On Strike Votes and Turnouts

Last week, more than 120,000 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada/Alliance de la fonction publique du Canada (PSAC/AFPC) – the union that represents many of Canada’s federal employees – went on strike. The unresolved bargaining issues include wage rates and the amount of remote work (“work at home”) done by PSAC members.

A PSAC member filed a complaint with the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board asking for the strike vote to be declared invalid, because PSAC shortened the voting period after the announcement of the vote. In their decision, the three Board members hearing the complaint noted that while “the respondent made no discernible effort to announce its reduction of the voting period”, and expressed misgivings about other aspects of the changes to the voting process, such as limited attempts to reach members without email addresses, and limited capacity at the mandatory information meetings held online prior to the vote itself.

Nevertheless, the Board members concluded, the vote was more than 80% in favour of striking and “the Board is satisfied that in the current circumstances, the vote result would have been the same even without the irregularities.”

A considerable amount of the news coverage of this case has focused on the low turnout in the vote – only 35% of eligible PSAC members participated. The underlying tone to much of this coverage is that because of the low turnout, the vote is somehow not representative of the opinion of the entire PSAC membership. It seems that some journalists and commentators could benefit from a review of some basic information about strike votes and democratic processes. Here it is. (more…)

Count It Up

With the cost of living on the rise in many parts of the world, I’ve been thinking a lot about the unseen advantages – sometimes called social capital or cultural capital – that give some people or groups the ability to weather economic challenges better than others. These advantages aren’t necessarily explicit or visible advantages such as education or employment, although individuals with more social or cultural capital will likely have better access to those kinds of advantages. Social and cultural capital are more the implicit knowledge and skills that someone acquires from living in a specific part of society – and they may not even know that they benefit from having that capital.

Rather than me explaining this in more detail, instead I want to share a song that captures this idea perfectly in its lyrics, and challenges you to think about the advantages that you have that you may not even realize. Please have a listen to Field Music’s ‘Count It Up’.

Sorry

Happy New Year!

It seems a little odd to start a new year of blogging (my 11th year) with an apology. I had planned to start posting again in mid-January and life got in the way, and I’m sorry for the unexplained delay. However, I’m beginning on a positive note by recommending an excellent book that I’ve just finished reading – and it just happens to be about apologies.

Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy have been running the site SorryWatch for more than a decade – I first discovered their work through the very entertaining SorryWatch Twitter account. Over the years, they have used SorryWatch to (more…)

All About Work’s Holiday Break

Snow on the decorated tree in my yard. (credit: own photo)

A phrase I’ve heard being used a lot to describe this time of year is, “Well, we made it.” The world certainly wasn’t a happy place in many ways in 2022, but….well, we made it. Here’s hoping that 2023 is a little less eventful and a little more empathetic.

I’ll be taking a few weeks off from All About Work to rest up and recover. I hope you’ll have some time to relax as well. Here are the posts on the blog that got the most traffic this year:

1) Bob White and “Final Offer”

2) Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up

3) The Joy of Figures

4) What’s A Rotating Strike?

5) Compulsory Figures: Technical Guidelines, Diagrams, and Tests

See you in 2023!

Vocational Awe

Earlier this week, US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Tweeted a photo of himself visiting an elementary school classroom, with the caption “Teaching isn’t a job you hold. It’s an extension of your life’s purpose”.  Numerous responses to the Tweet pointed out that teaching is indeed a job, and that characterizing it as “your life’s purpose” is questionable.

One of the more liked responses to the Tweet said: “No. It’s a job. When we view it as some sort of holier than thou calling, it makes it easier for those in power to justify paying us crap salaries because “we signed up for it” or expecting martyrdom because “That’s the life of a teacher” or “it’s for the kids””.

Some of the other responders to Cardona’s Tweet mentioned a concept called “vocational awe”. This is a term that was new to me. I looked it up, and I was extremely impressed. “Vocational awe” is relevant to many occupations, and I honestly can’t believe that I never encountered it in several decades of teaching and research about work and workplaces. That says a lot about the limited and biased ways in which work and organizations are understood.

The term “vocational awe” originated in an essay by librarian Fobazi Ettarh. She defines it as:

the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique….I would like to dismantle the idea that librarianship is a sacred calling; thus requiring absolute obedience to a prescribed set of rules and behaviors, regardless of any negative effect on librarians’ own lives.

