Book: Practice of Human Resource Management in Canada

Last week, I finally got a paper copy of a new textbook I co-authored, entitled the Practice of Human Resource Management in Canada. This is an open educational resource (OER) in that students can download and use the pdf version for free. If you want a paper copy, it is $39.99 (about $120 less than commercial texts). The book also offers a more nuanced view of HRM because it tackles how workers’ interests can shape effective HR practices

I first tried to write an intro HR textbook about seven years ago. Despite having a contract with a publisher and a draft written, that effort failed because my then co-author and I had an unresolvable disagreement. That was the second co-authored book project that failed that year (for different reasons) and I swore off writing books.

But then commercial publishers began getting greedy. The price of textbooks went up, including the price of e-texts. One publisher discontinued access an etext in the middle of a course (ack!). Another publisher began discontinuing etexts a year or so after new (generally unnecessary) versions of textbooks came out, forcing unnecessary course revisions.

So Jason Foster and I decided writing an OER was a good option, both in terms of managing our workloads and student costs. We’d previous written Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces together, so I knew we could get a book across the line, even though an intro HR book would be about twice as long.

It took us about eight months to write the book. We then located a publisher, went through peer review, and found funding. And then the publisher ghosted us. After four months of non response (and we still have no real idea what happened), we started again with another publisher (i.e., back through the proposal and peer review stages).

After more than three years of work, I’m pretty happy to see this out in the world and adopted into Athabasca University’s HRMT 386: Introduction to Human Resource Management starting for February (?) enrollments. It is interesting to see AU’s renewed institutional interest in OERs (largely seeking to reduce institutional costs) coupled with very little incentive or support for faculty to author them.

-- Bob Barnetson

New research on unions' impact on wages and benefits

In November, Andrew Stevens and Angele Poirier released a report that examined the union effect on wages and benefits across Canada to 2022, with the data for Saskatchewan also broken out.

Nationally, unionized workers earned an average of 11% more than non-unionized workers. There was significant provincial, gender, age, and sectoral variation. The union advantage appeared particularly pronounced for workers aged 15 to 24 (+26%) and part-time workers (+41%).

Unionized workers were also more likely to have paid sick time (80% versus 555 for nonunionized). Unionized workers were also much more likely to have employment-related pension plans (825 versus 37%) as well as other supplementary benefits.

Interestingly, non-unionized workers experienced slightly higher wage increases between 2020 and 2022. This might reflect pressure on non-union employers to improve wages in order to attract and retain staff (i.e., is a union spill-over effect). It might also reflect that union contracts (which fix compensation for a period of time) may delay increases (e.g., inflationary bumps) or unionized workers (who are very often in the public sector) may have been subject to mandated wage freezes and rollbacks by the state.

-- Bob Barnetson

Resisting company doctors through moral suasion

Unionized workers can make gains and stave off concessions by attaching costs to employer behaviour in the hope that the employer will decide to behave differently.

Most often, we think about strikes. Strikes attach primarily financial costs to employer intransigence at the bargaining table by disrupting production. If the strike causes the employer enough pain, the employer tends to compromise.

Moral suasion is a different way to attach costs to employer behaviour. Athabasca University’s (AU’s) unsuccessful efforts to impose company doctors on its academic staff provides a useful example of this tactic and its limitations.

AthabascaU’s demand for company docs

In 2018, AU pushed its workers to agree to new contract language around company doctors. Essentially, the employer wanted to be able to send a worker for a so-called independent medical examination (IME) if:

• the worker used sick leave frequently or for a prolonged period,
• the employer believed the worker was unable to do their duties due to illness or disability, or
• the employer believed a worker was mis-using their sick leave.

This proposal would give the employer a largely unfettered ability to impose and IME upon pain of discipline and/or loss of sick leave. Such a power would:

• interfere with workers being able to choose their own health-care providers,
• open the door to illegitimate employer demands for non-therapeutic medical examinations, and
• would end-run the requirement for the employer to get an arbitrator’s order to require an IME. 

