, worse things have been done in the name of one supreme being or another.
Labour Minister Graham Bruce, after apparently wrestling with his capitalist demons, wallowed self-servingly, "This is the hardest thing I've had to do in this portolio".
If the reason for the Campbell regime's hamfistedness was a gnawing fear of the hospital workers' militancy, its over-the-top tactics may get them militancy beyond the their worst nightmares - maybe even militancy of biblical proportions.
Don't rule it out. HEU leaders and members have already vowed to defy the back-to-work order and other unions how vowed to join them. Reports from the picket lines over the past few days have been unusual in one very important respect: Many of the workers, while tired and frustrated, have reached the point where the myths of domination - that they need to do as they're told, that they should put their faith in arbitrators, to that they should look on the bright side, that they should blame themselves for wanting to hold on to what they've got, that they should defer to the wisdom of hte big and the powerful - just don't have quite the hold on them that they once did. Better to die on your feet than....
By pushing people to the brink, the Campbell administration may have done what a lot of overzealous divinely-inspired rulers have done throughout history - started a rebellion that they can't stop. Time will tell of course but the hospital workers strike is shaping up to be another one of those watershed moments in contemporary labour history. Like the massive grocery workers' strike in Southern California, the numbers, the militancy, the casting off of old disempowering values, sets this dispute apart from others and leaves open the possibility that the people will use their power.
What the hospital workers - and those who come out in support of them - do in the days, weeks and months ahead, may change the face and the direction of the Canadian labour movement. And speaking of that, there are some faces that are conspicously absent from this explosive scene. Despite the destruction that has been heaped upon these workers and the implications for public sector workers across the country, so far it has only been other public sector unions that have pledged solidarity with them.
The leader of the media-release-spewing Canadian house of labour has had little to say about the hospital workers' strike and nothing at all to say about the astounding legislative hammer that has been wielded against them. Not a word about it is to be found on the official web billboards of the UFCW, the USWA, the CAW, the CEP and other private sector labour heavies.Members of these unions are coming out to the picket lines to lend support, but their leaders are nowhere in sight - they're conspicuous only by their silence. There have been no offers of help, no stinging media releases, no angry sermons from the mount, no solidarity - even though May 1 is upon us and as this CLC media release tells us, it's a day that "celebrates the unity of workers and their unions around the world in the cause of equality, justice and the daily struggle to improve the quality of life of our families and communities".
It's true, that's what May Day is all about and it's somehow fitting that this one comes just as the outrage of tens of thousands of Canadian workers is reaching critical mass. Maybe it's just as well that the leaders of photo opp unionism keep their fingers out of the pot that's boiling over in BC. They'd only piss in it anyway and snuff out the sparks that are just starting to become airborne. That the emergent labour movement won't include them is pretty much a given now. It will be better that way.
To all the striking hospital workers in BC and to those who going out to the picket lines to show support and all the community members who are expressing their outrage at the indignities that have been heaped on them (and that we can be sure are on the drawing board for the rest of us), keep the faith, rock on, give 'em hell.
Now, I must say the faith is restored somewhat, the membership is high, and the support has been awesome.
Tonight, on my picket line, the members who were fired last year, all returned to man those picket lines.
Amazing, though, so many workers I have never met (I was not allowed in the building so never got an opportunity to meet the LPNs and care aides that were hired since last summer), so I never got to know them.
The last 4 days I now know most by name, and some of the workers that I worked with for 14 years and represented for the last 8 were out on their breaks walking the picket line, they told me that I had made an impression on the "new" staff, that I have earned their respect, living on the picket line, and protecting them and taking the heat when management comes out.
I have tried really hard to look after our members, give them strength to do what must be done, and was humbled and touched by the setiments expressed to me tonight.
I will admit I was worried that some may not have it in them, we are a small facility and isolated on a dead end side street away from the public. But I regained some strength today, as I watched our members refuse to cross the line, and when management phoned them and ordered them back to work their reply was "I'm taking my direction from my union" and they called me.
Tired, but finding it easier to keep the faith. From the picket line.
Where to next? It's your call.