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As post offices across the country remain shuttered, a McGill sociologist and labour expert says federal back-to-work orders in recent labour disputes have encouraged Canada Post to let the strike drag on.

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Barry Eidlin, who studies the history of labour movements, told The Gazette that those interventions have set an expectation that the minister would intervene again, weakening Canada Post’s incentive to bargain with the union.

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Canadian postal workers walked off the job Nov. 15 following more than a year of fruitless negotiations.

The strike came just three days after federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon ordered binding arbitration in dockworker disputes across the country, sending locked-out workers back to work at the ports of Montreal, Quebec and Vancouver and overriding the typical negotiation process. That intervention followed MacKinnon’s August decision to order binding arbitration in rail disputes, less than a day after CN and CPKC locked out their employees.

“I’m quite confident that had we not seen federal intervention in the rail, if we’d not seen federal intervention in the ports, that the current strike would be over by now or at least would not have dragged on as long as it has,” Eidlin said.

Ordering workers back undermines their constitutionally protected right to strike, the professor said. Without the threat of a strike, he said employers would have no incentive to bargain, preferring not to meet demands, which tend to come with a price tag.

“In order to get (employers) to reach an agreement, they need to be pushed,” Eidlin said. “You need a kind of pressure cooker environment. It’s ultimately the strike threat that creates that.”

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The possibility of government intervention should workers strike or be locked out creates an “escape hatch” for employers to circumvent the regular negotiation process in favour of binding arbitration, Eidlin said.

“If (employers) know that if things drag on long enough and there’s enough of a crisis and they create enough chaos that there’s going to be government intervention, that removes any incentive they have to reach agreement at the bargaining table,” he said.

Eidlin accused MacKinnon of creating a “playbook for employers to basically engineer their own back-to-work orders.”

“The playbook goes: lock out your workers, use the economic chaos created by your own lockout … to call on the government to intervene and provoke government intervention.”

“Canada Post was trying to do that,” he said, when the Crown corporation issued a lockout notice Nov. 12, following the union’s strike notice.

Ultimately, it was the union that called the strike.

“It’s not like we’re going to intervene every time,” Matthieu Perrotin, a spokesperson for MacKinnon, told The Gazette.

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He gave the Air Canada dispute as an example of one that reached a resolution with support from government mediators but without intervention.

MacKinnon “profoundly believes in collective negotiations,” he said, pointing to the minister’s assertion that he will stay out of the Canada Post dispute.

But union negotiator Jim Gallant, who represents the Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ urban bargaining unit, said he wasn’t so sure MacKinnon will refrain from intervening.

“I don’t take the minister’s words as forever. Every time he says I’m not going to order you back to work, it’s today,” he said.

MacKinnon has imposed binding arbitration three times over the course of Canada Post negotiations: in the run-up to a planned WestJet mechanics’ strike in June and following the rail and dockworker lockouts.

“He’s done it so often that everybody thinks he’s going to do it again,” Gallant told The Gazette.

He agreed with Eidlin that Canada Post is prone to dragging its heels at the negotiating table to force binding arbitration.

“That’s their modus operandi,” he said.

Postal workers’ most recent contract was the result of binding arbitration, after Parliament passed a back-to-work bill in 2018.

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Binding arbitration typically spells bad news for the union, Gallant said. Arbitrators “move very carefully and (workers) are not likely to make big gains,” he said.

A Canada Post spokesperson called Eidlin’s argument “an external observation with no basis in fact.”

“We have not wanted government intervention,” Jon Hamilton told The Gazette. “We’ve put forward fair and reasonable offers because we want to get negotiated agreements.”

“Arbitration is not a process where you’re going to bring about the type of transformational change that the post office sorely needs.”

Canada Post is looking to increase the number of permanent part-time employees, which Hamilton said was necessary to meet changed delivery demands.

Gallant agreed that an arbitrator probably wouldn’t let Canada Post make the major changes it’s looking for.

“That may be one of the reasons why the minister hasn’t ordered back-to-work legislation until now,” he said.

On Tuesday, the Retail Council of Canada renewed its demand for federal intervention in the dispute, saying the strike has had a negative effect on businesses and customers.

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Calls for government intervention are the “default, knee-jerk response” in a country where back-to-work orders are normalized, Eidlin said.

The reliance on government intervention to end strikes and lockouts is “distinctively Canadian,” he said.

“Canada really stands out among other comparable countries in both federal and provincial governments’ frequent resort to back-to-work orders or legislation.”

Governments frame intervention as an extraordinary measure only taken in extreme situations, Eidlin said.

“Politicians will all sing the praises of collective bargaining,” he said, “except for this once. Because this once the costs are too high, the strike is too disruptive.”

But “just this once becomes every time,” the professor argued, resulting in what he called a “corrupted collective bargaining process.”

Perrotin disputed that assertion.

“Just because the government intervened (in the dockworker and rail disputes) doesn’t mean the negotiation process no longer exists,” he said.

Federal mediation was put on pause last week with reports that Canada Post and the union were too far apart to reach agreement.

jawilson@postmedia.com

x.com/jackdlwilson

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