Category Archives: unions

Marine Drive Golf Club Lockout Enters Third-Week: workers rallied at Club today

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August 12, 2013   http://www.uniteherelocal40.org/

The lockout of food and beverage workers by the exclusive Marine Drive Golf Club has now entered its third week. The Club, one of Vancouver’s most prestigious private golf clubs in which an initiation fee can cost $75,000, locked out its servers, cooks, bartenders, locker room attendants and janitors on July 26.  The lockout affects 48 workers who work in the Bullpen (Men’s Lounge), the Mixed Grill, the dining room as well as those who work in the women and men’s locker rooms.   Many of the workers are long-term employees of the Club, some with more than 30 years of service.

The Club has refused to let workers return to work and has terminated workers’ medical benefits.  The workers are members of UNITE HERE Local 40. 

Management enforced the lockout after workers turned down the company’s long-standing proposal offering average wage increases of only $0.17 cents.   The Club’s proposal reneges on an earlier promise made by Club Management in 2010 to offer a better agreement during this current round of bargaining.  In 2010, when the Club was struggling financially, workers agreed to minimal wage increases and made other sacrifices for the good of the Club.  At the time, the Chief Operating Officer of the Club told workers the Club would “do better” by the food and beverage staff during the 2013 round of bargaining.  Instead, the Club has locked out workers – a move that was particularly unexpected given relatively smooth labour-management relations in previous years. 

Meanwhile, the Club’s financial performance has bounced back.  In May, Club COO, Ron Pauls, told BC Business (May 6, 2013), that the Club had turned its performance around:

“In 2011, we hit it out of the park and added 160 new members.  We’re bucking the trend.  But for us it’s not about cash for the present, it’s about maintaining a fun, vibrant, healthy and sustainable club for years to come.” 

In spite of the lockout, workers and Local 40 have been willing to continue bargaining with the Club in order to reach a settlement and resolve outstanding issues.

Marine Drive Golf Club Locks Out Food & Beverage Workers

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August 7, 2013   http://www.uniteherelocal40.org

Marine Drive Golf Club, the exclusive club with a $75,000 initiation fee, has locked out its servers, cooks, bartenders, locker room attendants and janitors.   The lockout affects 48 workers who work in the Bullpen (Men’s Lounge), the Mixed Grill, the dining room as well as in the women and men’s locker rooms.   Many of the workers are long-term employees of the Club, some with more than 30 years of service.

Workers locked out at Marine Drive Golf Club.

Workers locked out at Marine Drive Golf Club.

The Club has refused to let workers return to work and has terminated workers’ medical benefits.  The workers, members of UNITE HERE Local 40, have been locked out since July 26. 

Management enforced the lockout after workers turned down the company’s long-standing proposal offering average wage increases of only $0.17 cents.   The Club’s proposal reneges on an earlier promise made by Club management in 2010 to offer a better agreement during this current round of bargaining.  In 2010, when the Club hit a rough patch, workers agreed to minimal wage increases and made other sacrifices for the good of the Club.  At the time, the Chief Operating Officer of the Club told workers the Club would “do better” by the food and beverage staff when the contract re-opened in 2013.  However, Club management has failed to stand by its word.  Meanwhile, the Club’s financial performance has steadily improved. 

In spite of the lockout, workers and Local 40 have been willing to continue bargaining with the Club in order to reach a settlement and resolve outstanding issues. 

Young, frustrated workers begin to listen to the union pitch

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THANDIWE VELA   The Globe and Mail    Sunday, Aug. 04 2013

Debra Moore is on the front lines of an upswing in union interest among younger workers.

This year, eight of the baristas at one of her coffee shops in Halifax surprised her by joining Local 2 of the Service Employees International Union. The move came with some controversy: Two employees claimed they were fired for their involvement, and labour leaders organized a protest outside the store.

The unionization drive at Just Us! Coffee Roasters is emblematic of a labour movement that is making some inroads into typically low-wage, part-time, non-unionized workplaces. And Ms. Moore says she understands what’s behind it.