Seventy-seven percent of union members were opposed to this proposal. Of particular concern to the union’s members were the possibilities of:

• worker fear of being sent to an IME might cause them to not use their sick leave when its use was medically required,
• when workplace harassment had caused a worker’s performance to deteriorate or the worker to go off sick, the employer might weaponize the IME process to further harass the sick member, and
• the medical opinion of a company-paid doctor may result in a refusal of sick leave or the alteration of work restrictions set out by the worker’s treating physician.

The employer’s rationale for this proposal was cost-savings (i.e., no arbitration hearing required). In fact, the proposal shifted costs from the university (lower financial costs) to the worker and their families (less privacy and greater stress).

There was, of course, no evidence of any meaningful level of sick leave abuse. A review of 15 years of union files (with a membership of more than 400 workers) identified one case where the university officially raised concerns about the accuracy of medical information provided to the employer. This was conern was resolved.

Pushing back on company docs

Resisting company doctors could certainly form part of the basis for a strike mandate. But there is always the risk that members might be willing to accept company-doctor language as part of a package deal (i.e., if the employer offered something good in exchange) or to avoid a strike (if company doctors was the only major issue). Given this risk, the union opted to explore a different approach first.

The company-doctor proposal was obviously repugnant. The union also suspected it was being driven by the desires of the HR shop, rather than being a core mandate from the university’s Board of Governors (which was the ultimate decision maker). These factors opened the door to applying moral pressure on Board members to abandon the proposal.

Activists identified 15 members who (1) were secure in their jobs, (2) had experience with ill-health that required medical leave, and (3) had a reasonable degree of political acumen. The union then used its membership map to divide them into five three-person groups based on pre-existing relationships.

Each team was tasked to write a five-paragraph letter to individual Board members (the union provided contact details). The first and last paragraphs were boilerplate, respectively introducing the issue and asking the Board to drop its proposal.

Each team member wrote one of the middle three paragraphs, disclosing their personal experience with medical leave and explaining how the company-doctor proposal would have affected and harmed them. The letters were heart wrenching and drove home the odious nature of the Board’s proposal.

The union coordinated the members sending their letters such that Board members received a new letter every week. The Board members eventually concluded that their negotiating team’s proposal truly was not worth pursuing because, shortly thereafter, the employer’s chief negotiator said “company doctors (suddenly!) wasn’t a hill to die on” and the proposal fell away.

Analysis

This example illustrates one (of myriad) ways that workers can attach costs to employer behaviour and, thereby, possibly change it. The costs attached by the letters were mostly emotional. Few people (even employers!) enjoy being shown how their behaviour will profoundly and personally harm others.

The Board members may also have been concerned about being publicly and personally associated with such a disgusting and harmful proposal. That threat was not contained in the letters, but was an obvious next step and was part of the union’s overall escalation strategy.

Having workers write about their very personal experiences of ill-health appeared more effective at driving home to the employer how awful the proposal was than were the union’s broader communications about the proposal. The pressure exerted by the letters was applied discretely enough that there was no real loss of face for the employer in doing so.

The union members, both those directly involved and those who simply heard about the tactic, got to see how they could take effective action to protect their own interests. This built confidence among the members in their ability to resist employer demands and advocate for themselves.

A weakness of this tactic is that it creates the possibility of a rapid reversal by the employer. For example, if the employer catches even one worker malingering or faking sick in the future, it is likely to bring this proposal back to the table. And, because the employer will feel like it got emotionally manipulated into withdrawing the earlier proposal, the employer will likely pursue the renewed proposal vigorously. In this way, both the employer and the union now have a shared interest in ensuring no workers malinger.

-- Bob Barnetson

Workplace safety versus worker privacy

Employers often struggle to balance their interest in improving workplace safety with workers’ right to privacy. For example, the history of workplace drug and alcohol testing often turns on the circumstances under which is it appropriate for an employer to require a worker to submit to testing (e.g., post incident, suspicion of impairment, randomly).

Employers often assert (and behave as if) workplace safety considerations trump workers’ privacy rights. This is good rhetorical terrain for employers to argue from because it frames opponents of testing regimes as being opposed to (or at least not prioritizing) safety.

