Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Get back to the bargaining table, both of you

By G.D. Maxwell Samuel Gompers was a bear of a man. He was big and burly, with hands the size of hams, piercing dark eyes and a moustache that all but covered the lower half of his face.

By G.D. Maxwell

Samuel Gompers was a bear of a man. He was big and burly, with hands the size of hams, piercing dark eyes and a moustache that all but covered the lower half of his face. If youÕd ever seen Sam Gompers climb onto a bus and head for the seat next to you, your first impulse might well have been to get off at the next stop and wait for another bus.

A cigar maker by trade, Sam was elected the very first president of the American Federation of Labor in 1886. He spent the next 38 years of his life creating untold grief for the heartless robber barons of American business. Among his other crimes against free enterprise, he made them begin to pay living wages. He made them close a few sweatshops. He made them give workers some time off so they could have a life. He made them clean up workplaces so they werenÕt the death traps they had historically been. He made them share the wealth and thereby contribute to the ascension of the middle class, who, as it happened, were the single biggest natural market for the widgets being made by the people who didnÕt want to pay their employees enough to buy them.

In a particularly heated negotiating session with a group of business leaders fed up with his demands, the question was put to him. ÒMr. Gompers, just what exactly is it you want?Ó

His one word response set the tone for all future labour negotiations, at least until the last 10 or 15 years when a generation of idiotic labour leaders began to sit across the table from a generation of incredibly greedy executives and see which side could lead the race to the bottom.

ÒMore,Ó he said. ÒWe want more.Ó

More wages, more benefits, more safety, more compassion, more vacation, more of everything that made life better for working men, women and children.

More has been the dream of North Americans since Europeans first set foot on the continent and started conniving to beat the savage natives out of whatever spurious claims they had to the riches of the land by having peacefully occupied it for mere centuries. More is all most of us have ever known. More people, more cars, more houses, more toys, more money, more flavours of latte. The growth curve of mankind has trended unendingly upward since fire was harnessed, rudimentary agriculture mastered and weapons improved. It seems to be twisted into our genetic code somewhere.

Along the way, during one of those too brief and too infrequent periods of enlightenment, those times when isolated pockets of mankind begin to live up to both the potential and promise of evolution, some western cultures promulgated rules of engagement to govern the internecine warfare of labour relations. Key among those were the right of workers to organize collectively, form a union and negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment.

The touchstone of collective bargaining is the duty, placed equally on unions and employers, to bargain in good faith.

In the case of the RMOW and the municipal water workers Ñ members of CUPE 2010 Ñ that ainÕt happening. Collective bargaining and good faith have been replaced by petulance and stonewalling. Shame on you both. ItÕs time to grow up boys and girls.

This isnÕt rocket science. YouÕre not reinventing the world, discovering a cure for cancer or trying to come up with a hit rock song. For chrissakes, this is labour relations 101. ItÕs been done before; itÕll be done again. ItÕll be done a lot in the run-up to the Olympics. Get on with it!

IÕd like to smack both sides on the nose with a rolled up Pique. Since I have to start somewhere, I might as well start at the source of the problem.

IÕd like to smack the mayor, our municipal administrator, the muniÕs manager of inhuman resources and the heavy-handed manager of the water workers for somehow mistaking the Resort Municipality of Whistler for Wal-Mart. We only elected one of you Ñ the one we expect to demonstrate leadership and set the moral tone for the others Ñ but make no mistake, the rest of you hold your jobs to serve the needs of this community. ThatÕs SERVE the community. Power-tripping, empire creating, finagling cushy contracts for yourself, paying yourselves Whistler premiums and generally treating municipal employees like lower life forms does not fall under that definition.

HereÕs a seminal truism about labour relations. Any employer who gets unionized deserves it. Happy employees donÕt form unions. The act of becoming certified is so onerous, so perilous, so fraught with personal grief, it doesnÕt happen unless thereÕs something really rotten in the employer-employee relation. And that begins with how employers treat employees.

While the newspaperÕs still tightly rolled, IÕd like to smack the collective members of CUPE 2010. I stand in solidarity with you but youÕre pissing me off. Which ever one of you first termed your key money demand as a Whistler allowance or premium insulted each and every one of us who have chosen to live here. You want more money. Bravo, thatÕs what contract negotiations are all about. And thatÕs how it should have been presented, not as a Whistler premium that made us all look like we lived in fairyland in the eyes of the rest of the country.

You get another smack for that little demonstration outside council a couple of weeks ago. Guys, that was so 19 th century. I know you were trying to demonstrate broad labour support for your cause. I know you were presenting the spectre of larger labour unrest targeted at the Olympics. But no one in town, no one you need to support your side in this bunfight was impressed. Call us stupid, but we like to think weÕre marginally more enlightened than that.

So letÕs put down the paper and get back to the bargaining table. The Muni put an offer on the table on February 16 th . The union rejected it. It didnÕt address their issues of affordability, it included benefit rollbacks and it didnÕt offer any protection for whistle blowers. And as an aside, that last issue is going to make a very interesting feature story one of these days. I think after Walkerton, youÕll find a lot of support for protecting whistle blowers when it comes to issues like the quality of our drinking water. Think about it.

Making an offer, rejecting an offer, that, boys and girls, is the very essence of collective bargaining. Having an offer rejected doesnÕt suspend the duty to bargain in good faith; neither does rejecting an offer. ItÕs been nearly three months, more than enough time to lick your collective wounds and get back to the bargaining table.

Do the right thingÉ both of you. Now.