A lone worker stands in the middle of a make shift camp set up on the middle of a bus service road outside of the main Metro Transit terminal in Dartmouth, NS , March 6, 2012.Paul Darrow for The Globe and Mail
Professors are expected to walk on Monday. Health-care workers will learn the results of their strike vote the same day. And for more than a month now, transit workers have been off the job.
Welcome to Halifax, Canada's strike central.
So ubiquitous are pickets and protests in the city that Saint Mary's University held a public forum Monday night entitled, "Everything you always wanted to know about labour-management disputes."
Halifax has become emblematic of a much larger year of labour unrest, one in which provinces are not budging on public-service benefits as they try to balance their books and nervously await the federal government's March 29 budget, which is likely to deliver them even more bad news. Workers, meanwhile, feel they've already taken their lumps during the recession, making concessions to their employers.
In British Columbia, 41,000 teachers are off the job. In Ontario, doctors have been told there will be no wage increase. And in Toronto, 23,000 inside workers, including daycare workers and health inspectors, could be on strike or locked out in the next few weeks.
In Halifax, the potential job actions involve 870 Dalhousie professors and 3,800 health-care workers. The transit workers, 650-strong, are in the midst of their first strike since 1998.
This friction between unions and provincial and municipal governments will pose a challenge for the Harper government, which is looking to slash up to $4-billion annually in federal spending. That means likely job losses for federal public servants and cuts to programs.
"We were certainly forecasting even back in the fall that it was looking like it was going to be a rocky year in terms of contract negotiations for 2012, and certainly it seems to have been the case in the first few months of the year," said Karla Thorpe, the Conference Board of Canada's director of leadership and human resources research.
She ranks Nova Scotia among the top three labour hot spots in the country, along with British Columbia and Toronto.
The labour strife is happening, she believes, because unions are frustrated, having expected the economy to have recovered by now, especially after their workers made concessions in their contracts during the height of the recession.
Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers, sees it differently. He argues the confrontations are "overwhelmingly driven from the employers' side" in both the private and public sectors.
"Almost all of the strikes and conflicts have been defensive from the perspective of the union," he said. "It's not that they're out there wanting something more, they're trying to hang on to what they have."
He says private-sector companies such as Caterpillar Inc., which had offered its London, Ont., workers a contract that would cut their wages in half, have influenced governments.
"They'll be saying if private sector firms cut dramatically so can we," Mr. Stanford said. He said that approach "infects into the public sector."
Joan Jessome, president of the Nova Scotia Government & General Employees Union, has never been busier. Most recently, she's been running around the province taking strike votes at the 14 locals representing 1,400 home support workers.
Those votes ranged between 90 and 100 per cent for a strike, she says. And then on Monday, her union will be counting the strike ballots from the 3,800 health-care workers – ward aides, social workers, diagnosticians – mostly located in Halifax. They're after a wage increase. The expectation is that they will also vote to go on strike.
Earlier this week, Ms. Jessome said 800 support staff at Dalhousie voted 78 per cent to go on strike. That strike could come as early as March 22. Like the Dalhousie academic staff, the support staff are concerned about pensions, she says.
The Halifax transit workers are fighting with the municipality over issues of scheduling and there seems no resolution in sight.
"I think what you're seeing very loud and clear is a fight back by the public sector," Ms. Jessome said.
Earlier this week, Saint Mary's management professor Larry Haiven played host to the public at a forum on the labour wars in Halifax. About 90 people attended and stayed for more than two hours.
"Employers can smell blood in the water," Prof. Haiven argued. "We're in difficult times and they're beginning to attack. And when they do then labour pushes back … it's like they poked the sleeping bear … and the bear woke up and the bear is swatting back."
With a report from Mark Hume in Vancouver