“I don’t hear them focused on money, I don’t hear them focused on benefits,” says the founder of Just Us!, a co-operative with cafes across Nova Scotia. “I hear them focused on, ‘Well, we’ve been to university, we’ve got stuff to contribute. How can we do that? I hear, too, that they feel vulnerable and the union gives them somebody behind them.

“Up until the last few years the retail world was more about people who wanted part-time work, who wanted transient work. That was what that industry has been built on but of course that’s not our reality.”

The slow recovery from the last recession has been hard on young workers. The unemployment rate for workers 15 to 24 is still elevated — it was 13.8 per cent in June — and it is common for today’s twentysomething to stitch together multiple part-time jobs.

Sabrina Butt, 26, is a recently unionized sales associate at a Toronto-area H & M store. She is among the cohort of young workers entering the labour market in a soft economy, looking at their after-school retail and service jobs as long-term employment, and hunkering down.

“You come in thinking that it’s just convenient with your school schedule and so on and so forth but I started when I was in college, and I’m still there,” she said.

The proportion of Canadian workers belonging to labour unions declined considerably since the 1980s, but has remained stable since the late 1990s, at slightly less than one-third of the work force. In 2012, the rate of unionization went up slightly, to 31.5 per cent from 31.2 per cent the year before. Part-time jobs have been cited as the source of recent unionized job gains.

“Retail and service is a huge chunk of our economy and they’re not the sort of short-term, high-turnover type jobs that they were for the past 40 years,” Karen Foster, a fellow at Saint Mary’s University who has studied youth employment trends.

“There was a time when you could be a shoe salesman and support a family on that income and you had that level of security — so it’s not an entirely new idea to make these jobs ‘good jobs’. But it is new compared to the past 40 years or so.”

Virtually any occupation can be unionized, so long as the workers do not have any managerial powers, said Kevin Shimmin, a national representative of private sector union UFCW Canada, which represents workers in places such as H & M, The Bay, Future Shop, Loblaw and Sobeys.

“I think the retail sector is where cutting edge and innovative organizing will happen for many years to come. It is a sector dominated by precarious, part-time jobs, with little or no security, low pay and often not enough hours. At the same time, the work force is young, highly educated and looking at organizing in creative ways,” said Mr. Shimmin.

Claire Seaborn, president of the Canadian Intern Association, said she believes that a stigma of unionization is now being lifted by young workers across the country as they become frustrated with a job market that leaves them vulnerable or insecure, with part-time work.

“There’s a power imbalance between precarious workers and employers – one that is a lot more stark than with full-time workers and for that reason precarious workers in many ways they need a union even more,” said Ms. Seaborn.

At WestJet Airlines Ltd., the Calgary-based airline where the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has said a handful of flight attendants are interested in unionization, the company has had what it calls a pro-active communication team (PACT) in place since 1999, said spokeswoman Brie Thorsteinson Ogle.

“It’s a mutually engaging process that has been successful for 14 years, so we trust the process works. The fact that we have not had to rely on a third party speaks to our ability to collaborate, and it is our opinion that the interests of WestJet and WestJetters are best served by an internal, employee-elected association,” said Ms. Ogle.

Ms. Butt believes that unionization is the key to raising the respect level of her industry. This summer she also helped organize another group of Toronto-area retail employees at a Sirens clothing store in Brampton, who in July became the latest to join UFCW Canada Local 175.

“Having Sirens on board with the union is a huge step,” she said. “It shows that there can be young leaders and not all hope is lost because these are young girls in their twenties and they want to make a change in their workplace and that fear didn’t stop them. They were able to take that step.”

Opinion: Canada’s labour model is broken

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By Brian Dijkema, Edmonton Journal July 16, 2013

 

Opinion: Canada’s labour model is broken

The Harper government needs to reshape labour relations to reflect that workers and capital both win when they work together.
Photograph by: Jacques Boissinot , THE CANADIAN PRESS

 

Pop quiz: which Canadian politician was responsible for the first piece of legislation allowing trade unions in Canada? J.S. Woodsworth? Tommy Douglas? Ed Broadbent?

