The federal Tories don’t like labour disputes

The Harper government’s response to postal workers trying to defend employment conditions (including their pension plan) demonstrates how the federal Tories want to handle all labour disputes. Geoffrey Stevens describes this well in a column in The Record, and points out that the way Harper’s caucus dealt with the stalemate in the Canada Post negotiations “had less to do with postal service and the wage and pension issues involved in the dispute than it did with sending a message about its ‘tough-on’ agenda.” See the whole story here. The government’s actions imply that they don’t care about the details of negotiations; it’s all about winning ideological points. For our part, we need to dispute the notion that as unionized public sector workers we are somehow privileged. Our incomes have stayed pretty close to the rate of inflation. Our only “privilege” is that as part of a union we’re in a better position to defend ourselves from erosion of the conditions we’ve worked hard to achieve.