Jamie Sarkonak: Liberals, NDP only support workers when DEI is at play, not actual work

On Thursday, the lockout barring Canada’s 9,300 rail workers came to a close after only one day. It was the one time a union made sensible asks to an unreasonable duopoly of employers, and the Liberals caved. With a few harsh, inconsequential words, the supine New Democrats backed them up completely.

The material significance of government intervention, at this time, is low. Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon referred the dispute to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board, asking it to “assist the parties in settling” the dispute with means that include “imposing binding arbitration,” which — if the board so chooses — would have a third-party adjudicator force the parties into an agreement. He did not end the dispute, nor did he order binding arbitration, contrary to CBC’s announcement. In fact, it’s questionable whether he even has the authority to do such a thing.

It’s a betrayal of labour by MacKinnon because the union explicitly did not want binding arbitration at this point in negotiations. Handing off the matter to the labour board with a wink and a nudge towards the very mechanism workers tried to avoid tipping the scales to favour the corporate parties without brazenly sullying the allegedly labour-courting Liberal-NDP coalition. The board offers a layer of insulation that would have been absent in back-to-work legislation — or worse, emergency legislation.

Now, not every union ask is deserving of sympathy, but in this case, it’s warranted. To start, rail is unlike most industries: it operates on very limited, government-built infrastructure; it’s dominated by two employers, keeping competition for labour to a minimum; lastly, poor working conditions pose a serious safety risk to the public. Reduced employee leverage in these non-market conditions requires a union for balance.

To be clear, not all unions should be given such weight. The Public Service Alliance of Canada, representing federal government workers, advocates for the use of neo-pronouns in the workplace and wails for taxpayer dollars to cover gender-neutral washroom renovations. The Mideast-obsessed Canadian Union of Public Employees calls for the “regularization” of illegal immigrants and the creation of race-based seats at the bargaining table, while fully embracing the discriminatory, politically charged mission of “anti-racism.” Their contemptible demands hamstring this country and deserve to be laughed out of the room. If only they were.

The train workers, however, had reasonable asks. Though the draft collective agreements in dispute are a quagmire for the unversed, the short version is this. CN proposed two offers to its workforce in previous months: one that would add wage bumps to the current system of distance-based pay, and another that uses a new shift-based model and could require additional labour from staff members who arrive at their destination early. The former included a new “mobile workforce” scheme that would allow the company to lay off employees from their home terminals and force them to work in three-month stints far away from home. In May, CN climbed down, offering for such “mobile” roles to be made voluntary — leaving the gate open to making such work the standard for new hires.

An analogous distance-based offer by CPKC would reduce the hours eligible for pay when a worker is off-shift away from home, to account for new government rules on rest time which kicked in last year.

Both CN and CPKC have offered shift caps at 12 hours, which is higher than the current 10 (CN says that the increased work hours is the trade-off for more rest time, as is now mandated by federal regulation).

All in all, the proposed collective agreement was either a downgrade or a necessary change — depending on who you ask. The corporate side no doubt has been interested in managing labour costs despite both CN and CPKC having hit record-high stock prices in March. The union, meanwhile, has seen the proposed work terms as even less predictable than before, but it hasn’t made any counteroffers and it refused company offers to enter binding arbitration.

A last consideration is the conduct of the parties. The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents both CN and CPKC employees, only planned to have the latter strike. In response, both employers planned to lock out their workers on Aug. 22, forcing a nationwide supply chain catastrophe when they followed through. The federal labour board opened the door to this, by the way, having ruled earlier in August that a total work stoppage would not pose a threat to public health and safety.

You can squarely put me on the side of the workers on this one. Safety is a critical concern and the whole “mobile workforce” arrangement CN hopes to institute would be unacceptable to any reasonable party. “Go work for the other guy” isn’t a good answer, since the other guy appears to be coordinating worker lockouts with the competition.

So it stings that the Liberal-NDP government for once decided to promptly get involved. When freeman-on-the-land Indigenous protesters and their radical allies blocked much of the CN rail network in February 2020 in a childish revolt against property rights, costing the economy some $425 million, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for “peaceful honest dialogue.” His willingness to listen to hostile actors back then is an insult to good-faith workers who didn’t want to be corralled into binding arbitration and with that, a possible bad deal.

Thursday’s one day of total shutdown was worse, costing a colossal $1 billion in losses, on top of everything that was lost as operations wound down in earlier weeks. But at least the labour board deemed the closure acceptable, and it was not a hostage-taking to remedy colonial grievances.

It’s also a complete farce that Liberals and their NDP comrades proudly support labour when office identity politics are in play, and sympathetically hear out protesters when they camp on the tracks — only to suddenly invoke the economy in a flurry when train conductors make their case, as if safety concerns about driving a 100-tonne train across the country have been aired to no avail for months.

Indeed, the Liberals and NDP could have long averted this iceberg if they wanted to. Rest time, shift caps and cross-country transfers can all be dealt with in Transport Canada regulations. But that would have taken time, and any pro-labour change was unlikely to satisfy the corporate side. The Liberals want to court workers, but not at the expense of alienating the bosses on Bay Street, and the NDP, Jagmeet Singh’s toothless posturing aside, are happy to back them up.

In any event, the rail dispute continues Friday. The trains are rolling as of morning, but the Teamsters have told CN that its workers will strike on Monday, Aug. 26. Whether the labour board will mandate binding arbitration remains to be seen, but even that is in question — the Teamsters (CPKC side) are challenging the labour minister’s referral.

A good deal isn’t impossible, but it’s not a guarantee — especially now that the Liberals and the NDP have decided that trains, for once, at the very last minute, need to run on time.

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