This May Day, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) announced that it had reached a tentative agreement with its main federal government employer, Treasury Board. The deal, if ratified by the union’s membership, will provide them with an average wage increase of 12.6 per cent over a four-year span. It will also provide a pensionable lump sum payment of $2,500 for each member, protections against contracting out and what the union called “the strongest remote work protections in the federal public service.” This is a significant, if imperfect, victory for working people in Canada and there are lessons for us to learn from it.
The tentative agreement, if ratified, will end a period of nearly two years PSAC members have spent working without a contract. Their last collective agreement expired in June of 2021. And despite the strenuously promoted and toxic propaganda to be found in business class news media whenever public service workers strike, PSAC members are not exactly “labour aristocrats” raiding the public purse for extortionate contract gains. According to PSAC, 60 per cent of members earn less than $70,000 annually and 24 per cent earn between $40,000 and $60,000. Only 20 per cent of the union’s members earn over $80,000, and an average PSAC member working for the federal government earns an annual wage of just over $67,305, not much above the average Canadian worker’s annual salary of $61,119.24. The contract, if approved by PSAC membership in a ratification vote slated to run from May 24 to June 16, will settle a strike that has been described as one of the largest in Canadian labour history.
“During a period of record-high inflation and soaring corporate profits, workers were told to accept less – but our members came together and fought for better,” said Chris Aylward, PSAC national president. “This agreement delivers important gains for our members that will set the bar for all workers in Canada.”
Some PSAC members were dissatisfied with the proposed contract, including the leadership of the PSAC bargaining unit at the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA), (PSAC-UTE), who held out for improved language before endorsing the contract a few days later. In announcing its support for the tentative agreement on May 4, PSAC-UTE leadership cited improved language on work life balance, an increased shift premium and an improvement in vacation accrual. They noted that the agreement also includes a new five-day leave, including two days with pay, for self-identified Indigenous employees to engage in traditional practices such as hunting, fishing and harvesting.
It would require viewing the agreement through a truly distorted ideological lens to see the real but modest gains won by PSAC members as too rich or dangerous to the economy at large. Unsurprisingly, pundits in the business class press were well supplied with such lenses. They always are, and we are often warned that while when employers rake off profits, that is good for the economy, but when workers take home a little extra in improved wages or conditions, it is economically dangerous and to be viewed with extreme alarm.
Over at the Globe and Mail last December, for example, a scare headline warned about the “emboldening of Canada’s unions,” and the Postmedia chain marked the news of the tentative PSAC contract on May Day with a Howard Levitt column sternly warning that “ Government’s Capitulation on PSAC Strike will cast a long shadow over private sector.” According to Levitt, decent wage settlements for public employees will exacerbate labour shortages and drive inflation.
In April, the Fraser Institute (where the interested reader can often find out what the ruling class is thinking, or, alternatively, what they want us to think) weighed in on the prospect of a PSAC strike and admonished government that it must “…reject unrealistic union demands and better align compensation with the private sector to repair Canada’s finances,” a euphemistic way of prescribing a race to the bottom for Canada’s workers.
Now, no one who is familiar with how class interests can shape perception will be surprised to discover so much hostility toward PSAC workers and their just and modest demands in the mainstream media and right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute. After all, these are bodies that depend on business funding to exist, and regularly reflect and rationalize the class interests of our political and economic masters.
While an anti-union bias is no surprise in the mainstream press and right-wing think tanks, it is notable how much venomous vitriol is devoted to attacking unionized public sector workers, and how often other workers are invited to join the attack.
Why do those who speak for the ruling class save their particular rancor for public sector workers? Several possible explanations occur.
First, public sector unions in Canada have been impressively successful in organizing their workplaces over the past decades. If unionized workers in the private sector and unorganized workers across Canada can be persuaded that our sisters and brothers in public sector unions are lazy slackers out to …wait for it… “hold the public to ransom,” it represents a classic divide and conquer victory for the ultra-rich and powerful who are glad to turn us against each other and splinter our unity. There has been the usual din of such attempts surrounding the PSAC strike, and we should all recognize it for the deafening and toxic clamor it is.
Second, unionized public sector workers in social services, education and health care are more likely to be female and of colour than not, and the attentive reader can hear the drumbeat of racism and misogyny in the background as their unions are attacked. We need to identify the implicit and structural power of these biases, and guard against being swayed by them. Solidarity is key to our victories, and the incessant media attacks on public sector workers are designed to dissolve that solidarity in a toxic flood of prejudice. In the words of the classic rock anthem, “We won’t be fooled again.”
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