(Image credit: P-SAC).

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Let the strike begin – who will be the first to blink?

Apr 19, 2023 | 5:18 AM

FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVANTS are officially on strike and life in Canada will be different for a while.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada was true to its word after no agreement was reached by 9 o’clock last night. As many as 100,000 non-essential workers will be off the job, affecting everything from income-tax returns to passport applications.

Kamloops is among the communities in which workers will walk the picket lines; here it’s at the Service Canada Centre on Seymour Street. “Invite your coworkers, friends and family to join you on the line,” urges the union.

Collective bargaining is a lot about bluster but it’s also about asking for more than you expect to get, and offering less than you expect to give. The whole thing hinges on trade-offs — “we’ll drop this demand if you give us this one; we’ll offer a little more here if you’ll take a little less there.”

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At some point, the Treasury Board will have to give more in wages, to get closer to the union’s demand of 4.5 per cent over each of three years, maybe in exchange for holding the line on something else. And the union will have to drop some of its demands, maybe quite a few of them.

PSAC certainly has a lot of creative proposals. For example, it wants employees, not the employer, to decided whether the employee works from home or at the office.

It also wants indigenous employees to get up to five days of paid leave to engage in hunting, fishing and harvesting — dubbed traditional practices.

Any worker whose work day goes beyond 4 p.m. should get a shift premium, PSAC insists.

Back to work legislation will have to be carefully weighed against interference with the bargaining process.

In the meantime. the union will continue to demand “fair wages and conditions,” and the government will continue to insist its offer is exactly that.

Question is, how long will it take to meet in the middle?

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.