Possible strike looming as standoff lingers between union and province
For the first time in more than a decade, a major public-sector strike in Saskatchewan looms on the horizon.
SGEU members in the public service and government employment unit have given a strike mandate to their negotiating committee.
Legally, no strike or lockout can occur until an essential services agreement is in place. Basically, that agreement is the two parties determining who will be needed to continue to work during a strike.
The unit with a strike mandate covers 12,000 employees, including social workers, wildfire firefighters, highway workers and corrections officers.
“Part of the equation for both sides has to be the question of essential services, because that’s going to have an impact on the level of strike activity possible, depending on the sector,” said Keir Vallance, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Law.
If an agreement is not reached at the negotiating table, there are a number of strike activities that can take place outside of a full-on withdrawal of labour by the union.
Rotating strikes, overtime refusals and work-to-rule actions are all possibilities.
Relations between labour and the Saskatchewan Party government have been particularly strained over the past two years — but this is the closest the province has come to a work stoppage since 2006.
“This is probably the first time since the change in government that this kind of financial pressure has been on the government. I think prior to this point, the government hasn’t felt the need to take a really hard line on wages or budgets,” said Vallance.
One of the core items of the province’s back-to-balancedbudget plan was, for a time, a 3.5-per-cent wage reduction for Saskatchewan’s roughly 64,425 public-sector workers.
Wage rollbacks, unpaid days off and rejigging overtime pay were all considered means to achieve that end, which was announced in 2017 by then-premier Brad Wall.
“There’s probably some suspicion on the part of labour following the government’s fairly strong position on cutting public service budgets, and the inevitable implication of that on wages or staffing,” said Vallance.
When the plan was first announced, 25 of the province’s 40 public-sector unions already were, or were going into, negotiating contracts. More than half — 36,877 — of public-sector workers belonged to one of those 25 unions.
But the 3.5-per-cent wage reduction plan failed and was eventually abandoned after it was rejected by labour groups and prompted massive protests.
The province now aims for $70 million in savings — $35 million in each of the next two fiscal years — in the public sector, but it continues to receive little help from unions in making that happen.
SGEU’S strike mandate follows an impasse between the union and government. In June, SGEU asked its members to take part in a strike vote, after a tentative deal between roughly 18,000 SGEU members and the province was rejected in April by the union in a vote.
(The rejected deal offered wage increases of zero, zero, one and two per cent over four years. At the end of September 2016, the last contract expired, meaning the first two years without increases would have been partially retroactive.)
On Wednesday, SGEU and the province expressed hope a negotiated deal would be reached.
SGEU workers went on strike in 2006, after it opened negotiations with a proposal seeking a 27-percent increase in wages and benefits over three years. The province originally offered an increase of 9.5 per cent with any enhancements coming out of that amount. That strike wrapped up a little more than one month after it started, with an agreement allowing for ratification of a 12-per-cent wage increase.
Prior to that, the last government employees’ strike occurred in November 1992. The union pulled select groups of workers off the job in a rotating strike that lasted four months and came to an end in March, 1993. The dispute was resolved with the assistance of hired gun Vince Ready, a British Columbia mediator.