Ontario’s trampling of worker rights damages our democracy

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The right to strike is a part not just of our system of resolving labour disputes but our system of democratic freedoms. Trample on it, as the Ontario government has just done, and you trample on democracy.

Workers fought for generations for the right to down tools if their employers failed to treat them decently and compensate them fairly. It is not an untrammelled right; far from it. Unions are obliged to stay on the job while a contract is in place, to negotiate with the employer in good faith, to give notice that they are contemplating a strike and so on.

But it is a fundamental right all the same. Before they won it, workers who agitated for better working conditions could end up being fired, or worse. In Canada’s early decades, authorities routinely called out the militia or the troops to put them down. Employers often simply refused to recognize their unions.

Even today, in a time of legal unions and regulated labour relations, workers are inherently the weaker party. Their negotiating partner is the boss, on whom they depend for their livelihood. The threat of withdrawing their labour is the only real weapon they have to counteract this power imbalance. As the Supreme Court said in 2015 when it gave the right to strike constitutional status, “it is the possibility of a strike which enables workers to negotiate their employment terms on a more equal footing.”

Most unions are extremely reluctant to use the strike weapon. The cost to their members in lost wages is often much higher than anything they hoped to gain at the bargaining table, not to mention the anger they may face from those who are hurt by the strike. But, for collective bargaining to work, they must be allowed to wield it. The prospect of a strike tends to concentrate minds, bringing negotiations to a head and leading the parties to make concessions. Without it, employers tend to stonewall or drag their feet.

All of this is worth remembering as we contemplate the current clash between the government and the union representing education workers. The government is in the wrong on two counts. First, it outlawed the education workers strike even before it began. This is not a case in which a strike in a key sector dragged on for so long that the government felt it had to act in the public interest. It announced its draconian legislation while the education workers were still on the job.

Second, of course, it threatened to invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to insulate the legislation from the scrutiny of the courts.

Now we have an illegal walkout in the schools and a looming showdown between the government and the labour movement, which is rousing itself for a battle royale. Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government seems confident that it will win in the court of public opinion. It argues that it is only acting to protect the province’s children, who have endured so much during the pandemic and should not have their schooling interrupted again.

But the government is getting a pasting for its use of the notwithstanding clause. Canadians cherish the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and don’t like to see their governments using a Get Out of Jail Free card to override it, as the Ford government has now done, or threatened to do, no less than three times since taking office.

The public may even come to see why it’s wrong to attack the right to strike this way.

Strikes are not popular with anyone. Unions are hardly the most loved organizations in our society, and some richly deserve their poor reputation. Yet most people understand at some level that workers should have the right to organize themselves into groups, lobby their employers for better conditions and threaten to stop work in protest if necessary.

The workers in question do crucial jobs for low pay. If they can’t employ their strongest weapon to press for something better, where are they?

Where are all of us? Democratic rights can crumble quickly once they start to erode. The erosion is happening all around us. This would be a good place to say, Stop.