Blowup in public-sector contract talks
Public-sector contract negotiations lurched towards crisis Thursday, with Finance Minister Cathy Bennett publicly discussing key sticking points in negotiations, and NAPE president Jerry Earle clearly furious about it.
The Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees also revealed that the government has triggered one of the necessary preconditions of a potential lockout or public-sector strike less than two months after some bargaining units started negotiating — an unprecedented move in the province.
“This minister, this government, has totally disrespected the bargaining process,” Earle said.
“It took us four weeks to negotiate a single-page (protocol) document, and now the minister is expecting to conclude collective bargaining — 16 bargaining tables, very complex issues — and some of these have only had 10 or 12 hours of bargaining. That is impossible to do and clearly reflects the minister’s lack of understanding of collective bargaining.”
The day started with NAPE announcing that the government had requested a conciliation board for six of the 16 NAPE bargaining units. That’s usually a last-ditch attempt to break an impasse in bargaining before a strike or a lockout, but in this case the negotiations only started in November, and some of the bargaining units didn’t begin until early January.
After NAPE made this announcement, Bennett called reporters to Confederation Building and detailed some of the key sticking points in negotiations.
“NAPE has said at the table that they are inflexible on offers we have put forward,” Bennett said.
She specifically pointed to sick days, evening and weekend shiftpremium pay, severance and contracting out of public services as key issues the government is interested in discussing.
Bennett also pointedly said salaries and benefits account for 45 per cent of the government’s entire budget.
“We still have a very high deficit,” Bennett said. “And we are diligently working through the delicate balance of maintaining, or in some cases improving, services, while finding places to cut costs.”
Earle said the news conference was an insult, given that it’s usually verboten to discuss the meat of contract negotiations in the media.
“About 20 minutes before that press conference, she personally called me to say that she wouldn’t do exactly what she did,” Earle said.
“She clearly said (she) would not be talking about the details of bargaining.”
In the legislature, both opposition parties castigated the government for this move.
“I think it signals that they probably have another plan,” Opposition Leader Paul Davis said.
“It really certainly raises questions and concerns: is this an effort or a ploy to create a strike, or labour unrest?”
NDP Leader Earle Mccurdy had the same question, and thought he saw a sinister actor lurking behind the curtain — a labour-relations consultant from Mcinnes Cooper that has been retained by the government. “The whole approach that the government took today is exactly what you’d do if your goal was to torpedo negotiations,” Mccurdy said.
“This has got Dennis Mahoney’s fingerprints all over it. That’s the kind of approach we saw at Vale Inco when they had that long, long strike at Voisey’s Bay. That’s the kind of approach — the belligerent employer approach — that we saw at the St. John’s airport authority when we had that strike that went on months and months and months.”
Bennett tried to downplay this kind of thinking, saying conciliation is a normal tool of bargaining, and she demurred when asked about Earle’s concerns.
“There’s all kinds of inflammatory words that people can use in the media,” she said.
“I’m not going to engage in inflammatory language.”