labour

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

This week, Barry Biffle, the CEO of Frontier Airlines in the US, gave a speech at a private event in which he said “we got lazy in COVID” and called post-COVID working from home “silliness”. Biffle is certainly not the only CEO to speak out against employees working from home, but his characterizing workers as “lazy” drew a considerable amount of criticism.

It’s an interesting time in a lot of workplaces. Full-time working from home was an emergency response to an emergency situation (although we should remember that between 60% and 70% of jobs cannot be done remotely), and as such, the pandemic experience of fully remote work shouldn’t be considered an example of how remote work can be optimally structured and operated. However, even in that emergency situation, some at-home workers discovered that they liked features of remote work such as (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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

“It’s Beyond Frustrating”: Why Athletes are Still Being Abused

The Olympics are supposed to be an exciting and enjoyable experience, for athletes and for spectators. But for figure skating fans, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing could best be characterized as stressful and depressing.

After the team event – the first skating event on the schedule – it was revealed that 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, the favourite to win the women’s event, had previously tested positive for a banned drug intended to treat chest pain. After an emergency hearing by the Court for Arbitration in Sport, Valieva was allowed to continue competing, but the medals in the team event were not awarded. Valieva ended up placing fourth in the women’s event, and her teammate Alexandra Trusova, who came second, had an emotional meltdown at rinkside, shouting that she hated skating and would never go on the ice again.

While watching all of this drama and turmoil unfold, I couldn’t help but think that for almost 30 years we’ve known there were problems in the sport of skating. In 1995, sportswriter Joan Ryan’s book Little Girls In Pretty Boxes painted a terrible picture of abusive coaching, unhealthy training practices, and incredible stress placed on young figure skaters and gymnasts. Thankfully, as an adult skater, I got into the sport when I was old enough to be in control of what I did. But it’s no secret to anyone who follows skating that, even after well-documented investigations like those in Ryan’s book, there are still very significant problems within the sport.

So I decided to get in touch with Ryan and see if she would be willing to be interviewed about whether anything has changed, 30 years after her whistleblowing. She kindly agreed, and we talked this week. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

 

Fiona McQuarrie [FM]: What’s your take on the doping scandal at the Olympics?

Joan Ryan [JR]: The Washington Post asked me to write an op-ed on that a couple of weeks ago, and, you know, I wrote this book 27 years ago now. There has been change on the gymnastics side, unfortunately because of Larry Nassar, and because of the gymnasts themselves. They have risen up like an army, and they are the ones that are going to make sure it finally changes. That’s the only reason I have any hope that it’s going to change now after all these years.

I haven’t followed figure skating as closely over those 27 years, but the US skaters certainly seem healthier to me. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but clearly the total destruction of two of the three Russian figure skaters is a clear sign that it’s dysfunctional. There’s clearly (more…)

“The Power of a Collective”: The Experience of Unionizing at a Chapters/Indigo Store

As an author and as a reader, I love bookstores. I want to support bookstores that treat their employees fairly and respectfully, because knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff are the difference between a good bookstore and a great bookstore. So I was delighted when the staff at my local Chapters/Indigo store became members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, and recently reached their first collective agreement.

Traditionally, retail outlets staffed by younger or part-time workers have been perceived as challenging to unionize. I was curious about the process that led to the formation of the Indigo 771 union, so I got in touch with Ariel Popil and Alex Johnson, the two union stewards at the store. They graciously agreed to be interviewed via email about the experience of organizing the union.

[Note: since this discussion took place, workers at another Chapters/Indigo location, at Kennedy Commons in Scarborough, Ontario, have started a certification campaign.]

How many full-time and part-time staff work at Indigo/Chapters Pinetree? How many of those staff are in the union?

There are about 30 part-time staff members at any given time, and we have one full-time staff member. All part-time and full-time staff are part of the union.

When did the organizing campaign start, and why did it start? What was happening at the store that made the workers want to be represented by a union? (more…)

Lawren Harris’ “Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay”

Canada Post has just released a set of stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first exhibition by the Canadian painters who became known as the Group of Seven. The set has one stamp for each of the seven painters, and the stamp for Lawren Harris shows his painting Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay. I was delighted to see that Canada Post chose this painting, not only because it was the cover image of the first edition of the textbook that I write, but because Miners’ Houses represents an important part of Canadian labour relations history.

Harris created the painting in 1925, after a trip to Nova Scotia. The houses at Glace Bay, near Sydney, were the homes of  mineworkers and their families; at the time of Harris’ visit, the miners’ union was engaged in a lengthy strike against the mine owners, rebelling against (more…)