Negotiation

This crisis could have been so easily averted. The Charest government, however, decided to break the only important rule of negotiation. People like discounts.

When you go to Best Buy, you don't pay retail for your new 60" television. When you buy a car, you don't pay the listed price. In most markets, you don't even pay the asking price for a home. You get a discount, and everyone goes home happy. The seller gets his commission and the buyer gets a rush of hormones that comes with amassing crap, some sort of evolutionary leftover from our hunter-gatherer days.

This is how most labour negotiations work too. The two sides put up a solid front, give a best-case-scenario offer, and sit down to work out a compromise. Unions can spin it to their membership that they got the best deal possible. CEOs can stress the intrinsic value of labour peace to their shareholders. It's just how things work.

Unfortunately for Line Beauchamp, Quebec's students, and Montreal in general, Premier Charest sent the Education minister to the table with no room for negotiation. The opening offer was the final offer. Sure, there was some recognition of the minor issues that the students had brought to public attention, but the tuition hikes were sacred. The subsequent government offer went from the original $1625 in hikes to $1750. This was obviously not an honest attempt at getting kids back into class. It was Charest's recognition that his tuition hikes were far more popular than his government or even his person, and he was going to milk it for all it was worth. Beauchamp herself, I assume, had enough of playing Charest's puppet and threw in her political towel.

If Charest had really wanted to end the crisis, he could have launched an investigation into the apparent grift in university administration and dropped the tuition hike to $1250 over five years. $250 a year. The majority of students would have melted away. The government could have probably found enough savings to cover the difference, and certainly would have avoided the costs that are involved in prolonging the daily protests in the streets. And if they didn't, virtually all remaining support for them would have dried up. An even more dishonest but probably effective approach (judging by the above discussion of retail shopping) would have been to have originally introduced $2000 in hikes and then cut it back to $1625 as a compromise. The students could have at least consoled themselves with the discount.

Instead, Charest passed a law designed to radicalize the students even further and bring all of the local anarchists out of the woodwork who are willing to chuck rocks at cops and undermine the student movement.  Yesterday, reeling from a Sunday night PR disaster which exploded like a stun grenade when the Montreal Police decided to pepper-spray patrons sitting on a St. Denis patio, the police left the protesters alone. Hopefully, the Police continue to refrain from enforcing Bill 78, and the protesters refrain from throwing molotov cocktails. I guess we'll see.

Oh, by the way, I didn't make it out to the protest last night. I was too lazy. Eventually, I'll make it happen.