Sunday August 28, 2005
Bargaining as blasphemy
As summer winds down, we seem headed for a winter of discontent.
We\’ve had relative calm on the labour front for the last few years, as business has boomed and employment soared. I expect that euphoric interlude to end. It\’s almost inevitable.
Earlier this week, representatives of the B.C. Teachers Federation agreed to hold a strike vote towards the end of September. The province\’s 42,000 teachers have been working for the last 15 months without a collective agreement.
If past votes are any indication of the future, a strike will receive a massive majority. In 2001, teachers voted 91 per cent in favour.
Labour relations in general do not look any more hopeful.
In the U.S., Delta Airlines mechanics are on strike. Management are trying to keep planes flying safely.
In Regina, transit, garbage collection, road, sewer and water services, park maintenance and recreational facilities all ground to a halt for a day as civic workers walked off the job to demonstrate the havoc they could wreak if they chose to.
The conflict between communications giant Telus and its employees grows nastier. Union ads satirized Telus\’s feel-good slogans. Telus retaliated by shutting down union websites on its Internet servers, and by filing injunctions to prevent stations from broadcasting the union messages.
Technically, the Telus conflict is a lockout, not a strike.
So is the current CBC dispute, although the endlessly repeated apology deliberately fudges that distinction by calling it a “labour disruption.” Perhaps management hope that viewers/listeners will blame the Media Guild, not the administration, for the disruption of regular services.
I wouldn\’t be at all surprised to see School Districts take similar pre-emptive actions, and count on the public blaming teachers for closed classrooms.
Speaking different languages
I expect more of these “disruptions.” Because the world has changed. Unions and management no longer speak the same language.
Once upon a time, contract negotiations worked out the niggling details of a broader social agreement: “You look after me, and I\’ll look after you.” In return for helping the boss make money, workers expected long-term employment, with dependable promotions and raises. The employer, in turn, provided a steady job, a salary, and a benefit package.
But that was before what a labour lawyer called “globalization, privatization, and flexibilization.”
Translated, that means there no such thing as long-term employment any more. Jobs can go anywhere – like Mexico or Bangladesh. Jobs can be contracted out, instead of done in-house. Staff are expected to learn multiple roles. A flattened chain of command restricts possibilities for internal promotion. And vacancies are filled by hiring outsiders.
Leaping on the bandwagon
The trend started in the 1980s. Loyalty went out the window. Businesses downsized and outsourced. Health and pension benefits were slashed.
Not all management, I should say. There were exceptions. Lee Valley Tools, for instance, resisted the trend to downsize and outsource. It maintained its experienced workers. Who were thus better able to give service to customers. Whose numbers increased steadily.
But most management leaped onto the new economic bandwagon. A friend who worked in a human resources department found that she had become a grief counsellor, helping laid-off employees cope with their feelings of betrayal.
I went through a relocation program myself around that time. The message came through clearly: “Even if you land a full-time job, think of yourself as an independent entrepreneur with one temporary client.”
In this climate, unions still struggle to maintain the principles of seniority, security, and narrowly defined job specifications, while management – whether in corporate offices or governments – have already switched over to flexibility, devolution, and “boundaryless” careers.
Significantly, both the Telus and CBC lockouts centre on management\’s desire to contract out.
By this analysis, unions and management are both fighting for workplace values that the other side thinks of as blasphemy. It\’s like asking a fervently evangelical Christian to un-convert. Or like trying to switch an orthodox Jew to Buddhism.
A draft paper submitted to the Osgoode Hall Law Journal called it a “mismatch between today\’s flexible work relations and conventional union practices… Many of the traditional bedrock practices of American labour are antithetical to the core ideas of the boundaryless workplace.”
I can\’t claim personal knowledge of union operations. I\’ve always been enough of a rebel to resent the push for solidarity. During the only three-year period when my job required me to join a union, I reserved the right to make up my own mind about working or walking out. Fortunately, I never had to make that decision.
But it seems to me that many unions today find themselves still marching to a tune that the band is no longer playing.
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That\’s why the next few rounds of negotiating will be bitter and prolonged. And often unsatisfactory to both sides.
I don\’t know whether the unions will change their convictions, or the managers will change their mindset. It\’s possible, the way economic theories come and go, that corporate management may re-discover the virtues of loyalty. Governments may re-establish public ownership. But neither will ever confess to having chased a fad up the wrong tree.
Because institutions find it almost impossible to admit error. They may denounce specific individuals for wrongdoing, but they never challenge the validity of the institution as a whole. The Canadian Red Cross stonewalled for 20 years before issuing a limited apology over tainted blood supplies. President Bush will never admit that his government erred in its reasons for invading Iraq. Arthur Andersen cannot confess that its accounting standards were flawed. The Vatican will never call its birth control policies a mistake.
Institutions simply move on. They bury their past. They adopt a new stance, as if they had always held it.
So I expect that unions and management will eventually get onto the same page again.
But I don\’t expect labour relations to be pleasant in the meantime.
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