When there is an absence of evidence to support the efficacy of initiatives like testing (which is often the case), employers can revert to some version of ”better safe than sorry” as a rationale to justify their position. This rationale runs contrary to the generally acceptable proposition that they who make a claim must substantiate it.

I recently read a 2018 arbitration decision about cognitive testing for Edmonton transit drivers that was quite interesting. You can find the full decision on canlii.org under this reference:

Amalgamated Transit Union, Local No. 569 v Edmonton (City), 2018 CanLII 82319 (AB GAA)

The nub of the case (and I’m paraphrasing pretty liberally) is there had been two bus-related pedestrian fatalities and the government regulator required the city to implement a transit driver evaluation policy. The city’s response was to implement mandatory (1) road testing and (2) cognitive testing.

The cognitive testing included a computerized screening tool. If workers scored above a threshold on the tool, they were then suspended with pay and required to undergo medical evaluation. (There was no evidence that the two fatalities were related to cognitive impairment of the drivers.) The medical testing and release of information violated these workers’ privacy.

The grievance basically asserts that the city had no legal or factual basis for implementing (1) the mandatory screening and, for those who fail the screening, (2) the follow-on medical assessment. The union also argued the cognitive screening test, having been developed primarily to screen for cognition decay in older drivers, was not a valid test for an otherwise healthy population.

In the end, the arbitration panel ruled based upon the union’s argument around the testing being unreasonable and declined to address the (rather troubling) issue of the test’s validity and reliability. What makes this case interesting is that, while the matter awaited adjudication, the employer proceeded with the testing under the “work now, grieve later” principle and we actually have results about the efficacy of the testing.

The firm providing the testing predicted that, of the 1535 drivers tested, 1-2% would be suffering from cognitive impairment (so 15 to 31 drivers, roughly). At the time of the hearing, only one driver was confirmed as having cognitive impairment and a second driver’s status was undetermined (so the true rate of cognitive impairment was 0.12%, or one-tenth the rate the testing firm asserted). The screening tool sent 88 drivers for medical assessment, of whom the vast majority were false positives. (A small number of other drivers returned to work with modest work restrictions related to other medical conditions.)

This sort of outcome (where the proponents vastly over-state the true level of risk in order to push forward with testing) is not uncommon. Random drug testing is another example where, despite decades of effort, there is no good evidence that random testing reduces injuries. Certainly, we would expect a company that is selling testing to make claims that create the appearance that their product is valuable to potential clients. And, these kinds of circumstances are why, generally speaking, we expect those who make a claim to substantiate it.

It is also interesting to note the uneven application of the better safe than sorry principle by employers.

• When it is employees who bear the cost of an OHS intervention (i.e., have their privacy invaded), employers are happy to play by better safe than sorry and not demand high levels of proof. 
• When employers must bear the cost (e.g., face disrupted production or higher material costs) because workers have concerns about unsafe working conditions or materials, employers generally demand very high levels of proof before they will alter their processes. 

This existence of this double standard speaks to which (and whose) interests are prioritized in workplace regulation.

-- Bob Barnetson

Podcast: Vriend 25 Years On

The Well Endowed Podcast is publishing a series on the 25th Anniversary of the Vriend decision. While sexual orientation had been deemed an analogous ground under s.15 of the Charter, Alberta had refused to include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground in its human rights legislation. This permitted discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by private actors. In Vriend, the Supreme Court found that this exclusion offended the Charter and should be read into human rights legislation.

Vriend was ground-breaking litigation and this multi-part podcast begins by examining how Canada and Alberta treated members of the LGBTQ2+ community in the decades leading up to 1991 (when Vriend was fire by an Alberta college because of his sexual orientation). The degree of discrimination faced by the LGBTQ2+ detailed in the first episode is, frankly, shocking.

This decision has had significant impacts for labour relations, including the Charter, human rights, immigration, and sex work.