Ettarh characterizes the negative effects of vocational awe on the worker this way: (more…)

MIXTAPE, My New Book

I’m delighted to announce that my new book MIXTAPE: 21 SONGS FROM 10 YEARS (1975-1985) is now on sale, at the retailers listed here. It was a lot of work to write but also a great deal of fun. I hope you’ll check it out!

Unionizing Starbucks

Just a few years ago, if someone had said that more than 200 Starbucks outlets in North America would be unionized, the response would have been something like this.  Yet here we are, just after Labour Day, and….more than 200 Starbucks outlets are unionized, including several in Canada. These unionizations are remarkable not just because they’re happening, but also because the successful unionization campaigns look nothing like what unionizing efforts are supposed to look like.

Starbucks is a huge and very wealthy international corporation, so it has lots of resources to oppose unionization in its “stores”. With many of its locations in the US, it benefits from US labour laws that are generally less union-friendly than in Canada – for example, captive audience meetings are banned in Canada but permitted in the US – so US employers tend to be more successful at resisting unionization. And because of how Canadian and US labour laws are structured, unionizing a company like Starbucks, with multiple locations, generally means the union has to run an organizing campaign at each individual location, rather than being able to unionize all of them at once. (In 2021 Starbucks had over 1300 locations in Canada and nearly 9000 locations in the US, in addition to licensed outlets operated in partnership with other retailers.)

Most traditional union organizers would look at this situation and say that it would be just too difficult and too expensive to organize unions at Starbucks, and that any attempt to do so would probably fail. To have any chance at success, a union would have to be very experienced, and have skilled organizers and major resources, to combat the extensive anti-unionization campaign and anti-union tactics that Starbucks would undoubtedly roll out. Also, because the food service sector tends to have high rates of employee turnover, most large unions have avoided organizing workplaces in that sector, because of the very real possibility that workers supporting the union might leave or be fired before the union is formally recognized.

So it’s incredible not only that there are now so many unionized Starbucks locations, but that (more…)

Just Say No

In every workplace there are tasks that aren’t enjoyable to do, or that aren’t part of formal job descriptions but are important for building positive relationships and community. However, research has shown that these kinds of tasks – which some researchers have labeled “office housework” –  tend to be done more often by women and by members of demographic minorities. It’s also been suggested that doing these tasks can have a negative impact on the careers of those who regularly take them on.

The new book The No Club: Putting A Stop To Women’s Dead-End Work, by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart,  is a very thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon. Coincidentally, I came across the book when I was thinking about how “office housework” functions in academic workplaces. I recently left an academic job, but I still regularly get requests to (more…)

The Weight of a Name

When an organization is hiring someone to fill a job, it’s very difficult to avoid bias in the hiring process – because, at some point, the hiring decision is subjective. The applicants for the job may have very similar qualifications and experience, which then usually leads to assessments such as how well each applicant would “fit” within the organization. “Fit” is a subjective assessment, and when subjective assessments become an exercise in “how much is this person like the people that are already here”, that’s when unintended or explicit bias can affect the hiring decision.

Numerous studies have shown that hiring decisions can be biased by factors like the ethnicity of the applicant’s name, their appearance, and their social class. Now, two economists, Qi Ge and Stephen Wu, have published a very interesting research study of another possible source of bias in hiring: how difficult it is to pronounce the applicant’s name.

The data that these researchers used for their study was taken from (more…)

Fact-Checking Card-Checking in British Columbia

In April, the British Columbia government introduced legislation that would change the Labour Relations Code and allow automatic certification in union organizing campaigns. This change would make it much easier for unions to become the legal workplace representative for employees. The usual pro-business pro-management organizations – Chambers of Commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Business Council of BC – are complaining that this change would “weaken the democratic right for workers to exercise choice through a secret ballot”.  The Business Council has also sent a letter to BC Premier John Horgan with a lengthy list of complaints about the legislation’s potential impacts.  And the “non-partisan” Fraser Institute has called the proposed legislation “unfair to workers”.

At best, these statements are misleading. At worse, they reflect an implicit belief that unions can only hurt businesses’ operations and profitability – a belief which is also highly inaccurate.

To understand why these statements are so troubling, it’s useful to know what automatic certification is. When a union (more…)