Teachers, Public Opinion, and Tough Times Public sector professionals, such as elementary teachers, have doubts about the possibility of job action, given the difficult economic circumstances. Of particular interest is the reaction of the public to assertive demands in negotiations. Do these workers, especially those with decent salaries and benefits, have public support? The following article attempts to shed some light on some of these questions by starting with a brief recap of recent economics. As many progressive economists have explained, economic productivity has been increasing fairly steadily in North America and the advanced capitalist countries since industrialization almost two centuries ago. With that increase, the workers driving the economy have seen a steady increase in their purchasing power, as long as they have had the bargaining power to insist on real wage increases. But since the 1980s and the advent of the ‘neoliberal era,’ productivity has continued to increase while real wages have levelled off. More stuff is being sold, but those sales have been translated into profits instead of increased wages. These profits are deposited in banks and that money in turn has been used as credit, alongside other expansions in speculative money and credit, for the public through car leases,
home mortgages, and credit card debt. From the perspective of capitalists, why should workers be paid more, when they can borrow the money, pay it back with interest, and still sustain the final demand for the increased output? This is a good part of how neoliberalism worked. Statistics Canada recently reported that the rich are getting richer. Between 1980 and 2005, the top earners have raised their incomes by 16% while the bottom fifth of the population have dropped by 20%. In contrast to the postwar era, middle and working class purchasing power has stagnated. Some public opinion polling seems to indicate that, in 2004, half of people felt they were worse off than they were a year ago. And while public opinion typically swings between feeling worse off or the same, people don’t seem to feel as though they're better off. As for many low-wage workers, Jonah Schein of The Stop Community Food Centre relates: “Years of economic growth did little to raise the incomes or living standards of low-wage workers in Ontario as throngs of ‘the working poor’ came to depend on food banks each month. Indeed, the current crisis has underlined this insecurity and demonstrated the problems of economic growth dependent upon growing debt arising from social inequalities. There is a real risk that this recession will pit workers against each other to drive
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David Banerjee
down wages and work conditions for all Ontarians.” BARGAINING IN THE PRESENT The recent economic reversal is not simply a matter of perspective. The Ontario government is seeing a massive reversal from surplus to deficit. There are generally two strategies available to governments in this position. On the one hand, you can try to expand production and consumption by spending directly, for example on building roads, hiring education assistants, increasing welfare payments, etc. Under the right conditions, this might expand the tax base with a short-term deficit. On the other, a government can attempt to boost private sector spending by cutting taxes and freezing wages. The latter strategy is one that current leaders favour as it is consistent with the neoliberal policies they have been adopting, although they can't abandon the first without deepening this crisis. Fortunately for teachers, public sector negotiations most often take place in cycles, with each cycle having a particular pattern. According to Greg Albo, a professor of Political Economy at York, the current public service bargaining cycle has been characterized by contracts of three or four years, with 2-3% raises each year, with