-- Bob Barnetson

AU’s ergo program symptomatic of organizational dysfunction

Almost 100% of staff at Athabasca University (AU) work from home, at least part of the time. This is up from about 50% prior to COVID. The shift to permanent home offices was partially motivated by the cost savings associated with shifting operating costs (e.g., office space and equipment, utilities) onto workers.

The sudden move to working at home in March of 2020 due to COVID resulted in significant concerns among workers about both the financial and ergonomic implications of home work. Three years later, AU has launched new, online ergonomic training for staff.

Essentially, staff have been told to take online training and figure out how to adjust their home workplaces to be ergonomically adequate by April 30th. A key question is whether AU will fund any necessary purchases to make a home office ergonomically adequate? The answer is, of course, no.

Will there be additional funding to support any needs identified as a result of this assessment?
No. All home-office-based team members have been provided with Home Office Support Funding. This included $1,000 in 2020 and another $1,000 in 2022. Team members will be provided with an additional $800 Evergreening Fund every 6 years.

It was certainly appropriate for AU to respond to shifting operating costs onto workers in 2020 with a small, taxable payment (which might have bought a desk and chair and lamp). The taxable 2022 payment of $1000 (or $800) was negotiated in lieu of a wage increase so was essentially self-funding by workers.

In both cases, that money has already been spent by most workers. For this reason, it is not available to resolve any current ergonomic issues. (This reflects that AU rolled out the training and payment in the wrong order.)

Overall, this initiative is pretty typical of AU:

• A long-standing problem is addressed belatedly and inadequately.
• The workers are made responsible for solving the employer’s problem (i.e., unsafe workplaces).
• The employer gaslights the workers about it, in this case by referencing financial assistance that is only available if you have a time machine.

So what are AU workers likely going to do? Some staff will take the training, either because they are rule followers or because they are being explicitly paid to do so (e.g., tutors). I expect the rest of staff won’t bother to take it or will take it but not implement many of the recommended changes because it will require them to spend their own money to solve an institutional problem.

This program (which is, at least superficially, a good idea) is a microcosm of how AU operates. Essentially, the administration “talks away” problems instead of addressing them and staff learn to tune out or superficially comply. The result is widespread distrust of leaders and staff disengagement.

The aftermath of the 2022 staff engagement survey results (released two weeks ago) pretty much mirrors this. Staff disengagement has been identified as such an issue it was added to the institutional threat register at last week's Board of Governor's meeting. That doesn't mean anything is being done to fix it, though.

Senior executives are heavily messaging that the results are “sobering” but not actually doing anything about it. This is the performative “talking away” of problems that fixes nothing. Staff are, of course, onto this strategy, with only 30% believing senior leaders will do anything, because successive executives have talked away problems for years and years:



Middle managers seem to be taking two approaches to the results. Some are earnestly (I think) asking for staff feedback. This ask is basically flopping because of the long-standing “big bosses who cried wolf” dynamic to problems. For example, in my meeting of people who are basically lead hands, there was just dead silence in response to the ask for feedback. Others middle managers are framing the results as a consequence of inadequate communications.

It is true that gaslighting and victim blaming are communications strategies that are inadequate. But, since this approach has gone on for most of a decade and intensified over time, it is likely this is an intentional strategy, not some sort of oopsie. Last week’s framing of engagement by the HR director as “good” because it encourages staff to work harder is essentially an admission that the employer doesn’t care about staff except as the means to an end.

For staff, disengagement (whether active or passive) is a very sensible response to a traumatizing workplace. The other response I’m seeing is people over-engaging, which is leading to burn out. This is pretty hard to watch, but perhaps some people need to hit rock bottom before they’ll change their behaviour. I know that I did.

-- Bob Barnetson

Athabasca U staff engagement results are predictably terrible

This morning, Athabasca University released some of the results from its Autumn 2022 staff survey. The survey was about staff engagement, engagement means how willing staff are to put in discretionary effort to benefit the organization. AU framing its interest in workers as entirely instrumental was unexpected honest and went over poorly.

The basic talking points of the presenters were

• The data is four months old (i.e., things may not be as bad as the results suggest!).
• There is high trust among co-workers.
• All staff need to work hard and take responsibility for reversing these poor results.

