labour

Unions and Their Unions

A lot of people don’t realize that unions that represent workers in interactions with employers are also employers themselves. The union’s leaders are members of the union and are elected by the other members – but most unions, especially larger national or international unions and labour federations, also have administrative, executive, and staff employees. These employees keep the union running day to day, and might have special expertise, like researching or negotiating, that the union can use during its organizing campaigns or collective bargaining.

What a lot of people also don’t realize is that employees of unions are often unionized themselves. The employees don’t belong to the same union that they work for – that would be a conflict of interest. So they are members of a different union, usually one that includes workers in similar occupations. As an example, the employees of the union I belong to, at a provincially-funded university, are members of a local of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, a national union that represents many public sector workers.

A union’s employees being unionized also means that, like any other group of unionized workers, they negotiate with their employer for a collective agreement. And that is where things can get kind of tricky. (more…)

Un-Cooperative

The co-operative business model is intended to be an alternative to the traditional capitalist business model, in which the business’ owners or their representatives (managers) run the business and receive the profits from the business’ operations. In a co-operative, the customers of the business are also the owners of the business. Customers usually have to purchase a membership in the co-operative to use its products or services. The members elect a board of directors which is responsible for overseeing the business’ operations, and profits from the business are returned to the members in the form of dividends or reduced prices.

Many co-operatives were formed in areas or industries that traditional businesses refused to serve – either because they did not think there was enough of a market, or because they did not think they would make enough profit. So the co-operative business model is not only an alternative to capitalist business; it’s also a direct challenge to that model. As such, you would think that co-operatives would also challenge the traditional top-down relationship between managers and workers, and treat their employees fairly and respectfully. But workplace disputes at three different co-ops are showing that unfortunately this doesn’t always happen.

In Saskatchewan, unionized workers at the Saskatoon Co-op, (more…)

Unionizing Comics

I probably stopped reading comic books in the middle of my teens (although I love comic strips in newspapers), so my knowledge of the comics industry is pretty outdated. However, I’m always interested in unionizing campaigns for any type of worker, so I was intrigued when I came across the Twitter account Let’s Unionize Comics. Sasha Bassett runs that account; she is a Ph.D student at Portland State University and a self-declared “all-around pop culture junkie”. She has also conducted a survey of workers in the comics industry about their working conditions and their workplace concerns. Sasha graciously agreed to be interviewed via email about the comics industry and her vision of how it could become unionized.

Fiona: For readers who may not be familiar with how the comics industry works, can you describe its structure? For example, is it dominated by major companies, or is there a significant number of independent firms? Do comics artists work on their own and then try to sell their work, or are they usually commissioned to do specific projects?

Sasha: The structure of the comics industry is complex and fairly non-standardized. The market is absolutely dominated by (more…)

LabourWatch is Back

The Canadian LabourWatch Association claims that it exists to “advance employee rights” and to provide “balanced” information about unionization in Canadian workplaces. However, this group’s real intention is to undermine Canada’s labour unions and Canadian workers’ legal right to choose to be represented by a union in their workplace.

In recent years, LabourWatch was one of the main supporters of Bill C-377 – a proposed federal law that would have required much more stringent financial reporting from unions than from other federally-regulated organizations. LabourWatch has also lobbied against mandatory union dues, and has been used as a resource by companies with unionized workers on strike in encouraging those workers to decertify their unions.

After the defeat of Bill C-377, and after the Conservative party lost the 2014 Canadian federal election, LabourWatch gradually became much less visible. The last newsletter posted on its website is from February 2017, and despite initiatives such as a review of federal minimum wage rates that would seem to be relevant to a group allegedly promoting “employee rights”, LabourWatch has been all but silent.

Until now.

On June 24 and 25, LabourWatch is (more…)

The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike: six weeks of solidarity in the fight for workers’ rights

By Kelly Anne Griffin In the spring of 1919, tensions boiled over in Winnipeg. Social classes were divided by both wealth and status. Labourers gathered in a common front, and ideas about workers’ rights spread. Canada’s largest strike and its greatest class confrontation began on May 15. Even though changes were slow to come in the […]

via The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike: six weeks of solidarity in the fight for workers’ rights — Library and Archives Canada Blog

Human Resource Management and Mistreated Workers

Jobs in “human resource management” – the part of organizations that manages employee-related functions such as hiring, training, and pay  – are becoming more professionalized. Professional designations such as Certified Human Resource Professional, which require human resource (HR) practitioners to demonstrate specific HR-related knowledge and skills, are becoming more common among HR staffers. But at the same time, working conditions for many employees are becoming worse.

