The perils of pickets and politics

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/08/2023 (738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Another week, another strike.

Just as the Stefanson PC government struck a deal with Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries workers after a strike that shut down Liquor Marts across the province, Manitoba Public Insurance workers took to the picket line. It’s a familiar story: MPI workers feel they’re getting a raw deal on pay, and they’d like workers to get the same wage increase MLAs recently received.

The MPI strike is significant on multiple fronts: first, it’s the first time the public insurer’s workers have gone on strike in MPI’s 52-year history. Further, the inconvenience to Manitobans is far greater.

While the MLL workers’ strike was cause for concern on specific fronts — namely, the risk of alcohol withdrawal among those addicted — Manitobans by and large could get by without the Liquor Marts being open a while. It’s a far different matter when MPI staff go on strike.

Be it road tests, insurance services or licence renewals, there are a host of necessary services Manitobans either won’t have access to or will struggle to access for as long as the strike persists. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of what Manitoba Government Employees Union president Kyle Ross called “the government’s inability to bargain with workers in Manitoba,” in a statement to the Free Press.

Indeed. Between the interminable process of getting a new deal for health-care workers, the just-finished MLL strike and now the MPI strike, the Government of Manitoba seems dogged in its insistence that it hold out and bargain down with public sector workers across the board. The lesson for the government — especially with an election on the horizon — seems to be clear: stop letting it get to this point.

Unfortunately, perhaps for no one more than herself, that lesson seems to be lost on Premier Heather Stefanson.

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In a baffling move, the Manitoba PC caucus released a video Monday in which Stefanson bemoaned the actions of the striking workers, claiming the workers are rejecting “fair raises, because of politics,” as if bargaining between a government and its staff could be anything but political in nature.

But then there is the most galling moment: “Worse,” Stefanson says in the video. “They’re demanding increases double the size of health-care workers. And that’s where I draw the line.”

It’s a remarkable statement. In that sentence, Stefanson tries to say: that the workers’ demands are improper because they aren’t in line with what other workers have received; that what health-care workers received post-COVID is good enough; and that Stefanson is the defender of health-care workers’ dignity after they got a lower raise that she somehow had nothing to do with.

What we see in Stefanson’s response to the strikes is a party too locked in to improve its own fortunes. The PCs have doomed themselves to strike after strike, one stingy negotiation after another, because universal penny-pinching is one of the core tenets of the party. Since the days of former premier Brian Pallister, the PCs have trickled out public largesse, too little and too late, under the stubborn, solid belief that balancing the budget is what matters in the end.

And so, the premier of Manitoba, less than six weeks from an election, casts striking workers as greedy and inconsiderate, oblivious to the notion that this situation could perhaps have been avoided from her own government’s end — at the negotiating table. She and her party could pay a price for that, come Oct. 3, when Manitobans look at their ballot and think about all the things they couldn’t get done because the Progressive Conservatives refused to offer more than the minimum, with anyone.