This framing elides that staff fundamentally do not trust AU senior leaders (see below), who play a pretty important role in creating the circumstances in which staff might (or might not) be able to work effectively. Anyhow, onto the results (apologies for the poor resolution; you can click on them for larger images). There was a 70% response rate, which is higher than sector norms.



Overall, about half of staff appear engaged. The biggest thing to note are the ~20% drop in that numbers since 2020. There was no explanation offered for this change but key events during that time include COVID (massive workload increases), forced relocation to home offices, efforts to bust the faculty association and deprive people of pensions, terrible wage settlements after a near strike, and using staff as hostages in a fight with the government. Given this, it is not surprising that many staff are just throwing up their hands and checking out.

Scores were broken out by different dimensions of engagement. Basically, people have good feelings about their coworkers and immediate managers. They have bad feelings about the senior leadership and how well the organization lives its values, focuses on learners, and innovates. Again, the drops really tell the tale of the deterioration since 2020.



Only about half of staff believe the institution lives its i-CARE values. There have been 11- to 18-point drops since 2020. Honestly, I’m surprised the drops have not been larger.

These results show pretty clearly that the staff see the gaps between values and actions as occurring primarily at the leadership levels.

In terms of organizational culture, these are some worrying results about caring, safety, and consultation. Again, it’s the leadership of the organization that primarily controls these aspects of the organization. The idea that staff can change the culture through some sort of personal-responsibility magic is just gaslight.



The innovation results are also quite negative. Again, look at the drops over time. I would say this manifests itself organizational in a sense that people are just giving up trying to solve problems and improve processes because it is just hopeless. Instead, some people are giving up and others are working themselves sick trying to protect students from the impact (which is not a sustainable option).

This is probably the most important slide. The assessment of senior leadership is terrible. Naturally, these results got less than a minute of discussion. On almost every dimension, the ratings are net negative (positive < negative) and, where there is historical data, it again shows profound drops over time. In many cases, AU’s executive is scoring at close to half of the sector average.

This is pretty clear evidence that staff see profound leadership failure. Only 29% agree that senior leaders inspire employees, and only 32% think senior leaders effectively establish priorities, do what they say they will do, and are adequately visible. This is a clear call for a housecleaning in the executive suite.

Only 30% think senior leadership will act on the issues identified in this survey. This was almost immediately shown to be true when, after the results were presented, the president, the VPA and the acting chief human resources officer all leaned hard on the message that the issue was a communications problem and the staff need to pull up our socks and work harder to help stem the bleeding of enrollments. While there was some lip service to the results as “sobering”and "removing barriers" to staff increasing discretionary effort, there was no real plan to address the problems or any sense that the executive was owning the results.

This is pretty consistent with AU’s past engagement surveys (2020 and 2019). The time between surveys was increased to two years to allow for a meaningful consideration and response by the executive. There was, predictably, none. And today’s presentation suggests AU’s executive are going to continue just try to “talk away” bad news instead of changing their behaviours.

That doesn’t sound like a very effective strategy to me. The staff reactions I've heard so far include anger at the victim blaming, disappointment at the vapid sloganeering, and regret for the hour of time we all wasted listening to the results.

-- Bob Barnetson

Notice of termination vs severance

One of the challenges of teaching students about interpreting collective agreements is the effect of clauses is often very hard to know because they can interact with other clauses in the collective agreement as well as other regimes of employment law. As part of a research project, I came across a 2011 decision that is a fun read about termination notice and severance pay.

The decision is:

Canadian Energy Workers Association v ATCO I-Tek Business Services Ltd, 2011 CanLII 81659 (AB GAA)

You can find the decision on canlii.org by searching the CanLII number (81659). CanLii is an excellent repository of Canadian law.

The basic facts are these:

• The employer was outsourcing a significant number of positions and this resulted in significant number of terminations.
• The collective agreement gave the affected workers rights to (1) working notice (or pay in lieu of notice) under Article 30 and (2) severance under Article 32 and a Letter of Agreement.
• The union argued that the permanent workers were entitled to benefit from both sets of rights; the employer argued that workers were only entitled to severance.
• (There was a second issue around a worker signing a release that isn’t really all that interesting.)