This doesn’t make sense, because most human resource management (HRM) professional associations have codes of practice that explicitly state HR professionals should promote ethical and fair treatment for workers. For example, the guidelines of the US Society for Human Resource Management’s code of professional responsibility include “strive to achieve the highest levels of service, performance, and social responsibility” and “advocate for the appropriate use and appreciation of human beings as employees”.

Also, the concept of “socially responsible HR” has emerged as part of discussions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) – the idea being that organizations have responsibilities to society as well as to their stakeholders, and that HR practices within the organization should align with an overall CSR strategy by encouraging fair treatment of employees. So if organizations have publicly committed to making positive contributions to society, but at the same time are allowing their own employees to be disrespected and mistreated, why aren’t HR practitioners doing something about it?

Two research studies – one from 2013, one just published – have explored that very intriguing question. The two studies (more…)

Good Jobs and Bullshit Jobs

Recently, the New York Times Magazine had a special theme issue on “The Future of Work: What Makes a ‘Good Job’ Good?”. As it happened, the issue came out while I was reading the new book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by anthropologist David Graeber. This was a lovely bit of symmetry, because both the book and the articles in the magazine address similar questions: with more automation in the workplace, why are we not working fewer hours? If we know as much as we do about organizations and work, why are so many workers so unhappy? Shouldn’t work be getting better, instead of getting worse?

These are very big questions with complex answers. I won’t try to cover everything that’s discussed in the book and the magazine articles, and have a wide-ranging but superficial discussion; I recommend that you read the book and the articles for yourself. But I’m going to pull out a couple of themes that I found particularly fascinating.

Both the book and the articles look at the worsening relationships between workers and employers and show that this trend isn’t just anecdotal. Surveys of job satisfaction over time show (more…)

Scabby the Rat: Good Times, Bad Times

Several years ago, I wrote about Scabby the Rat, the giant inflatable rat that is regularly used at union rallies and picket lines to draw attention to greedy employer behaviour. Recently, Scabby has popped up (ha-ha) in the news, in a good way and in a bad way.

At the time of my previous post, Scabby had mostly made appearances in the US. But  this past summer Scabby showed up in my own country, rising above the fence at Ontario Place in Toronto during a lockout of stagehands at the Canadian National Exhibition. And now it seems that Scabby has gone international, as he was part of a recent case in New Zealand involving alleged defamation during contract negotiations.

In 2016, members of First Union were negotiating a collective agreement with the owner of a Pak’n Save supermarket. When negotiations stalled, the union members held a protest outside the supermarket, with Scabby and signs reading “Pak’n Slave”. The employer took the union to New Zealand’s employment court (similar to the provincial and federal Labour Relations Boards in Canada), claiming that Scabby and the signs were defamatory and that they breached the legal requirement to bargain in good faith.

In December 2018, an employment court judge ruled that the duty of good faith “does not require bargaining to be undertaken in a courteous way” and dismissed the employer’s complaints. Scabby’s presence at the protest was deemed (more…)

Helping Workers Get To Work

In recent years, there have been dire warnings about work becoming more automated.  There’s also been much attention paid to telecommuting, remote work, and other technologically-assisted ways for workers to be able to work anywhere. But the reality is that many jobs still require humans to do them, and many jobs also require those humans to actually be at the workplace. Robots haven’t replaced everybody yet, and telecommuting isn’t something that’s feasible in every kind of job.

The city of Seattle is facing a particularly challenging situation right now in “the Seattle Squeeze” – a three-week closure of the major north-south highway that runs through the city, including its downtown. Although there will be some improvements to public transit during the shutdown, it’s anticipated that a lot of workers are going to experience unusually long commutes getting to and from their workplaces. So what can workers do if they have to be at their workplace and it’s going to take a really long time to get there? (more…)

Mediation, Arbitration, Mediation-Arbitration, and Back-To-Work Legislation

Last week, Canada’s Parliament started the process of passing a law to end the rotating strikes at Canada Post. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) has been negotiating with Canada Post for more than a year for a new collective agreement, and the union is showing it’s serious about its bargaining demands by strategically timing its strike actions for when people and small businesses are relying on Canada Post’s services for holiday deliveries. However, complaints about backlogs of undelivered mail and the lack of progress in negotiations apparently made the federal government decide it was time to intervene in the bargaining process.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the types of interventions that can be used to resolve bargaining disputes – particularly mediation-arbitration, which is not used very often, but which is what this law proposes to settle the contract. An explanation of each type of intervention will help in understanding the potential outcomes of (more…)