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CUPE's case against concessions

Opinion: It’s our responsibility to lead the way for good jobs not just for our members, but for every Canadian who works for a living

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As a labour leader and occasional social media user, I am pretty used to hearing how, because we now have weekends and minimum wage standards and health and safety laws, the work of unions in Canada is complete. The reality is otherwise.

In Ontario, Doug Ford just became the first premier in memory to actually reverse a scheduled wage increase that would have benefited hundreds of thousands of low-wage earners. In Alberta, Jason Kenney is talking about cutting the minimum wage for young people and service workers. And for middle-income earners, wages are barely keeping pace with inflation.

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Meanwhile, the basics of life are getting more unaffordable for many Canadians. Household debt is at 170 per cent of income. According to a recent Ipsos poll, nearly half the population is $200 from financial collapse at the end of each month.

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Wage stagnation, skyrocketing costs of living and precarious jobs: In 2019, this is the fight that labour unions are engaged in.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) is Canada’s largest union, with 680,000 members working nationwide everywhere from health care to education, airlines to social services, universities to municipalities. Our members are on the front line of public services in every community, big or small — and as a result, their contracts set the bar.

We feel it’s our responsibility to lead the way for good jobs not just for our members, but for every Canadian who works for a living.

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That is one of the cornerstones of CUPE’s national bargaining policy, which sets out how our local unions engage in bargaining with their employers. The policy emphasizes a few things. Foremost among them is that we don’t accept concessions on previously earned contract provisions at the bargaining table. Full stop. And we won’t sell out future generations of workers by agreeing to “two-tier” proposals — things we won’t accept for ourselves, but which we are being asked to force on future hires.

One might ask why we are drawing this line and asking our local unions to do the same. The answer is pretty simple. Because, for the hundreds of thousands of workers whose livelihood is either directly or indirectly tied to the contracts we negotiate, it’s the right thing to do.

Consider, for example, the case of CUPE 2424, which represents more than 850 administrative, technical, library, counselling, and nursing staff at Carleton University.

A little over a year ago, the Carleton board of governors were trying to get CUPE 2424 to strip any mention of pension bargaining rights from their collective agreement. It would have made the plan less reliable and given members less control. But our members were not willing to gamble their pensions after already earning the right to a dignified, secure retirement. So, in response, they took to the picket lines for four weeks in the middle of a blistering cold Ottawa winter. They called in community allies. And they sharpened their pencils, did their homework, and they wound up uncovering some shocking revelations about the university’s bad math and previous bad practices.

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In the end, not only did the university back down from trying to gut their pension language. And not only did CUPE 2424 prevent the erosion of pension rights across their sector. CUPE 2424 left negotiations with some of the strongest pension language in their sector across Canada.

That’s just one example. But if we look at other recent shows of perseverance by CUPE members at the Vancouver Art Gallery, or at the City of Weyburn, or at the Journal de Quebec newspaper, or at dozens of other workplaces in Canada, we see a similar story. It’s a story of working people defending what they’ve earned and refusing to take one step forward only to take two steps back.

Unions drive wage growth for low- and middle-income Canadians. And we don’t do it by laying down and accepting the erosion of our wages and working conditions, and the security of our jobs and our retirement.

In every community across Canada, we are protecting what generations of working people have earned, like good pensions and decent wages. At the same time, as we lead the way on issues like pay equity, we’re also paving the way to a fairer and more equitable future for everyone.

Mark Hancock is the National President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

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