Striking workers at the Shaw Conference Centre are bracing for a long cold winter after Edmonton City Council narrowly defeated a motion to send the dispute to binding arbitration.

After nearly three hours of closed-door debate, Council voted 7-6 against a motion from Councilor Dave Thiele that would have seen responsibility for negotiation taken away from Economic Development Edmonton (EDE).

Instead, EDE – the arms-length board appointed by the City to operate the publicly-owned Conference Centre – was directed to return to the bargaining table.

But given EDE’s track record on bargaining, most observers doubt anything will be accomplished by renewed negotiations.

"I have no confidence that anything is going to change," says Doug O’Halloran, president of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), local 401.

"In fact we got a letter from one of the EDE board members, Audrey Luft, saying that they have no plans to change their positions or their approach to bargaining."

According to both O’Halloran and Thiele, the problem with ordering the parties back to the bargaining table is that EDE doesn’t really want to negotiate an agreement – they want to break the union.

That’s the same conclusion that was reached in July by the Alberta Labour Relations Board (LRB) when they found EDE guilty of bargaining in bad faith. In a written decision, the LRB said EDE had caused the strike by stubbornly putting forward positions that were "tailor-made for rejection."

In making their decision to reject arbitration, Council was acting on advice contained in a report written by the notorious employer-side labour law firm, Neuman-Thompson.

In the report, which conservatives on Council had put forward as "objective" advice from an outside expert, Neuman-Thompson urged Council to let EDE pursue its own bargaining strategy – even if that strategy had been labeled illegal by the LRB.

Several Councilors were also reportedly influenced by a threat from EDE board members that they would all resign if Theile’s motion passed.

"I guess it shows how timid some of the councilors are," said AFL president Les Steel. "Council should have called their bluff and let them walk. All they’ve done is waste millions of dollars in public money on a strike that didn’t have to happen. Taxpayers wouldn’t miss them."

Council has asked EDE to report back to them on Nov. 29 with a progress report on negotiations.

In the meantime, O’Halloran says Edmontonians should keep up the pressure and urge their Councilors to "step up to the plate and force EDE to stop union busting."