The union’s argument was (loosely, I’m paraphrasing in the interest of space) notice is designed to give workers a chance to find alternative employment while severance is compensation for their investment in their workplace that is lost upon termination. Essentially, these two are complementary, rather than alternative, entitlements.

The employer’s argument (again, loosely) was that the entitlements are mutually exclusive and applicable in different circumstances and this the benefits do not compound. Reading the provisions as complementary creates an excessive benefit for the workers.

I won’t spoil the ending for you. The panel’s decision flows from an interesting exploration of the purpose of each of the rights in the contract, the language used, and the effect they have for different employee groups. This decision is a relatively simple example of this kind of inquiry, that occurs in many contract interpretation grievances.

The ultimate decision (that I found to be surprising) highlights how parties can negotiate provisions that each finds acceptable without mutually working through the actual operation of those provisions. This can reflect the nature of bargaining (where ambiguous language may be a strategy to, for example, defer a fight), the complexity of language (which can give rise to legitimately different interpretations), and the impact of practical constraints (e.g., bargaining is often done under the gun by very tired people who sometimes make errors of omission).

-- Bob Barnetson

Statutory law versus the collective agreement, a fun example

When we teach HR and LR students about the web of rules that regulate employment, we often focus our attention on the various sources of rules (e.g., common law, statutory law, contracts and collective agreements). This reflects that students need to (1) build a mental framework in order to understand how employment law operates and (2) develop some foundational knowledge of what the rules actually are (e.g., what are the basic rules around firing someone?).

One of the topics that gets glossed over in this sort of introduction is that, sometimes, what the law means (in practice) isn’t clear. Or, at least, an employer and worker/union might have a different interpretation of what the law required or permits. This can reflect legitimate differences of opinion, differing interests, and, sometimes, apparent conflict between rules from different sources of law. In the interests of time (and understanding that a survey course is just an introduction), we tend to wave this complexity aside with “disputes are remitted to an adjudicative body for resolution.”

Sometimes, it is worthwhile having a look at a case to see just how this adjudication works. As part of a research project, I came across an interesting arbitration decision from 2009 that is a fun read. The decision is:

Edmonton Space & Science Foundation v Civic Service Union 52, 2009 CanLII 90156 (AB GAA)

You can find the decision on canlii.org by searching the CanLII number (90156). CanLii is an excellent repository of Canadian law.

The basics facts are these:

• A worker was employed at the Edmonton Space and Science Centre and was a part of a union.
• The collective agreement permitted the employer to terminate a worker only when the employer had just cause. This is much more restrictive than the termination provisions set out in the Alberta Employment Standards Code (wherein workers can be sacked for no reason so long as notice is provided).
• The worker resigned, giving a month’s notice. The employer doubted how diligent she would be in performing her duties during the resignation notice period and purported to terminate her with one week’s notice under the Employment Standards Code.
• The worker grieved that the employer had no right to do so, given the collective agreement limited terminations to just-cause scenarios.

So, we have here basically a fight over whether the collective agreement trumps the Employment Standards Code or vice versa. After listening to the evidence and arguments of the parties (including refereeing a preliminary bun fight, where the employer wanted (among other things) to force the worker to narc out which member of the management team leaked that the worker was getting the sack), the arbitrator distilled the matter down into two questions (he listed three slightly different questions, but they are more granular than we care about):

1. Was the griever terminated without just cause by the employer?
2. Can the employer rely upon the Employment Standards Code to override its obligations under the collective agreement?

I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that (1) the employer’s argument was more inventive that I would have guessed (at the beginning of the decision, I laughed aloud at the employer’s position), and (2) the arbitrator does a good job of walking everyone through his thinking about how these two different sources of rights operate in this particular fact situation and how their seeming conflict can be resolved.

This decision is a good example of how employment-law sausage is actually made when the parties can’t agree and when there are multiple sources of rights that may conflict.

