activism

The Power to Change

When I was researching the article on the “right to disconnect” that I recently wrote for The Conversation, one of the studies that I referenced was one exploring over-connectivity and gender equity in the legal profession. The Australian researchers interviewed 63 lawyers about the effects of newer digital technology tools (e.g. email, Zoom, Teams, texting, mobile phones) on their work. The legal profession is a good place to study these effects, because lawyers do complex work in time-sensitive situations that can unexpectedly change. They also simultaneously manage multiple clients, cases, and commitments.

The interviewees appreciated the work flexibility that digital technology gave them – particularly women with family or household commitments outside of work. But they reported that they were experiencing more challenges around setting boundaries between work and non-work times, due to their increased availability. Many also said that easier communication had intensified clients’ expectations for fast turnarounds and responses.

The interviewees discussed individual and firm-level strategies they used to deal with “digital overload”. These included clearly defined work hours, limiting the methods by which clients could contact them, and organizational policies with guidelines such as expected response times to messages from client. However, this part of the discussion really stood out to me. (more…)

Mapping Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada

UPDATE: Regrettably the creator of the map described in this post has discontinued the map website. Thank you for your hard work, anonymous map-maker. The federal government data that were used to make the map, and that are regularly updated, are posted here.

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In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion around the Canadian federal government’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program. This program allows eligible employers to hire temporary workers from outside Canada. To be eligible to hire a TFW, an employer usually has to obtain a “positive” Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), which is a confirmation that the employer cannot find qualified Canadian workers to fill its vacant job. A worker entering Canada on a TFW permit can only work for the employer that received the LMIA for the job.

Part of the reason for the increased attention to the TFW program is the release of a new report commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. The report calls the TFW program “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery”. It alleges that employers having control over TFWs’ immigration status in Canada leads to worker exploitation and abuse, with workers afraid to report mistreatment for fear of being fired and deported. It’s also been suggested that Canadian employers turn to using TFWs when they aren’t willing to pay the higher wage rates that Canadian workers expect.

Other critics of the program have alleged that the LMIA process is being corrupted by unethical employers and immigration agents.  These employers create non-existent jobs, get positive LMIAs for those jobs, and then, with the help of the agents, “sell” the LMIAs to individual immigrants. The immigrant pays the employer a fee – allegedly often in the tens of thousands of dollars – and the employer hires the immigrant to fill the vacant “job”. The immigrant can then (more…)

Ship of Fools

As some of this blog’s followers will know – especially those that follow my other blog – I have two careers: one in academia, and one in music writing. The two don’t often intersect, and that’s partly because I try to keep them separate. Having a Ph.D. and being a university professor doesn’t mean a lot in the music writing world, and being a music writer doesn’t mean a lot in the academic world. There might be some overlap if my degree was in a subject related to music, but although my area of study is very useful in helping me to understand how the music industry works, it’s not explicitly music-related.

This week marks the anniversary of the day I defended my doctoral dissertation – March 17, 1995. The defense comes after you’ve written your dissertation, which is an original piece of research, and your academic supervisor (supervisors, in my case) has signed off on it. You verbally present your research and your findings to a panel of professors, including an external assessor from another university. The panel members ask you questions about what you’ve done, and then you wait outside the room while the panel decides whether you’ve passed.

The defense is extremely nerve-wracking – you’re defending several years’ worth of work to a panel that has the power to say “no, not good enough, go back and try again”. But I was exceptionally nervous about my defense. At an earlier step in my doctoral program, the progress of my dissertation was suddenly derailed because (more…)

Being Woke about “Woke”

Research is intended to move knowledge forward. One of the ways that happens is by putting ideas forward and collectively discussing them.

A new article in the academic journal Academy of Management Perspectives asks the provocative question: Why Do Companies Go Woke? It’s extremely troubling that research mostly based on broad generalizations and selective interpretations has been published in such a high-profile journal – particularly one with the stated mission of “inform[ing] current and future ‘thought leaders’”.

