Union Members Reject York's Offer in Forced Ratification Vote

All three units of striking York employees soundly rejected York’s offer in voting over the past two days.  Here is the Star’s early story.
The results of the vote were as follows: Unit 1 (teaching assistants) 62% opposed, Unit 2 (contract faculty) 59% opposed, and Unit 3 (graduate assistants) 70% opposed.   Only 69% of eligible voters bothered to show up–who knows what the other 31% were doing Monday and Tuesday. Turns out the union executive had a pretty good sense of the mood of the workers–these results are what they predicted.  What happens now is anyone’s guess.  The employer has said it has nothing left to offer, and the union has said that the employer has been stalling in bargaining for months and has hardly moved at all since bargaining began last summer. Full-time faculty members have been bickering with their union (YUFA) and among themselves, with a minority last week issuing a signed petition urging the strikers to return to work.  The Deans of the faculties too sought to influence the strikers to vote for the offer, emphasizing the “economic crisis”. Apparently, none of these efforts to sway the workers away from the opinions of the union leadership worked.  Indeed, in my experience with these issues (I practiced labour law for years before becoming an academic), these efforts to pressure the strikers, while no doubt intended to help end the dispute, may very well have had the opposite effect that was intended.
The politics at Queens Park have begun.  John Tory wants back to work legislation.  Premier McGuinty said he would wait to see the vote outcome before commenting, but is disinclined to legislate an end to the strike.  So we will have to watch over the next few days to see if the government moves.  In the meantime, the union has offered to resume bargaining any time.  I’m new to university bargaining, but one thing that has struck me as a somewhat knowledgeable observer in this round of negotiations is the extent to which bargaining has been taking place in the media, rather than behind closed doors. Collective bargaining, in my experience, rarely works very well when public relations spin becomes a dominant theme, when communications people are as busy as the bargaining teams.  Too much time is spent thinking about how a proposal will “sell” to the public (and students here), and not enough time spent on problem-solving.  But, of course, I have not been in the bargaining room, so I am only speaking as an outside observer.
Finally, I mentioned earlier that if the government does pass back to work legislation, it will send the dispute to something called “interest arbitration”.  The principal legal test in interest arbitration is often called “the replication test”.  The idea is that the arbitrator tries to estimate what would have been the outcome had the parties been permitted to continue the strike.  When the membership and the union bargaining committee have strongly rejected the employer’s last offer, that is pretty strong evidence that the employer would have been required to give something more to end the strike.  On the other hand, since the union’s bargaining committee thought there was a reasonable offer on the table, the rejected offer is also evidence of what the parties likely would have agreed to if a work stoppage had been permitted.   If you’re interested, look how arbitrator Burkett deals with the ‘replication test’ in the recent TTC interest arbitration.  In that case, just under half of the union’s bargaining committee rejected the employer’s offer, and when the offer was put to the membership, they voted it down by a margin similar to the York results announced last night.
To my students, hopefully I’ll see you soon.