The obvious answer — one might say the conservative Canadian answer — would be one of the above. The correct answer is, in fact, none of the above.

None other than Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, passed the Trade Unions Act in 1872. You read that right: it was a Conservative prime minister who first legally recognized trade unions in Canada.

That this would come as a surprise to many reflects our assumptions about the way conservatives react on the labour file, instead of leading in step with their principles. Recent efforts are a case in point.

For those who haven’t been following, the current government’s efforts in labour relations reform have been limited to nibbling at the edges via private member’s bills. Bill C-377, which sought to force labour unions to disclose to everyone, not just their members, all spending over $5,000, loans over $250, and wages of employees making more than $100,000.

The other attempt at reform was Bill C-525, which would require unions to achieve a threshold of support in workplaces of 50 per cent plus one of all employees (not just those who vote).

In other words, it would require unions to receive a mandate not currently enjoyed by any current governing party in Canada, or any government in Canada ever.

Bill C-525 didn’t make it to second reading, and Bill C-377 was deemed — by the normally compliant Senate, no less — so poorly written that it was infamously sent back to the House of Commons with amendments.

Both of these bills are efforts to solve real problems with Canadian labour unions. Union spending on fringe causes — Israel apartheid week anyone? — is worthy of scrutiny. So are many of the deceptive practices unions use to get members in the door.

But what both bills have in common is that they buy into the very adversarial mentality that many of the socialist labour unions in Canada have against conservatives. In doing so, the federal Conservatives (and conservatives) are letting the left frame the conversation instead of taking a page out of Macdonald’s book and charting their own course.

Canadian labour law has not fundamentally changed since 1944 when Canada adopted the American model based on the Wagner Act of 1935. That model is based on the false premise that workers and owners are adversaries rather than parties with different, yet entwined interests.

There are rumours the government is considering bringing back a version of C-377 this fall. Let us all hope it is not so.

The choice facing the federal government over the summer is whether to continue symbolic tinkering with a broken model that diminishes mutual respect and trust, or to substantially reshape labour relations to account for the fact that workers and capital both win when they work co-operatively.

The latter approach reflects values inherent to Conservative governments: recognition of the entwined nature of labour and capital, respect for the limited role of the state, and the value of private associations.

Framing the debate according to conservative principles of limited government with a view to increasing competition between unions would break up the current anti-conservative labour monolith and, paradoxically, lead to the development of more unions.

In other words, it would be good for workers, and good for the country. It would be a legacy worthy of Sir John A. Macdonald himself.

Brian Dijkema is program director for work and economics at Cardus, a think-tank that researches renewal of North American social architecture.

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

I’ve Always Hated The Idea Of Labor Unions, But It May Be Time To Reconsider

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Henry Blodget Dec. 2, 2012  http://www.businessinsider.com

I’ve always hated the idea of labor unions.

Why?

Several reasons.

  • They create an “us versus them” culture within companies, instead of putting everyone on the same team
  • They create a culture of entitlement
  • They restrict flexibility and hurt competitiveness
  • They drive companies to move jobs out of the country, to places where there are no unions
  • They often become career employment for their leaders, who pay themselves well (much better than the workers they’re representing)
  • They maintain ludicrous compensation and benefit levels for jobs based purely on seniority (some bartenders in one of the New York hotel unions, for example, apparently make ~$200,000 a year)
  • They force companies to treat all union employees equally, regardless of the relative skill and value of particular employees–thus reducing incentives for people to do a great job
  • Etc.

And all those are indeed negatives.

But we’ve now developed a bigger problem in this country.

Namely, we’ve developed inequality so extreme that it is worse than any time since the late 1920s.

Contributing to this inequality is a new religion of shareholder value that has come to be defined only by “today’s stock price” and not by many other less-visible attributes that build long-term economic value.

Like many religions, the “shareholder value” religion started well: In the 1980s, American companies were bloated and lethargic, and senior management pay was so detached from performance that shareholders were an afterthought.

