The wildcat strikes held by the health-care support workers, and the attendant disruptions to surgeries and other health services, have served to highlight the gross injustices built into our public service structure.
In the simplest of terms, if the health-care workers have the legal right to opt out of the system in order to get better pay and benefits, why aren’t we taxpayers accorded the same option?
The wildcat strikes expose the fundamental imbalance between the rights and liberties of the citizenry at large, and the rights accorded those who choose to work in the public sector.
Unlike the private sector, most public sector workers are unionized. Like their private sector union counterparts, public sector union members pay dues for the privilege of belonging to a bargaining unit that negotiates pay, benefits, and general workplace conditions. Also, like their private sector counterparts, public sector unions have been granted the right to withhold services when contract negotiations break down.
It is that final point that public leaders and, if necessary, the courts must alter.
Unlike their private sector counterparts, public sector workers and unions exist and negotiate in a risk-free environment.
Private sector employees do not have the luxury of compulsory customers and compulsory payment.
If they withhold services, it’s very possible that the customers they serve may simply move on down the road to a different supplier. Those customers may do so on the basis of price, quality, or even something as simple as a guarantee that the product will be there when the customer needs it.
The business graveyard is chock full of failed companies that fell prey to overzealous and greedy unions that simply took their customers for granted and didn’t grasp that some customers just don’t come back when their supply chain breaks down.
Our public sector unions have no similar risks and constraints. Their customers have no market recourse. We can’t take our business elsewhere, and we can’t refuse to pay, even for services that aren’t being provided.
As a private citizen, I have no issues whatsoever with private sector unions. I have never belonged to one and would never work in an environment where a union was present.
But, as a taxpayer, I have a legitimate right to expect that services that I have been compelled by law to pay for will not be interrupted by work stoppages brought on by politically motivated unionism.
This imbalance of power can not, and should not be allowed to stand. It came about because militant public unions in the 1970s found they could bring whole cities to a standstill, and make politicians’ lives miserable, by walking off the job. The expedient reaction was virtually always to cave in to the unions from that point forward.
Witness the Toronto garbage workers strike of 2009. Toronto’s mayor and much of city council made consistent noises about being “labour friendly” for several years. Contract after contract with the various city unions, to the dismay of much of the citizenry, provided increases in pay and benefits much greater than inflation would seem to warrant.
A fairly tepid response to public pressure over fat union contracts by Mayor David Miller led to a five-week work stoppage by garbage and maintenance workers. By all accounts, Toronto city government caved in not to public pressure, but to the unions, and gave them virtually everything they demanded.
The question you don’t have to ask is if Toronto taxpayers got back five weeks worth of taxes for the time when the services they had already paid for were not available.
Employees in the public service have an obligation to serve. Their services are provided in support of governments lawfully elected and empowered by the citizenry at large.
Strikes by public employees amount to an attack on the idea of civil government and civil society. They represent a distortion of authority where power rightly flows from the citizens to government. Instead, the power of job action by a small sector of the workforce has led to a situation where governments are beholden far more to government unions than they are to the citizenry.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air traffic controllers who had defied a U.S. law banning such action. The result was a short-term disruption in air travel, but far less than what a protracted strike would have brought about.
It’s high time that our own public leadership step up to the plate as Reagan did. Public union members need to be told politely, but firmly, that if they choose to go on strike, they will be asked to leave and to never come back.
After all, it is the duty of our elected leaders to speak for us, the taxpayers.
Bill Greenwood is a local freelance columnist.