Should unions go on strike?
July 9th, 2009 | Published in Economics idea
I live in Toronto where a municipal strike has been under way for 18 days. City-run day-cares are closed. Summer camps for kids are on hold. The garbage is piling up. As bad as things are in Toronto, another city in Ontario, Windsor, has had their city staff out on strike since April 15th, that’s 12 weeks and counting without garbage being collected.
While I believe workers should be paid fairly and work in decent, safe conditions, striking is a blunt instrument for achieving these ends. It hurts both the workers who don’t get paid and whoever relies on the services the workers usually do. It also increases the ill will between workers and management. While striking can help bring the sides together in contract negotiations, the costs are high.
Strikes are a form of brinkmanship. Both workers and employers are hurt by the strike. Each side hopes that the other will blink first. Is this a sensible way to make decisions about something as important as wages and working conditions? It would be faster and about as effective to get the union leader and the head of management to play a game of chicken with cars. Let them head at each other full tilt. Whoever swerves off the road first has to make contract concessions. The whole thing could be over in a matter of minutes.
The underlying problem is that we aren’t very good at negotiating. If each side could understand their own decision making process and the decision making process of the other side, strikes wouldn’t be necessary. Both sides would be able to figure out ahead of time what the outcome of the strike would be. Unfortunately, how decisions get made is a murky process. Furthermore, there is no way to determine what a fair settlement is. There are too many different factors to be considered.
I would love to find a less destructive way to settle contract disputes. Strikes are costly and don’t do much to improve the outcome. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure there are less disruptive mechanisms that would achieve results that are at least as good.
