Employees, Employers, and PSEC: An Awkward Threesome

by Paul Bowles, President, CUFA BC
September 23, 2009

Although you may not think about it very often, faculty members at BC’s public universities are public sector employees. As a consequence, when a university faculty association sits down with the university administration to negotiate wages, benefits and working conditions, the whole process takes place under the umbrella of the Public Sector Employers’ Council (PSEC).

Established in 1993 by the NDP government, the legislated purposes of PSEC are to ensure coordination of human resource policies and collective bargaining activities amongst public sector employers and to improve communication and coordination between public sector employers and employee groups. Over recent years, however, its practice has gone far beyond simple coordination to include explicit limits on free collective bargaining.

Part of the problem with PSEC is the extent to which it allows for direct governmental management of our bargaining. PSEC is compromised of two components, the Council itself and the Secretariat. The Council includes representatives from each of the seven public sector employers’ associations, seven cabinet ministers or deputy ministers and the Minister of Finance as the chairperson. The Council is responsible for setting high-level policy. The Secretariat is responsible for implementing Council policies and for dealing directly with public sector employers.

From its inception, the Council’s mandate has included a form of wage controls, which is currently known as the “bargaining mandate.” The bargaining mandates given to public sector employers includes a general limit on growth in wages and sometimes include more specific directives. Over time, the range of items covered by PSEC’s bargaining mandate has expanded unevenly, sometimes including virtually everything that has a cost implication, sometimes setting rules for non-monetary issues as well. The wage-controls can likewise be rather unevenly distributed; in 2006, the general wage increases allowed for university faculty were a little larger than those for most other public sector employees. Nurses in 2009 were given more than the general mandate as well.

This uneven treatment makes it clear that bargaining mandates are discussed between PSEC and the public sector employers’ associations, but the final decision on the mandates is made, effectively, by the Minister of Finance. Because of this political dimension, many have asked if BC public sector employees really have access to free collective bargaining. A recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling on government interference in collective bargaining has raised further questions about PSEC’s role in constraining bargaining.

It’s certainly true that anyone from a union or employee association who has been at the bargaining table since the creation of PSEC would be hard pressed to say that it is a textbook example of free collective bargaining. What is also clear is that —in the short term— PSEC is unlikely to go away any time soon. CUFA BC and its member associations seek to effectively represent the interests of our members in the shadow of PSEC, and we continue to closely monitor PSEC’s impact on our ability to bargain freely with our employer universities.