The latest teacher's strike in BC demonstrates a major disconnect in our society that is felt across the country. The government has allowed the strike to go ahead instead of sitting over the weekend and legislating the teachers back to work. This is a calculated move in order to win public support and to allow the inevitable 'anti-union' opinion to coalesce against the teachers' cause. We are all familiar with both sides of the argument and this story has been on repeat as long as I've been alive. What I'm interested in, is not so much who is wrong or who is right but in going beyond the arguments as they have been and as they likely will be, for years. We need to look at why it is that this same process and state of perpetual feud continues to see results that satisfies no one.
Unions developed out of necessity. They were formed to protect vulnerable workers from unscrupulous employers in an age when very little was expected from employers. Workplace conditions and compensation levels were poor. Unions led the way in creating satisfactory workplaces and the government followed suit by legislating and regulating employers to ensure fairness. Unions served a purpose and motivated governments to make important changes. Most significantly, they motivated the private sector to offer employees more benefits in order to discourage unionization.
Unions function on purely socialistic logic. They demand out of their employees completely equal input (which is simply not possible given human nature) and, in turn, offer equality of compensation (based on seniority, of course). The problem is that these unions operate within a capitalistic reality. In the rest of the economy, individuals are rewarded for their different levels of input. Employers have the freedom to motivate employees through purely financial rewards such as wage increases, bonuses, etc., as well as through benefits, workplace amenities and other advantages. Individuals then have the opportunity to pursue careers that suit their own needs and seek out a relationship of their preference with an employer. Of course this is the system in principle and, indeed, reality isn't so simplistic. The fact remains, however, that a capitalist system's ultimate intention, and result, is to create fluidity and choice in the labour market and the power of the individual to make decisions. Unions work against nearly all of these principles. They co-opt the normal relationship between an employer and employee, allowing for no individual rewards, and create an instant state of confrontation. They negate the power of the individual in preference for the group; socialism defined.
Of course, most of this has been realized and remedied by the private sector. Unions have been on the decline for 40 years now. This decline is the result of the above reasoning and the important factor of private sector pressure to improve compensation in order to discourage unionization. Unions have become largely obsolete in the private sector because government ensures that both the employers' and the employees' needs are being met and that the system operates as our society deems it should. For the most part there is very little labour unrest in the private sector. All of this explains the situation in the private sector but the public sector is a completely different matter.
Unions function as representatives of employees and governments exist to represent the needs of both employees and employers. The public-sector creates a sort of conflict of interest. Here the government goes beyond its role of neutral representative of employer and employed and becomes the employer itself. It's like the defense lawyer being the judge in the same trial. This is part of the reasoning behind minimal government-run enterprise. This, along with the idea that a government simply need not offer a service that the demand for is easily met through interactions amongst private citizens. The logic behind a government owning a restaurant would be minimal as individuals are perfectly capable and wanting of opening their own restaurants while the consumer's needs are easily met. With things like health care, education, and the bureaucracy the need for government control and thus public-sector employment is obvious, if not ideal. The awkward relationship between government, as employer and governor, and public sector employees has created a situation of almost universal unionization. Rather than an option, as in the private sector, unions are seen as a necessity in the public sector.
Enter the teachers strike. Same as the teacher's strike before that, and before that, and on and on down the pages of history. Add nurses to that list. And let's not act on our socioeconomic biases...add doctors, police, the bureaucrats. All of these individuals are held hostage to their situation. They need unions to rectify the immense power that the government has over them as their employer and representative in society. They are cut off from the normal operating of a capitalist system; they don't get rewarded or benefit from their own individual effort. The government is encouraged to view them as a collective, rather than individuals, and the unions are a powerful collective. The lines of power distribution are blurred (the government as legislator, executor, and employer is a daunting beast of disproportion) and the unions are seen as a beast of their own. Public opinion, inevitably, gets swept up in the relationship of perpetual conflict and people take sides. Often the debates get reduced to a team-sport. It becomes so natural.
Of key importance is the nature of the public's involvement in these public-sector disputes. In the private sector, individual relationships to employers and employees is dependent on their own individual action; concern with a private-sector labour disupute is largely relegated to whether or not they use the service affected. Of course, if worker's are not being treated fairly we hope that our government takes action. In the public sector our stake is more intimate. The government is, essentially, an extension of us. We vote in order to see to it that our government represents our individual perspective and we pay the taxes that fund its operation. So, by extension, public-sector employees are employed by us. They are employed by us because we see the need for their jobs to exist outside of the private sector. They are valued, important, and indeed, essential. We have individual stakes in them serving our society. As teachers they educate our kids and ensure that future generations can prosper and progress. As nurses they care for our sick. Both jobs increasingly entail filling in the void left by the unfortunate decline in the family unit.
We elect our governments to make decisions on our behalf. But when they are negotiating compensation and engaging in a relationship as an employer we see a conflict of interest. We become more involved through public opinion and take sides. The yelling match reaches epic proportions and whoever yells loudest wins. Most often it's the government. They won with the paramedics. They'll win it with the teachers. And what was achieved? Teachers feel as though their individual needs and desires are not being heard. The government feels its being vilified for trying serving the interests of the people who elected them. The union feels that the process of collective bargaining is being made a mockery of. Most individuals feel as if a whole lot of time and energy was wasted with no productive result. Everyone has someone to blame, no one looks at themselves as –at leas the partial– cause, and the system goes on perpetuating itself.
The polarization of British Columbia along union and anti-union lines is well known. As soon as the strike began out came the same-old troops lined up to do battle. It was actually an articulate and involved facebook conversation of a friend's, regarding the strike, that inspired me to write this entry. We understand the problems. The current 'solutions' aren't working. Is it not time to try something different? The unique implications involved in having a government operate as an employer requires a unique handling of the relationship. Public-sector employment does not seem to be functioning in a way that is amicable to societies needs. There's a limited scope of change that can be instituted in this regard and it seems clear that the institution that is in most need of reform is the union.
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