Mr. Speaker, I am sure a couple of people are waiting to hear exactly what I am going to say on this. I see the grins starting already.
I will say at the start that I personally have a problem with the concept of replacement workers. I have said this publicly before.
However, rather than look at that, I want to look at the bigger problem. Replacement workers are a problem created inside a bigger problem. What is the bigger problem? The bigger problem is that in collective bargaining we end up in a situation where people are out of work when they are on strike.
If people are on strike, collective bargaining has failed. I have had people say that if I am against strikes I am against collective bargaining. Strikes are not part of collective bargaining. Strikes are the result of the failure of collective bargaining.
The Bloc member who brought the bill forward today said in her speech that Quebec has made great improvements by bringing in legislation to ban replacement workers. However, the average strike time is 27 days; that is 27 days that workers are without their wages.
I know a lot of people working at regular jobs who sometimes find themselves, particularly in the high cost years of starting out with their family, dealing with a mortgage, a car loan, the costs associated with young children and many other costs, being as little as a paycheque away from bankruptcy. If they lose one paycheque they start missing payments. In 27 days they are missing more than a paycheque. Yes, it is a problem for them if the company hires someone to replace them on the job but the bigger problem is that they are losing 27 days of wages which they cannot afford to lose.
In terms of replacement workers, two particular points are important. There are a lot of jobs that theoretically this would be addressed to if we were to put this in where replacement workers cannot be used because of the high technological nature of the job. It is not possible to go out and get people to come in for the short term and take over those jobs. There are situations where it can and is done, but there are a whole lot of jobs where it simply cannot be done.
The other side of that is that we have to look at the trade-off in terms of replacement workers. What is the other side of replacement workers? In terms of replacement workers it is a situation where a company hires someone to replace the striking worker.
I had an interesting situation in my own riding where a union newspaper went on strike for a long time. Replacement workers were not used but employees were on strike for a long time. Basically the employer was not even talking with the strikers.
At some point, because of the problem, as I have said, where people needed an income, these union workers started their own paper. They now have an employee operated paper where the very people who were on strike, and technically are still to this day on strike, and it has been years, now operate what would be a competing paper if in fact the original paper even ran. The original paper shut down and, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Although technically it is still there on the books and they are still legally on strike, the workers have gone to work. That is the other side of replacement workers. They replaced the employer.
If we want to be truly realistic and fair, and I say this totally theoretically, and ban the ability of a company to hire replacement workers, although I do not endorse having replacement workers go in, we must also give those striking workers the ability to replace the company. It seems far-fetched but it is a direct correlation.
We can look at the other things that happen in terms of strikes. I have already mentioned the loss of wages. There is the loss of business income for the company which, in some cases, results in the company ceasing its operation. The workers would no longer on strike, they would simply be unemployed. There is harm to third parties.
In the early days of strikes, in a less complicated world when trade unions first came into the country in the 1800s, it was an economic tug of war between the employer and the employee. It was a question of who could do without the money longest; the employees for wages or the company for its revenues. There was certainly some collateral damage, particularly if it were a company town, but generally speaking it was related directly to those workers in that particular factory or business, or whatever it happened to be.
However, in this global economy, for example, when a relatively small group of people go on strike at the port of Vancouver, prairie grain farmers thousands of miles away could lose their farms if that strike goes on long enough.
When air traffic controllers, who are a relative handful of people in the grand scheme of things, go on strike the transportation of goods and people ceases. Therefore there is incredible third party damage to people who are not even a party to the negotiations.
I accept the sincerity of the member who brought the bill forward and her genuine concern about the people who are impacted by strikes but I think we need look at a bigger picture.
Strikes and lockouts have been the dispute settlement mechanism that has been used since trade unionism and collective bargaining started in this country, as I say, back in the 1800s.
A lot of things have changed. In those days if people wanted to go on strike or be in charge of a strike they had to be strong. They had to defend themselves against goons hired by the company who came out with clubs and beat people into submission. Those things have changed. The education of the union leaders has changed.
Everything about how it is done has changed; the adding in of mediators, conciliators and these types of things. However we have never changed the most fundamental aspect of disputes and that is the dispute settlement mechanism.
We need to look at alternatives. Like everything else, we do not wait until we have a perfect solution to try to make a change.
I and my party very much favour the concept of going to a mechanism, for example, like final offer arbitration. I talked to the labour critic for the NDP who said that yes, it is good in certain circumstances but that it does not work in all circumstances. Nothing does.
The member from the Bloc said that we need to have civilized bargaining, that we need to get people talking and working together. I absolutely agree. The fundamental concept behind final offer arbitration is that we ultimately have each side take a final position. We can set out all kinds of parameters that must be followed in terms of the arbitrator who makes the final decision. We can lay it out in fine detail in terms of looking at corporate share profit, the economy and comparative jobs in other industries. All kinds of things can be put into the mechanism before it is even set up.
However, ultimately each side knows if they are being unrealistic. Let us say on wages that a $2 raise is what would be reasonable if all the factors were weighed. The union says that it wants $3 and the company says that because times are tough it wants a $1 cut. That is unreasonable if the realistic benchmark is $2.The workers will get $1 more and the company knows that.
Consequently, the company can determine just as easily as the union can what the reasonable benchmark is. It may try to cut it but it will try to come close enough to it that the union cannot come in above it, win and have its demands prevail. What often happens in these cases is that the two end up so close together they often settle.
This is something I feel very strong about. I could go on for a long time but I see my time is up. I appreciate the intent the hon. member had in bringing the bill forward. I sympathize with the situation but I think that if we start putting band-aids on labour problems we will divert ourselves from focusing on the real problem that we need to come up with a way where workers do not lose any money, never mind 27 days on average.