Tentative deal offers a PR win for PSAC, but unlikely to spark strikes by copycats: experts

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Labor relations professor Jason Foster noted something telling in a graph PSAC released Monday, showing the scale of the salary offer it got after 12 days of strike action.

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Although described elsewhere in the release, the union chose not to label the table with the individual, proposed percentage increases for each year of its tentative new agreement: 1.5 percent by 2021; 4.75 percent by 2022; three percent plus a salary adjustment for 2023; and 2.25 percent by 2024. Instead, the union took the compound approach to its mathematics. The year 2023 on the bar chart, for example, shows an increase of 10.1%, reaching 12.6% in 2024.

“That’s a spinning effort, I think, which is fine. I mean, that’s what you do, it’s called public relations,” said Foster, an associate professor of human resources and labor relations at Athabasca University.

The chart also compares the tentative deal wage proposal to the Treasury Board’s compensation offer before a strike mandate was activated. He puts both figures next to a third data set, which he says represents deals struck by other negotiating agents in the federal public service during the same time period. The chart shows that these were also lower than what PSAC brought in for its more than 120,000 striking members.

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“I feel like they want to maximize the sense of what they’ve accomplished and what they’ve achieved,” Foster said.

“In part, a message to their own members to say, ‘Look, your sacrifice over the last few weeks was worth it, right? Let’s see what we got because you were willing to take that step.

“But I also think it’s trying to send a general message that PSAC is strong, our members are united, and when workers are united, they can win.”

For Robert Hickey, director of Queen’s University industrial relations programme, the PSAC’s Monday presentation of the message that “the strike improves the final wage offer” seemed more like a guarantee of ratification of the tentative agreement by members. of the PSAC than any calls for work stoppages elsewhere.

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“The incidence of strikes has increased, but I think it will be more a function of high inflation than the inspiration of this particular dispute,” Hickey wrote by email.

While he envisions PSAC’s new contract informing the bargaining strategy of other public sector unions, Foster also did not expect to see additional strikes, sparked by the one just concluded, that would not otherwise have occurred.

“The unions take the strike very, very seriously. And they do it very reluctantly. And it requires a lot of work, a lot of energy and a lot of mobilization”.

It is also a decision with a lot at stake, for the relationship between a union and its members. The 1991 PSAC strike ended with return-to-work legislation after three weeks, no movement on a wage freeze that year, and many workers feeling bitter at both the government and their union.

It’s a much different picture in 2023. After less than two weeks of lost wages, the striking workers are now back with a new and improved contract on the table.

“We know that the research really shows that when workers perceive that a strike has been successful, that can stimulate them in terms of…more union activism, more support for the union even for a couple of years,” Foster said.

— With files from Joanne Laucius