business

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.

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

Medals Medals Medals*

2022 is an Olympic year, and as the Beijing Olympics unfold, the focus of a lot of the media coverage is on the medals. It’s great for any athlete to win, especially at such a high-profile event – but a lot gets lost when the Olympics, or any major sporting event, are framed mostly in terms of who wins.

Leadership theory tells us that a leader can’t be a leader without followers. Similarly, a winner is only a winner if they have competitors to beat. Everyone competing at the Olympics has worked incredibly hard, spent a lot of money (or a lot of their parents’, sponsors’, or sports federation’s money), and sacrificed opportunities to do other things. Viewership for Olympic TV and streaming broadcasts has been declining and maybe, just maybe, the nationalist focus on only the athletes who win medals is starting to wear a little thin.

Prior to the Games, the Globe and Mail newspaper ran an extremely interesting article on how Norway increased the number of medals won by its Winter Olympic athletes. Many countries have programs like Canada’s Own the Podium, which use medals as the measure of success in sport, and direct funding to the sports and athletes perceived as most likely to win medals. That strategy usually requires identifying potential medalists as early as possible, and then supporting those athletes in intensive training in a single sport. Norway took a completely different approach. (more…)

I See You: The Effects of Representation

Many organizations think that being inclusive is simply an issue of hiring members of underrepresented groups. But people hired on that basis are not going to stick around if they feel isolated or that they stand out, or that they’ve been hired just because they’re “diverse”. One very important element in inclusivity is representation; people want to see others like them, and also want to see those other people being respected and valued.

Part of a new study by a group of US researchers looks at the effects of representation in a place that isn’t often examined: the readings that students are assigned in university courses. There has been plenty of discussion over the past few decades about “the canon” in various academic fields and what determines whether a work is a “classic”  that all students should be familiar with. The researchers investigated whether the gender balance of assigned readings in a political-science course – the number of readings written by men and the number of readings written by women – affected female and male students’ self-efficacy: their confidence in their own ability to succeed. The study looked at (more…)

The Right to Disconnect

The boundaries between home and work became blurred when the COVID-19 pandemic caused many jobs to be shifted online. Workers who were not permitted to come into their workplaces were working on computers in their living rooms, dining areas, spare rooms (if they had one), and even closets and bedroom. But even before that, boundaries were already being blurred by communications technology such as cellphones, text messaging, and email, allowing employers to contact employees at any hour of the day or night – which for many workers made them feel as if they are never really off work.

Ontario’s labour minister has proposed a legal “right to disconnect” is a step toward solving the problem of employers expecting workers to always be “on”. This is an important initiative, and the problem needs to be addressed. But this on its own is not going to fix the more fundamental and widespread workplace issues that the pandemic has highlighted, and which should be more of a priority.

The legal “right to disconnect” was first implemented in France in 2017, allowing employees to not answer work-related emails or calls during their time off. Canada’s federal government struck a task force in 2020 to explore the possibility of similar legislation for federally regulated occupations.  Ontario’s proposed legislation would require organizations with 25 or more employees to develop policies around work-related communications, such as establishing expectations for response times to emails.

It might seem that policies like this could cause even more stress for workers and employers, by compressing working time while maintaining expectations of continued productivity. However, (more…)