-- Bob Barnetson

Should I take a job at Athabasca University?

Every year, I receive phone calls from a couple of dozen candidates considering taking a job at Athabasca University (AU). Usually, these folks find me through this blog or word of mouth.

So, as the academic job-hunting season begins, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write down the pros and cons of taking a job at AU. These comments are mostly directed at folks considering a professorial job.

PROS

Working from home: Pre-pandemic, the vast majority of academic staff worked from home offices). Although the majority of staff live in Alberta, recently staff have been permitted to work anywhere in Canada. This means you can stay in your home community. 

At the time of writing, the university’s Board is engaged in an ill-chosen bun fight with the provincial government over the ongoing loss of jobs in the town of Athabasca (where the university’s headquarters is located). The government wanted, at one point, 65% of staff to work from there (despite there being inadequate housing stocks and office space). It is unclear how this dispute is going to play out or how it will affect where academic staff can live. You’ll definitely want to ask about this in your interview.

Setting your own schedule: For the most part, instruction at AU is asynchronous and text mediated. Since you don’t have to appear at a fixed time each week to lecture, you can largely set your own schedule. Start early or late. Work in the middle of the night. Take your kids to school or you mom to the doctor. As long as you get your work done and show up for the small number of fixed meetings, you basically can organize your life however you want.

Good benefits and pension plans: The benefits plan for faculty is pretty good, particularly in terms of vision, eyecare, and drug coverage (although costs are reimbursed, not pre-paid).

The pension plan is also pretty good, although you’ll pay about 11% of your salary into the plan. You can collect a full pension when (1) you are at least 55, and (2) your age and years of services equal 80. A full pension is 70% of your average salary during your five best consecutive years of employment. You can take a reduced pension any time after 55 if you have not yet met the 80 factor.

Tenure and promotion is the norm: The vast majority of hires (>99%) can expect to get tenure and promotion. Based on my 18 years of experience, I’d go so far as to say you have to actively and repeatedly fuck-up not to get tenured. That is not to say you don’t have to work—just that the bar is set at a very manageable level.

Faculty are typically hired with a four-year probationary appointment. After a successful review, you receive tenure. You can choose when to apply for promotion in rank. If you apply for and receive promotion before your tenure review, then you also automatically get tenure. Promotion is also rarely denied although the process is more rigorous than just tenure.

Financial stability: AU is financially stable (despite a history of the administration crying insolvency). In 2021/22, AU posted a surplus of $10.4m on expenses of $150.6m. This was the sixth straight surplus and ninth surplus in 10 years. AU has an accrued surplus (i.e., cash in the bank) of $46.9m.

Government funding of AU has been stable over the past few years. Only about 35% of institutional revenue comes from grants (the largest chunk is tuition based). Enrollments have been falling (about 9% per year for last two years) but the nature of AU’s business model is that the costs of revenue losses due to declining enrollment are borne mostly by the tutor pool (i.e., permanent, part-time academics with variable teaching loads).

CONS

Poor wages: Overall, wages are low and have fallen significantly behind inflation. The table below compares the compounded cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) to faculty wages and Alberta inflation from 2013 to 2022. Basically, the purchasing power of staff wages at AU has dropped by ~20% over 10 years.

Going forward, the COLA for adjustment for 2023 will total between 2.75% and 3.25%. Unfortunately, inflation is presently running about 8%, so expect another big loss in purchasing power.

Compounding the erosion of purchasing power is that starting salaries in nominal dollars are roughly the same as they were in 2007. There is also evidence of a gender wage gap (but zero interest by the institution in addressing it). While the institution will often say that salaries are negotiable, in practice that is not the case.

