Holy cricket what a week!
Well the NDP, all deities bless them, were able to hold up the passing of that bill to force us back to work! It still hasn’t been passed into law yet! Unfortunately though, they’ve held it off as long as they can and it’s due to be passed tomorrow morning (Thursday January 29th). Needless to say there’s going to be a rally at the legislature to protest!
While they weren’t able to stop the bill though, the NDP were able to get a lot of important stuff on the record as to what’s wrong with it. And not just morally either. They were able to raise the very serious possibility that it may, in fact, be illegal because it may be in violation of a previous ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada on a similar case in BC (British Columbia) a couple of years ago. It all depends on whether the university’s essentially refusing to bargan counts as a deadlock or not. The NDP argued that it’s more like bargaining in bad faith! Anyway, apparently it scared the Premier enough for him to pause the proceedings on Tuesday and this morning while he put a phone-call in to the university to try to get them back to the table, though it may just have been a photo-op to make it look like he’d done all he could. Whatever though, the university still refused to return to bargaining, so the legislation is back on for passage.
We’re not going to take this lying down though! We’re looking at all the options we have within the law for protesting this sht, because a lot of us think it’s disgusting that government is so much on the side of management and not of workers. So we’re not simply going to let this go down uncontested! We will be back to work though as of Monday, and we will have to submit to binding arbitration. And that means that, unless we can really mobilize some pressure to get a labour-friendly mediator/arbitrator, we’ll effectively be being forced to take the university’s offer. Needless to say, we’re really cheesed off about it!
While they weren’t able to stop the bill though, the NDP were able to get a lot of important stuff on the record as to what’s wrong with it. And not just morally either. They were able to raise the very serious possibility that it may, in fact, be illegal because it may be in violation of a previous ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada on a similar case in BC (British Columbia) a couple of years ago. It all depends on whether the university’s essentially refusing to bargan counts as a deadlock or not. The NDP argued that it’s more like bargaining in bad faith! Anyway, apparently it scared the Premier enough for him to pause the proceedings on Tuesday and this morning while he put a phone-call in to the university to try to get them back to the table, though it may just have been a photo-op to make it look like he’d done all he could. Whatever though, the university still refused to return to bargaining, so the legislation is back on for passage.
We’re not going to take this lying down though! We’re looking at all the options we have within the law for protesting this sht, because a lot of us think it’s disgusting that government is so much on the side of management and not of workers. So we’re not simply going to let this go down uncontested! We will be back to work though as of Monday, and we will have to submit to binding arbitration. And that means that, unless we can really mobilize some pressure to get a labour-friendly mediator/arbitrator, we’ll effectively be being forced to take the university’s offer. Needless to say, we’re really cheesed off about it!