The Summer of Discontent

With the city workers’ strike just 2 days old, the LCBO workers appear ready to drop their smocks and join the picket line tonight.  It certainly has been an interesting year in Toronto for those of us who teach labour law.
I was asked yesterday by a National Post reporter what I thought would happen next. Here is the Post piece. I said one never knows for sure what is going on behind close doors, so it is hard to predict.  But I did say that the anger of the public in this case is palpable, and I think much sooner than normal.  If the liquor workers go off tonight, then tempers will really start to boil.  All of this will likely result in considerable pressure on McGuinty to intervene with back to work legislation, like we saw recently in the York strike.
The public’s apparent disapproval of this strike will empower the Liberals to move in this direction after giving the parties some time to begin making some movement.  If McGuinty begins to consider legislation, watch for him to follow the process he used in the York dispute, where he sent in Mediator Reg Pearson to ‘bang heads’.  In fact, very little head-banging occurred.  After a short meeting with the parties, Pearson declared that the parties were deadlocked at an impasse.  This declaration was then used by McGuinty as the basis for passing back to work legislation.   This process appears to be based McGuinty’s response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s statement in the B.C. Health Services decision that government intervention in collective bargaining should only occur “on an exceptional and typically temporary basis, in situations, for example, involving essential services, vital state administration, clear deadlocks and national crisis.”  See my earlier post on this issue relating to the York strike.  So watch for McGuinty trying to build his case that the parties are in “clear deadlock” and/or there is risk to public safety resulting from accumulating garbage.