Category Archives: in these times
Union women work to shatter labour’s glass ceiling
By H.G. Watson December 4, 2013 http://rabble.ca
The labour movement’s female ranks are growing, but women are still struggling to have their voices heard and to fill executive positions.
“Sadly, I still find myself in the trenches,” said Yolanda McClean, the Diversity Vice-President of CUPE, speaking at the microphones during the women’s forum at the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) convention.
Women, even in unionized workplaces, face workplace harassment and income inequality.
For those that might consider leadership positions, there are still barriers in the way of taking executive roles at the local or national levels — including a lack of available childcare and mentoring — despite the fact that there are more women unionized than ever before.
A recent Globe and Mail article found that the rate of men who are unionized is dropping while rates for women have held steady. The losses for men is found in the declining manufacturing sector while unionization rates in health care, education and public administration — industries largely dominated by women — have grown.
Men still take up many of the top positions in labour unions and councils, a situation that has certainly not gone unnoticed by union sisters. At the Unifor founding convention in August, Lindsay Hinshelwood, a member of the former CAW local 707 in Oakville, Ontario, ran against Jerry Dias to challenge what she called the “old boys club” of leadership.
“Traditional power structures still exist within the labour movement which is really unfortunate,” said Nicole Wall, a Toronto based regional representative of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
She, along with her mother, labour activist Carol Wall, sat on a panel about the challenges women face in the labour movement last Tuesday at the OFL convention.
They were joined by Katie Arnup, a national representative for communications at Unifor, Sue Genge, who was formerly with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and Michele Landsberg, a journalist who has written extensively on labour issues.
Landsberg recounted that when she attempted to write a story about maternity leaves many years ago, she was laughed off the phone by many of the union leaders when she asked if they would include leave provisions in collective agreements.
“I’ve heard a woman say that she ran for an elected position and she was told she’d get in trouble with her union supervisor because they didn’t want a woman running,” she said.
If there is anyone who knows the challenges of becoming not only active in labour, but a leader, it would be Nancy Hutchison. The secretary-treasurer of the OFL was the first woman to work in the gold mine in the Campbell Red Lake Mine in 1977. Hutchison became the president of her union local, and eventually rose through the ranks of the United Steelworkers to take a place on their national executive as the Canadian National Health, Safety and Environment Department Leader.
“Very rarely will a sister come up and say, ‘it’s my first year working here and I want to be involved in the union,'” she said. “It’s up to us to look for [leadership] qualities.”
Mentorship opportunities and access to childcare were two of the key barriers she identified for women who may consider running for leadership positions.
At the OFL convention, there were several impassioned speeches in support of a universal childcare system. Others also advocated for maternity leaves to be included in collective agreements — a situation that they argue benefits families overall, not just women.
But according to Landsberg, union culture has to become more inclusive — or risk disappearing altogether.
“The union movement has done amazing things for changing the scene for women externally,” she said, noting that unions supported Charter challenges that helped secure the right to choice.
“But internally, they haven’t done as much and they have to because that is the future of unionizing –they need the women or they are gone.”
New Report: Unions Shield Workers—and States—Against Recession
Friday Jul 12, 2013 3:34 pm http://inthesetimes.com
Although the economy is improving, income inequality remains high in Illinois. Neal Jennings/Flickr/Creative Commons)
A new report by Robert Bruno and Frank Manzo of the University of Illinois, The State of Working Illinois 2013: Labor in the Land of Lincoln, paints an all-too-familiar portrait of a state economy that has righted itself from free-fall to “tepid growth” but has yet to reach pre-recession levels. With decreased labor-force participation, nearly 10 percent unemployment, wage stagnation and the top 1 percent earning 635 percent more than the median employed worker, Illinois has a long way to go before true recovery.
But unlike other accounts of today’s economic woes, the authors don’t attribute the blame solely to the global financial collapse. The report’s findings strongly suggest that the decline of unionization has played a considerable role in the increase of income inequality in Illinois, which can in turn slow economic growth. The report also suggests that lags in union membership put a strain on the social safety net, sapping resources that could otherwise be invested to speed the state’s recovery.
The State of Working Illinois, released Tuesday, found the union membership among working-age Illinois residents has fallen from 20.6 percent in 2002 to 17.2 percent. The findings also suggest that this decline may have been a factor in pushing income inequality to extremes. The salary boost of belonging to a union worker—some $10,682 for workers making a median wage of $43,687—goes up for low-income workers. The bottom 25 percent of nonunion earners make an average of $15,471, while the bottom 25 percent of union earners makers $27,406. A similar gap appears in the bottom 10 percent of each group, with union workers earning an average of $14,685 and non-union workers earning an average of $3,701. The authors conclude that with the power to considerably boost incomes in the lowest brackets, unionization can prevent the lower-earning workers from descending into poverty.
At the other end of the spectrum, union gains are more modest: For the top 25 percent of union workers, incomes average $61,884, compared with $57,692 for nonunion workers. And, strikingly, the top 10 and 1 percent of nonunion workers actually make more than their unionized counterparts. Overall, this means that union wages are far more compressed than nonunion wages in the state, with a $100,319 discrepancy between the highest- and lowest-earning brackets of union workers, compared with a $296,404 gap among nonunion workers.
According to coauthor Frank Manzo, some degree of income inequality isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can “encourage hard work, the acquisition of skills and education, and innovation.” But “when income inequality gets too high, like the levels we see today, it can negatively impact economic growth.” This is because “the ‘marginal costs’ of inequality—such as lower equality of opportunity and lower class mobility, declining middle and working class wages, higher chances of financial crises, and even decreased national happiness—are outweighing the ‘marginal benefits,’” Manzo explains.
Given this, the report’s findings indicate that higher unionization could help shrink Illinois’ income gaps and lead to economic growth.
There’s another way that unions can be a powerful agent to combat the detrimental effects of weak economies. Despite some improvement, Illinois workers still have only “somewhat more financial security and slightly higher prospects for finding a job” than during the darkest days of the recession. Even under these grim conditions, unionized workers generally have higher wages and have more financial security for their retirement—benefits that nonunion workers don’t always enjoy, rendering them more vulnerable to the dire effects of economic recession.
This means that lower unionization rates not only hurt workers, but also put a strain on Illinois’ social safety net. With union membership on the decline, the authors hypothesize that the growing ranks of nonunion workers are sapping public resources that could otherwise be used to boost the economy by, for instance, “subsidizing college education and investing in early childhood education programs”—investments that the authors suggest would improve Illinois’ long-term labor market prospects.
The authors conclude by recommending that Illinois help combat the decline of unionization. The state could, for example, require employers to post notices in every workplace detailing the “collective acts to improve pay, working conditions, and job-related problems that are lawful even if workers are not in a union” so that workers know it is their legal right to seek justice and improved working conditions.
Although the authors make clear that cooperation from the state—in the form of investments in public infrastructure, increases in the minimum wage and reforming the tax code—is vital for positive economic growth, The State of Working Illinois shows that unions can provide workers and economies with invaluable armor to withstand crises like the Great Recession.
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 