The province hoodwinked us into believing it had restrained public workers’ salaries, a recent Ontario Labour Relations Board ruling reveals.
As reported last week in The Globe and Mail, the government signed a secret deal to give members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union an extra one-per-cent increase in 2012 on top of the two-per-cent boost awarded when the parties reached a collective agreement in 2008.
As a result, professional and supervisory public servants who are to receive smaller pay hikes sought production of documents related to the OPSEU increases in
Association of Management, Administrative, and Professional Crown Employees of Ontario v. Ontario (Government Services). They won that part of the fight over alleged bad-faith bargaining by the government in a Feb. 16 ruling by the board.
The government’s actions are outrageous for a couple of reasons. First, the public didn’t know about the extent of the OPSEU pay hike. Second, it acceded to a three-per-cent increase at a time when public finances were crumbling in December 2008. It was overly generous, particularly in light of the province’s subsequent and largely unsuccessful bid for an across-the-board freeze in public-sector salaries.
The revelations come as Canadians re-elected a federal Conservative government bent on restraining spending and as Ontario gets ready for a provincial vote this fall. Given our deficits, public-sector wages should be issues for discussion at both levels of government.
We have a few choices when it comes to the messy task of fixing the financial mess. Conservative politicians, notably Mike Harris back in the 1990s, often talk a good game about wage restraint but merely cut civil service jobs and reduce public services rather than dealing with employees’ salaries, benefits, and pensions. In the meantime, they cut taxes, which puts further pressure on our programs while civil servants get pay increases anyway.
Another option is to maintain tax rates or even increase them to pay for both services and employee pay hikes. Given that some unions have been reasonable in their demands in recent years by, for example, accepting two-per-cent increases, that option shouldn’t be unpalatable. But with last week’s election and our current political environment that in recent years has delivered a stream of income, GST, and corporate tax cuts, that’s not likely to happen.
The third option is to take the unions on and let them go on strike if employees won’t accept restraint as governments and voters refuse to maintain or increase taxes. It doesn’t sound very nice, but particularly given the generous benefits and pensions public workers receive compared to the private sector, that’s the way to go.
It’s certainly a more honest way of dealing with things than the usual practice of promising efficiencies without service cuts that in the end result in reductions to vital programs as we continue to pay for the salary hikes and pensions that squeeze government budgets.
In the meantime, in light of the recent labour board ruling, let’s start with being transparent about what the pay increases are in the first place.
— Glenn Kauth
