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July
18 , 2001
Essential
Services, Health Strikes, Education
and the New Era
When
Deputy Premier and Minister of Education, Christy Clark,
is interviewed about essential
services in education, she says that it is a value
statement to say that education is essential. If that
is all there was to it, it would be a fair statement. Unfortunately,
the Campbell government is playing games with words. In
labour relations, essential services does not mean that
strikes cannot occur. Under the Labour
Code, essential services simply means that "the
minister may direct the board to designate as essential
services those facilities, productions and services that
the board considers necessary or essential to prevent immediate
and serious danger to the health, safety or welfare of the
residents of British Columbia." The designation occurs
by the parties to the dispute working with a mediator to
reach agreement on what is essential, and the board ruling
with the advice of the mediator regardless of whether there
is or is not agreement. One can only presume that the word
"education" will be added to the words "health,
safety or welfare", but that may be too much of a presumption.
After all, the Deputy Premier has said that post secondary
education will not be captured by their expanded "definition"
of "essential services". I put definition in quotes
since you can see that "essential services" are
not defined, but rather there is a process for the parties
arguing staffing levels before the Labour Relations Board.
All
this gets us to the strike announced by the Health
Sciences Association for Monday, July 23rd. The Campbell
government legislated the nurses and health professionals
back to work rather than ask the employer to request a change
in the level of essential service staffing. In other words,
by its actions, the Campbell government said that essential
services wasn't working and government wanted a complete
prohibition on striking. In doing so, the government did
not provide an alternative dispute resolution mechanism.
As
we witness the failure of the essential service process
in health care, or at least witness the government's loss
of faith in the process, the Minister of Education continues
to give interviews in which she compares essential services
for nurses with essential services for teachers. Before
they make more of a mess of things, they ought to recognize
that by their own actions they have said that they really
want something much stronger than a process for designating
essential services. Of course, that might mean going back
to the days of arbitration that the employer seemed to reject.
June
21, 2001
Essential
Services - What's in store for education?
In the
debate on Bill 2, ordering a "cooling off" period,
Opposition Leader Joy MacPhail said:
"Here we
are today because the government claims that the health care
system is in crisis and is about to collapse. Well, not one
single employer - not one single employer - has made an application
to the Labour Relations Board to have a determination made
on greater essential services. So who is this government taking
its advice from? How is it that the Premier can make a determination
today that the system is in crisis when no one has even taken
the opportunity to use the laws of the land that are available
to them today. I await the rising up of the Minister of Labour,
who is responsible for the Labour Relations Board, to explain
how that crisis has occurred and how it is that he has abdicated
his responsibility to advise employers of what's available
at the Labour Relations Board."
"I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why the Minister of
Labour hasn't had to do that, and I'll tell you why the Premier
is misleading the public on there being a crisis in the health
care system. It's because each and every time an employer
has suggested to a health care professional that more work
is needed, that health care professional and her union resolves
the matter at the worksite, and work continues. Never once
has a matter remained unresolved. And somehow that forms a
crisis today? I await the Minister of Labour rising to respond
to that, hon. Speaker."
The
new government's New Era platform promised to make
education an essential service. Many people have seen
the television
ads that the B.C.
Teachers Federation is running in response to those ads.
Throughout the election campaign the B.C. Liberals made it
clear they were not talking about removing the right to strike,
but rather using the provisions
of the labour code for the designation of essential services.
Having now seen that the government and health employers chose
legislation in preference to appearing before the Board, how
can we interpret the promise to make education an essential
service?
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