One of the biggest recent news stories in my region was the strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) locals that represent port workers on Canada’s west coast. Not only did this strike severely affect the flow of goods entering Canada from overseas – after all, part of the point of a strike is to cause economic disruption – but it also had an unusual and prolonged ending. The initial tentative collective agreement was rejected by a council representing the union’s locals. And then, when a another tentative agreement was reached, it was approved by the council but rejected by the membership. The dispute finally ended at the end of August when the members accepted another version of the agreement.

This was an extremely complex collective bargaining situation, with several different union locals in several locations, many different occupations represented by those locals, and an association representing 49 different employers bargaining on the management side. I’m not going to get into all of the specific details of the dispute – this is a very good summary and overview of it – but I’m going to discuss the issue of ratification votes on tentative collective agreements, because some of the media coverage of the dispute didn’t explain this accurately.

First, it’s helpful to understand the basic process of bargaining for a collective agreement. Before bargaining begins, the union (or unions) and management will both develop bargaining proposals. The proposals are based on what they think are the priorities that their “side” wants to see as a result of bargaining. Then, during bargaining, the parties exchange proposals, and modify them depending on what they think is achievable and what both parties might be satisfied with.

If one side feels that a particular proposal is essential, it can refuse to modify that proposal and look for other ways to get the other side to agree to it, such as agreeing to accept one of the other side’s proposals in exchange for agreement on that proposal. Eventually, ideally, both sides collaboratively agree on all of the terms of the collective agreement, and the agreement then goes to the union membership for a ratification vote. (If the management “side” of the bargaining is representing a group of organizations or employers, the agreement will usually be given to the members of that group for approval as well.)

Unions have the responsibility to represent all of their members’ issues during the bargaining process. This is why the bargaining team usually includes representatives from different parts of the organization, or from different workplaces, so that the team has input from a range of perspectives. But reaching a truly representative agreement can be very challenging for the bargaining team, because not every union member will have the same priorities or opinions. The bargaining team also gets to sees what the employer is able to offer, or claims to be able to offer – and if that doesn’t match what the union membership wants, then the bargaining team has the difficult job of balancing the union membership’s expectations or wants with what the team thinks it can realistically get from the employer.

The ratification vote by the union membership is  an essential part of unions operating as democratic organizations. It ensures that the union’s members support what the bargaining team has achieved. When bargaining ends, the union and the employer will usually send out a notification that a tentative agreement has been reached – but the key word here is tentative. The agreement is not official until the union members have voted to accept it, and this was not always conveyed accurately in the media coverage of the ILWU strike.

It may seem like a ratification vote is an unnecessary extra step – if the bargaining teams have been doing their job in representing the members, surely they can sign off on the agreement themselves. But it’s important to remember that the members of the union are going to be working under the terms of the collective agreement every day, for as long as the collective agreement is in effect. And even the most skilled and most experienced bargaining team may not accurately read what the union membership truly wants, or what the membership is willing to compromise on. So the ratification vote is another safeguard to ensure that the workers directly affected by the terms of the collective agreement are willing to accept those terms and work under them.

Before the ratification vote takes place, the union will usually provide information to its members, either in writing or during in-person information sessions, on the terms of the agreement. This usually includes explanations of why the bargaining team feels that these terms are acceptable. The ratification vote itself is a simple “yes/no” question, usually worded along the lines of “Do you approve the agreement reached by [union and employer] and effective for [start and end date of the collective agreement]”.

The agreement is approved if the majority of voters, defined as 50% + 1 of those voting, vote “yes”. Some unions only permit members that have attended an information session on the agreement to participate in the vote, to ensure that the voters are informed voters (although this policy can be unfair to members who face constraints that make it impossible for them to attend an information session).

As the ILWU strike demonstrated, if the majority of union members vote “no”, then the bargaining teams go back to negotiating, and attempt to reach an agreement that will be acceptable to the membership. Since the ratification vote is a vote on the entire agreement, not a section-by-section vote on each part of the agreement, the union and the bargaining team will also have to communicate with the membership to find out which parts of the tentative agreement were not acceptable to the membership, and create new proposals addressing those parts.

Although having to return to bargaining is obviously not an ideal outcome for the union, a rejected agreement can in some ways be helpful to the bargaining team. The team now has evidence that the membership is not satisfied with what management is offering – which may be an incentive to the management bargaining team to modify its own expectations or proposals.

In the ILWU strike, there was an additional step in the ratification process – the tentative agreement had to be approved by a council of representatives from the local unions before it could go to a ratification vote by the entire membership. This is not a common process, and most of us likely wouldn’t have been aware of this particular step if the ILWU council hadn’t voted to reject the first tentative agreement. But when a bargaining team is representing thousands of workers in different occupations and in different locations, this step can be a way to ensure that a tentative agreement has a better chance of being ratified by the entire membership.

The ILWU strike is over now, but its impact is still being felt – not only in the backlog of goods that is still being cleared through the affected ports, but also within Canada’s federal government. The federal minister of labour has announced an unspecified “process” to “examine the structural factors underlying this dispute” with the goal of “develop[ing] long-term solutions”. Nonetheless, the events in this dispute are an excellent illustration of how ratification votes work, and a good example of why it’s important to understand the ratification process.