Before anyone starts screaming “censorship” – the authors of the article, like any researchers, have a right to research whatever they think is worth researching, and to write about the results of that research. However, no researcher has the right to have their research published, and journals are not required to publish every submission they receive. The editors of Academy of Management Perspectives have affected the journal’s credibility by choosing to publish this article, thus legitimizing its inaccurate and divisive positions.

Analyzing how companies choose to react to events in society is an extremely valuable research topic. Understanding these reactions can generate further insights, and possibly assist other companies in reacting appropriately or productively. However, one of the many problems with the article’s approach to this topic is the article’s fundamental concepts: the definition of “woke”, and (more…)

Ratification

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 (more…)

Not Recommended

Organizations that are run by elected boards of directors, or boards of elected executives, often struggle with either getting members to run for election, or getting the right members to run for election. Depending on the type of organization, directors or executives are expected to be responsible for many different functions – and for some organizations, like co-operatives, the directors also have important legal and financial obligations.

One strategy to address this issue is for the board to recommend candidates for election. The nomination process is usually still open to any member who wants to run, but the board, or a subcommittee of the board, identifies the skills most needed on the board, and recommends the candidates it feels has those skills.  This sounds like a good way to ensure a functional and effective board, and it’s often suggested as a strategy by governance experts, but in reality it can be highly problematic.

When Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) was sold to a corporate owner in 2020, without the board consulting the membership, one of the criticisms of the sale focused around the board’s practice of recommending candidates for election. It was alleged that this practice resulted in the board being composed of “targeted professionals” that led the co-op away from its core mission and purpose and resulted in a more corporate mindset that limited the board’s approaches to the co-op’s financial challenges.

If you look at the publicly posted minutes and election results of organizations that use the practice of recommending board candidates, you’ll immediately notice two things:

  • Recommended candidates are almost guaranteed to be elected, and
  • Voter turnout for board elections is generally very low

For example, Vancity Credit Union, which has more than 500,000 members, has had turnout rates of between three percent and seven percent in its last five board elections. And in all of those elections, all of the recommended candidates have been elected, with the exception of one year when there were more recommended candidates than vacant positions.

From an organizational theory perspective, the process of the board recommending board candidates can lead to groupthink. The board identifies the skills it needs, but that identification is based on its own inherently biased perceptions of “fit”, which can result in the recommended candidates being similar to those already on the board. This in turn  can lead not only to a limited range of approaches to problems or issues, but also to implicit pressure on board members to conform to the dominant mindset, even if they disagree.

What can boards do to avoid these problems?  Here are three simple suggestions:

  • Don’t recommend candidates. If the board has identified skills or qualities that it feels it needs, that information can be presented to the voters, and candidates can be encouraged to present their own information to demonstrate that they have those skills or qualities. Voters, rather than the board, can decide whether a candidate is a good “fit” for the current composition of the board.

 

  • Don’t pre-screen candidates, beyond ensuring that they meet the basic qualifications needed for board membership. (For example, BC’s Societies Act, which governs not-for-profit organizations, specifies that directors must not be employees or contractors of the organization, must be at least 18 years old, and must not be an undischarged bankrupt.) Discouraging candidates who don’t “fit” may mean discouraging valuable counter-perspectives or different points of view.

 

  • If the board establishes a subcommittee to participate in the nominations process – for example, by identifying or encouraging potential candidates – the majority of the subcommittee’s members should not be board members. If the board has enough members on the committee to control its decision making, then the subcommittee is neither independent nor impartial.

On a larger scale, an organization that has a consistently low turnout rate for elections can also benefit from looking at whether that too is a problem. Research on union members’ participations in elections has suggested that quality may be more important than quantity; in other words, that it’s better for the organization to have a smaller turnout of informed voters than a larger turnout of less-prepared voters.

However, if an organization recommends board candidates, and those candidates almost always get elected, over time voters may feel that their vote has no impact, and be less inclined to make the effort to vote. And that may lead to larger issues of lack of member involvement and participation, which can have long-term negative effects on the organization – no matter what qualities or skills are represented on its board.

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’.

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…)