But now the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Now, it’s all about stock performance–to the point where even good companies are now quietly shafting other constituencies that should benefit from their existence.

Most notably: Rank and file employees.

Great companies in a healthy and balanced economy don’t view employees as “inputs.” They don’t view them as “costs.” They don’t try to pay them “as little as they have to to keep them from quitting.” They view their employees as the extremely valuable assets they are (or should be). Most importantly, they share their wealth with them.

One of the big problems in the U.S. economy is that America’s biggest companies are no longer sharing their wealth with rank and file employees.

Consider the following two charts:

1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before.

Corporate Profit Margins

Business Insider, St. Louis Fed

2) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. This is closely related to the chart above. One reason companies are so profitable is that they’re paying employees less than they ever have before.

Wages To GDP

Business Insider, St. Louis Fed

When presented with these charts, many people invoke one of two arguments. First, technology is making employees irrelevant. Second, low-skill jobs command low pay.

Both of these arguments miss key points: Technology has been making some jobs obsolete for 200+ years now, but it is only recently that corporate profit margins have gone through the roof. Just because you can pay full-time employees so little that they’re below the poverty line doesn’t mean you should–especially when retention is often a problem and your profit margin is extraordinarily high.

More broadly, what’s wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong is that an obsession with a narrow view of “shareholder value” has led companies to put “maximizing current earnings growth” ahead of another critical priority in a healthy economy: Investing in human and physical capital and future growth.

If American companies were willing to trade off some of their current earnings growth to make investments in wage increases and hiring, American workers would have more money to spend. And as American workers spent more money, the economy would begin to grow more quickly again. And the growing economy would help the companies begin to grow more quickly again. And so on.

But, instead, U.S. companies have become so obsessed with generating near-term profits that they’re  paying their employees less, cutting capital investments, and under-investing in future growth.

This may help make their shareholders temporarily richer.

But it doesn’t make the economy (or the companies) healthier.

And, ultimately, as with any ecosystem that gets out of whack, it’s bad for the whole ecosystem.

So, for the sake of the economy, we have to fix this problem.

Ideally, we would fix it by getting companies to voluntarily share more of their wealth with their employees. But the “shareholder value” religion has now been so thoroughly embraced that any suggestion of voluntary sharing is viewed as heresy.

(You’ve heard all the responses: “The only duty of a company is to produce the highest possible return for its owners!” “If employees want to make more money, they should go start their own companies!” Etc. Beyond basic fairness and the team spirit of we’re-all-in-this-together, what these responses lack is any appreciation of the value of personal loyalty, retention, respect, and pride in the workforce. People love working for companies that treat them well. And they’ll go to the mat for them.)

Anyway, it would be great if companies would start sharing their wealth voluntarily. But, as yet, with a couple of notable exceptions (Apple recently gave its store employees a raise it didn’t need to give them), they’ve shown no signs of doing that.

So if companies can’t be persuaded to do this on their own, maybe it’s time to rethink our view of labor unions.

Although correlation is not causation, the chart below suggests that labor unions might be able to help induce companies to share their wealth, at least in some industries.

This chart is from EPI. It is based on the work of Piketty and Saez (the deans of inequality research).

The chart shows the correlation between the share of the national income going to “the 1%” with membership in labor unions.  What it suggests is that, as unions have declined, income inequality has soared.

Income Union Membership

EPI, Felix Salmon

Again, right now in this country, we have the painful juxtaposition of the highest corporate profit margins in history, combined with one of the highest unemployment rates in history. We also have the lowest wages in history as a percent of the economy.

That’s not good for the economy… because rich people can’t buy all the products we need to sell to have a healthy economy (they can’t eat that much food or drive that many cars, for example).

And it’s also just not right.

Healthy capitalism is not about “maximizing near-term profits.” It is about balancing the interests of several critical constituencies:

  • Shareholders
  • Customers
  • Employees
  • Society, and
  • The Environment

It’s time more of our business leaders started to understand that.