I’ve often said that the (Marxist, if I’m not mistaken!) BC teachers union, who are now calling for a general strike, operate as if they are made up of poor, practically enslaved, industrial era trinket makers. So his quote (in my heading) seemed right to me. I would add the word “Marxist”.
Andrew Coyne says in his National Post column (subscription only) that public sector labor union strikes like the BC teachers’ strike are getting a little tired already.
In other news … thousands of public school teachers across British Columbia are out on strike. They are striking in defiance of the law, as both the B.C. Labour Relations Board and the B.C. Supreme Court have ruled. Yet, even in the face of fines of as much as $150,000 per day, the teachers’ union vows to stay out, leaving more than 600,000 students in the lurch.
As I say, what else is new? It’s a big story, and yet it isn’t: Teachers are always out on strike somewhere, illegally or otherwise—if not in B.C., then in Ontario, or Quebec or some other locale. Teachers’ strikes have become as much a part of the school year as prom night. That is, in the public school system that’s true. But you rarely hear about a strike by private school teachers, do you?
If it’s not teachers, it’s health care providers. Or civil servants. Or university professors. Or CBC broadcasters. The common denominator in every case is the public sector. Strikes, once common across the economy, have become disproportionately a public sector phenomenon. Public employees account for 18% of the workforce, but half or more of all days lost to strikes in a typical year.
There’s a simple enough explanation for this: Unions themselves are disproportionately a public sector phenomenon. Today, fewer than one in five private sector workers in Canada belong to a union. Three out of four public employees do.
And why is that? One word: competition. Strikes are rare wherever competition from rival providers makes such interruptions too costly, for management and labour alike. In the private sector, that is increasingly the case; the more competitive the industry, the less the incidence of either unions or strikes. But in the public sector, especially where it enjoys a monopoly or near-monopoly, unions are still a force, and the strike remains the weapon of choice.
[…] The present dispute was triggered when the B.C. government imposed a two-year wage freeze on teachers. That’s unpleasant, no doubt, though people put up with much worse in other lines of work. The difference is that teachers feel entitled to shut down the province’s schools to make their point—even in defiance of the law. The teachers’ leader calls it civil disobedience, and compares the union’s situation with that of the suffragettes.
It’s not that they’re particularly hard done by (at $65,000 per, B.C.‘s teachers are among the highest paid in the federation). It’s just what they do. It’s how they have learned to behave. I doubt it occurs to them that everyone else does not do the same.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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