Respect for Collective Bargaining Rights

Bob Rae, when he was NDP premier of Ontario found it in him to disappoint the unions during recessionary times by faulting on collective bargaining rights.  He was only a Liberal in disguise as a leader of the New Democratic Party, in any event.  One who saw the error of his ways and then aspired to the leadership of the federal Liberal Party, only to have several spanners thrown at his eager gears, the last one final.

Now it's another tedious and unfortunately severe financial downturn in Ontario that is turning the provincial governing party of Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty to stressing out the public service unions again.  Like his predecessor of many moons ago, he too was a good friend of the unions, enjoying superlative relations, and then reality impinged.

The public sector payroll could no longer afford what the private sector payroll never could agree to and remain functionally profitable.  And because the public, through tax dollars, is hard pressed to pay for its current contract obligations, it is no longer capable of again generously extending those financial obligations to meet the expectations of its broad-based public service.

Take doctors, for example.  Theirs is a deep investment in the science of health and medical practise requiring long years of study and a difficult application of time and energy to succeed in establishing themselves within the community of health practitioners.  Much depends upon their expertise, their capabilities in diagnosis and prescription, and they earn their keep.

So too do many educators earn their rather munificent salaries, but by no means all.  Outstanding teachers, those who relate to their students, respect them and enthuse them and expose them learning through a wish to teach them their academic courses to help them gain a future are all too rare.  But working with nimble and sometimes obdurate minds requires time and patience and forbearance, and for this our public educators are very well remunerated.

How well?  Well, a public figure adept in his own profession of the law (Howard Levitt, Workplace Law, Financial Post) has hazarded some interesting figures, actually based upon information provided through the auspices of the elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario.  Figuring days worked per year, hours per day and average annual remuneration, the province's 70,000 elementary teachers earn an hourly wage of $78.00.

As in wow.  The same formula applied to the province's 44,000 high school teachers with figures supplied by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation brings us to an hourly salary for high school teachers that is slightly less, but still powerfully attractive at $68.73.  Those figures soar in comparison to hourly wages of aerospace engineers at $40 hourly, or veterinarians at $48, civil engineers at $37.

Teachers' union contracts have guaranteed them, through astute bargaining and a supine government wishing to avoid discombobulation throughout the school year when teachers threaten to go out on strike leaving students marooned in a society where both parents work and someone has to look after the young ones - constituting a threat to the orderly progression of society's expectations - a swift resolution of demands accepted.

That's the kind of process that creates an aura of entitlement and expectations for speedy accommodation to be carried over into any future such negotiations.  That, this time around, the province's stumbling economy and a truly nasty deficit has encouraged government to act differently in deference to deficit and debt and unemployment, has made once-friendly unions current enemies.

Which is unfortunate.  Since those lucky enough to have these well-paid jobs should be able to relinquish some of their expectations to the realities of a straitened economy and the very real fact that they earn far in excess of most of the parents of the children whom they teach, even those who are themselves professionals, particularly those who must look after their pensions on their own.

It is reasonable that they do so, under certain circumstances.  And the current circumstances represent a case in point.