Liberals threaten to bring back interest arbitration legislation

A senior Liberal official has said the government will bring back the interest arbitration legislation that was defeated when the government brought in its Budget bill earlier this year.

theMatthewBlack

“We’ll be taking action and reintroducing the sections of the budget bill that Hudak instructed his party’s members to vote against, even though it was in their election platform."

McGuinty's comment of a year ago that it was unwise to 'finagle' with interest arbitration was, I guess, just stuff you say.

Toronto Star reporter Robert Benzie suggests the Liberals will first "expand... the wage-freeze push from teachers to other public servants in the weeks ahead, before tackling arbitration."

The reports came as Tim Hudak and the PCs announced they would be introducing another bill on interest arbitration. The Ability to Pay Act is basically designed to favour employers in cases of interest arbitration. (Essential service workers, like hospital and LTC workers, are required by law to settle contract disputes by interest arbitration and do not have the legal right to strike.) The Tories had introduced yet another bill in the spring session of the Legislature with the same idea in mind (the Trust in Arbitration Act 2012), but that bill went nowhere.

Apparently, even the PCs think their previous attempt came up short, as their new bill tries to bias the arbitration process in a different way. I guess we are expected to trust trust they know better now.

In the current version, Hudak and Co. say they would have the Minister of Labour appoint the arbitration boards.

This is a tragic/comic contrast with their current criticism of Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). Only hours ago, Mr Hudak tweeted "Local health care shouldn't be run by people appointed by the Cabinet as is the case with the LHINs. We have a better way".

Yet arbitration is going to be credible when a party obviously connected to the employers gets to appoint the arbitrators?

Comments

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada. When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.” Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada. This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog