Tag: Right to strike

One would like to believe newly installed Finance Minister Randy Delorey meant it. Last week he told union leaders representing teachers, health care workers, paramedics and assorted clusters of government employees he wanted to meet to discuss a “new approach” to collective bargaining. There are more than 300 collective agreements slated for re-negotiation this year, […]

What better time to declare victory and slink off to bind your wounds than just before cocktail hour on the Friday afternoon before school March break and the eve of another Sunday nor’easter? (It’s no coincidence two of the top four Google News search terms modifying “Nova Scotia” Saturday morning were “weather and “storm;” “health […]

Really? Last year, the McNeil government passed the Health Authorities Act, ostensibly (and laudably) to streamline the province’s health care system, but also (and shabbily) to game that system. The legislation reduced the number of health districts from 10 to two, and the number of collective bargaining units from 50 to four. But the government’s […]

By this time next week, government-appointed mediator-arbitrator Jim Dorsey is expected to hand down his final report into which health care worker should be represented by which health care union. His choices seem limited. The Health Authorities Act — which the McNeil government introduced last fall as part of its promise to merge nine district […]

On Thursday, in the warm afterglow of a Throne speech that zeroed in on “unsustainable [public sector] wage increases” and promised a “hiring slow down and steps to achieve a more sustainable wage pattern,” Health Minister Leo Glavine was clear as glass. Premier Stephen McNeil’s government had had it up to here with recalcitrant health […]

“SOMEONE TO SEE YOU.” Mike Hachey didn’t have time. Not today. He was in the process of sorting through paperwork dregs from last week’s Atlantic Lottery commercial shoot, planning a Canada Games event wrap-up, juggling planned/hoped-for/maybe pitches for future projects and overseeing – from the afar of Halifax – renovations at his company’s Moncton office. […]

So… Faced with a looming shortage of “several thousand” nurses over the next decade as our population both ages and also shrinks (read the Ivany Report; look around you), our new Liberal government responds by… Well, let me count the ways. The government alienates many current nurses by dismissing their concerns about patient safety as […]

Now that the government has legislatively punted the possibility of a paramedics strike into the hands of a pick-one arbitrator — who will have to choose between dueling union and management last-best offers for wages and working conditions over the next three to five years — it’s time to ask ourselves a question. What’s wrong […]

Forget the Byzantine balls-up the attempt to unionize Canada’s junior hockey players became—league-hired private investigators snooping on union staff, falsely (maybe) intimating one was a felon; union (dis)organizers scheduling, then canceling votes—and ask ourselves two simple questions: First, do run-of-the-litter junior hockey players, the ones least likely to lose millions in the next NHL lockout, […]

Last week’s to-the-edge-of-the-ledge, past-the-last-minute contract settlement between Capital Health and its 3,600 health workers raises all sorts of difficult but intriguing questions. The first, and most immediate, of course, is could the disruption—even without an actual strike, the anticipation cancelled 560 elective surgeries and emptied 172 beds—have been avoided? The short answer is probably not. […]