Iqaluit’s tale of 2 strikes

After years of labour peace, there are suddenly two picket lines in Nunavut’s capital.

Thirteen unionized workers at the Iqaluit Housing Authority have been on strike for about a month. It’s a coincidence, but on Wednesday about 150 federal government workers across Nunavut walked off the job when the Public Service Alliance of Canada called a national strike of its 155,000 members.

Both strikes are for what the unions are calling “fair wages” for their members whose contracts have expired. Their negotiations with the employer have failed to arrive at a new contract.

Wage increases are especially needed now, the unions say, because Canada is coming out of a two-year period of record-high inflation. While the rate of price hikes is now slowing in 2023, they’re still higher than what Canadians have been used to over the past three decades.

Everyone is feeling the pinch of higher prices. Especially people in the North.

Everyone has a stake in the outcome of both of these strikes. Whatever wage increase is ultimately agreed on in the federal public service strike, it will set the tone for other wage increases that will be negotiated in other contracts in the near future.

It’s natural for workers to seek wage increases that help them counter the effects of high inflation.

But the risk is that higher wages could contribute to inflation and make it harder to bring down the inflation rate to the official target of two per cent — the approximate level where it had stood since the 1990s.

In Nunavut, whatever wage increase the Nunavut Employees Union gets for its members at the Iqaluit Housing Authority will set the tone for future negotiations it will have with public sector employers in the territory, including municipalities and other housing authorities.

For example, NEU has a strike mandate for municipal workers in Kinngait. You can bet that dispute will be informed by whatever the outcome at the Iqaluit Housing Authority happens to be.

But in both cases, there’s a big difference in the approaches taken by the union and the employer.

In the federal public service labour dispute, both PSAC and the government itself have been transparent.

PSAC is calling for a 13.5 per cent wage increase over three years. The government has offered nine per cent over three years.

On the other hand, at the Iqaluit Housing Authority, neither the union nor the employer have been forthcoming about what the fight is about.

The Nunavut Employees Union has publicly stated it’s after “fair wages” for its members but it hasn’t said specifically how much of an increase it considers fair. Union leaders are only sharing what they say are the most recent, inadequate offers the housing authority put forward.

The Iqaluit Housing Authority has said nothing publicly about its wage offers.

While it’s common for contract talks to take place behind closed doors, away from the scrutiny of the media and public, the public deserves to be given an idea about what kind of wage increases are being discussed — especially in a public-sector workplace, where the public will end up paying for those increases.

But it’s more imperative for the public to know what’s at stake in these two strikes, because in the big picture their outcomes could have an effect on the war against inflation that Nunavummiut and all Canadians have been fighting for nearly two years.