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FRED HAZEL
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Next Monday's Labour Day is a traditional summer's-nearly-over-holiday to celebrate the advantages organized labour has brought to our working system. It might also be a time to contemplate some of the problems which have become ingrained in the system.

There can be no question the traditional labour movement has achieved a great deal for the working people of this country.

It's important to acknowledge and celebrate those achievements which have benefited all of our society.

But I also think it has to be recognized that there are some modern-day difficulties, when marketplace economic realities clash with the aspirations of some labour leaders and some management officers who are rooted in the old days.

Both labour and management will have to look for newer and better ways of achieving what must essentially be their common goal - getting the job done together. Old-style, adversarial labour-management relations need to find new ways of moving into a 21st century mode.

Too many negotiators on both sides of the table are still looking at their roles as old-fashioned bluff-the-other-guy players in an out-of-date poker game. Today's stakes are too high.

Some frightening examples which should catch public attention:

The Toronto garbage workers' strike, when a CUPE union tied up that city for more than a month and pretty well won what they were going after - at the expense of Toronto taxpayers. And ultimately, I would suspect, to the detriment of their own union workers somewhere down the road.

No one is going to put up with or support unsustainable union perks and privileges in a time when everyone else is shouldering tougher burdens. Just the same as no one is willing to stomach the obscene bonus benefits paid to CEOs whose companies are floundering and even on the dole.

In New Brunswick, we watched incredible brinksmanship, when unionized workers at Fraser paper's sulphite pulp mill in Edmundston first rejected - and then decided to accept - a final offer from the company which is undergoing financial re-organization. If the Communications, Energy and Paper Workers Union had stuck with their original position, the operation would have shut down, and some 200 workers would have walked away from their jobs.

Those old spoils-to-the strongest rules just don't apply anymore. Our society needs to shake up the system - on both sides of the negotiating table. There have been some small steps; mediation and final-position arbitration are among tools being used to assist disputing parties to agreement. But sustainability has to be a factor which both sides need to consider.

As the recession has demonstrated, enterprises can fail and jobs can disappear if demands and expectations go beyond marketplace realities.

I'm not suggestion we turn back the clock, but, rather, find ways of moving it ahead.

Free collective bargaining is a workplace principle that has been a hard-won and widely-accepted right in our society. It applies not only to skilled and unskilled labourers, but to university professors, doctors and a wide range of professional workers. But this is not to say the forum in which it is exercised can't be improved.

The way it works now is that committees from each side get together to work out a contract deal acceptable to both. Sometimes it's relatively simple, many times it's incredibly difficult, with one side, or both, getting on a surprisingly high-horse of intransigent demands.

Even after a bargaining-table deal is reached, the committees go back to their unions or managements to seek ratification of what they agreed to. Sometimes it doesn't end there - as has been the case with New Brunswick doctors accepting a deal, which the province balked at ratifying.

What's needed in my view, is a better way of handling bargaining - starting with changes in approach and attitude.

Fred Hazel is a retired editor-in-chief of this newspaper. His column appears on Thursdays.