Even those with an objective view of organized labour should see Unifor's tactics as long-term unproductive and bordering on stupid.
Unifor National President Jerry Dias in Regina on Monday, Jan. 20, 2020.
Regina police Chief Evan Bray is correct in his assessment of the Federated Co-op Refinery labour dispute that “both sides are, essentially, holding our city hostage.”
But when it comes to the recent escalations that required the involvement of Bray’s officers and, ultimately, the arrest of 14 Unifor members, including the union’s national president Jerry Dias, it’s not an equal situation. For this, one should fault the union, and Dias specifically.
“Their role is to come here and to cause challenges that are going to hopefully force them to get back to the bargaining table,” Bray, himself a former police union head, told reporters Tuesday in what also seems a reasoned and fair-minded assessment.
“That’s a basic labour tactic, I get it, and all the power to them.”
It’s a tactic, but (at worst) illegal and (at best) ineffective and highly suspect. Even those with an objective view of organized labour should see Unifor’s tactics as unproductive in the long-term and bordering on stupid.
On Tuesday, Dias held his own news conference suggesting — despite ample video evidence to the contrary — that he was treated roughly or unfairly by Regina police, whom he equated to a person in a fur coat behaving like King Kong. It was a quote Bray quickly turned around and aptly applied to Dias himself.
On the list of things to do to get public sympathy, flying in union leaders from out of province to get arrested ranks at the bottom, just slightly ahead of misidentifying some poor guy as a scab in a public-shaming video and then denying your mistake.
Why wouldn’t the union have simply used its video talents to allow its own members to tell their own stories as working people who say they stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars on their pensions over a change Federated Co-op said just two years ago it absolutely wouldn’t make?
Yes, rank and file Unifor members do have compelling stories to tell and legitimate reasons to be frustrated with Federated Co-op.
Workers were locked out over Christmas and during the coldest time of year as management continues to literally fly in out-of-province replacement workers. Union members have good reason to be angry at those who see an opportunity to personally benefit. They even have a right to publicly embarrass them … if they are actually scabbing.
And in the spirit of Bray’s even-handed assessment, Co-op has also behaved badly — although, tactically, Unifor badly miscalculated both the resolve of Co-op management in the face of pressure from members and customers or Co-op’s ability to keep the refinery operational.
However, the bottom line is that nobody is above the law. Responsible union leaders who rightly demand justice when business owners violate occupational health and safety rules simply can’t condone their own deliberate illegal acts on the picket line.
Besides the current use of illegal fences, we have seen Unifor flout the court order limiting the delay of fuel trucks to no more than 10 minutes or less if the driver requests to proceed. Unifor has been fined $100,000 for breaching the court order.
Bizarrely, this court ruling and the arrest of Dias have now become the rallying point not for those who have spent 50 days in the freezing cold line, but for professional union leadership from inside and outside the province. How will this help garner public support?
Arguably worse, NDP Leader Ryan Meili is now choosing to show up on the picket line. That surely delights the Saskatchewan Party, which, no doubt, is salivating at the prospect of pointing out during the campaign that Meili wouldn’t show up for the Rally Against the Carbon Tax a year ago, but did appear at a picket line where union leaders were stopping fuel trucks from getting to rural Saskatchewan.
One gets the desire to stand up for workers and the principle of union solidarity. But Saskatchewan unions and the NDP that fought the Sask. Party government to the Supreme Court on Bills 5 and 6 should know you don’t win if you cross the line into illegality.
Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post.
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