Poor Treatment and Low Morale: The treatment of staff by the university is, in a word, awful. I’ve been on the union grievance committee for a decade. While I can’t tell you everything I’ve seen, here are a few illustrative examples of how individual staff have been treated:

• AU knew it disciplined staff member improperly but took no action to fix. 
• AU accused a staff member of faking sick leave while his spouse was dying of cancer 
• AU forced a staff member to delay maternity leave or lose their sabbatical. 
• AU terminated nurses’ market supplements during a pandemic with no notice and then denied they were doing so. 
• AU dissolved a promotion committee with no cause 
• AU re-opened its campuses with no effective COVID protocols in place

Over the past five years, the employer has twice driven collective bargaining to impasse and the verge of a strike by demanding huge concessions. In between those rounds of bargaining, the employer also tried union busting with an effort to carve two-thirds of the union’s members out of the bargaining unit (and thus out of the pension plan).

The most recent survey of staff (Spring 2022) by the faculty association finds only 20% of staff trust the senior executive and only 39% agree with the statement that “my morale is high.” The employer no longer does staff surveys because the results were so consistently bad.

Workloads have also gone up, particularly for administrative staff, due to COVID. More subjectively, I’m seeing a widespread withdrawal of citizenship behaviours and effort by my colleagues. Essentially, they are realizing AU doesn’t care for them and are (understandably) reciprocating in kind. The upside is the union is tenacious, fights hard, and has strong member support.

Isolation: Working from home with essentially no in-person contact with co-workers or students is extremely isolating and may not be for everyone. Further, AU has no functional orientation process for new staff and most of the institution’s processes do not operate in the way that the various policies and procedures (often decades old) say that they do.

COVID has limited the opportunity for staff to meet socially (which is how we used to cope with the isolation and get our questions answered). In theory, more experienced colleagues in your area should provide you with an orientation and social introductions. In practice, the experiences of new hires is very uneven.

So, with those thoughts and the poor state of the academic job market in mind, one approach to a job offer might be:

• if you have no other option, take the AU job but stay on the market, and
• if you have other options, give the pros and cons of AU very careful thought.

-- Bob Barnetson

Bill 32 reduces workers' overtime choice and pay

This blog previous appeared on the Canadian Law of Work Forum.

Alberta is proposing changes to its Employment Standard Code that would permit employers to evade paying overtime (OT) premiums to workers by stripping workers of their right to refuse to participate in overtime averaging agreements. This has the potential to move hundreds of millions of dollars in OT pay from workers’ pockets to employers’ profits.

Background

Like all Canadian jurisdictions, Alberta has set limits on hours of work. In most cases, Alberta restricts work to a 12-hour window (ESC, s.16(1)). Alberta also normally requires that employers pay an overtime premium (1.5 times wage rate) if workers work for more than 8 hours in a day or 44 hour in a week (ESC, s.21). The policy rationale for limiting hours of work and requiring OT premiums centre on ensuring workers’ quality of life, reducing the safety risks associated with worker fatigue, and incentivizing additional hiring.

Alberta also allows employers and workers to enter into overtime averaging agreement (ESA, s.23.1(1)). Averaging agreements allow an employer to average the hours worked by a worker over a period of time when calculating whether the worker has met the weekly OT threshold and is entitled to the OT wage premium. Presently, overtime agreements can specify averaging over a period ranging from one to twelve weeks. Averaging agreements allow for workers and employers to agree to compressed work weeks (e.g., four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days) without triggering the OT premiums.

Any overtime paid out at the end of the averaging period is paid at a rate of 1.5 times normal wages. Although the legislation is slightly unclear on this, government policy asserts that time off taken in lieu of OT is paid at straight time. Here is the government’s existing summary of the average agreement device.

Proposed OT Changes in Bill 32

Bill 32 (Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act) was introduced in the legislature in early July. If passed, this bill will make a large number of changes to both the Employment Standards Code and the Labour Relations Code. Relevant to this post, Bill 32 will allow employers to impose OT averaging agreements on workers with two weeks notice (Bill 32, s.1(11)) unless there is a collective agreement in effect. Presently, workers must agree to overtime averaging.

Bill 32 will also increase the period of time over which OT can be averaged from 12 weeks to 52 weeks and do away with the two-year limit to such agreement and loosen the rules around changes in work schedules (which otherwise require 24-hours of notice).

These changes provide employers with oppportunities to evade paying OT premiums. For example, the weekly overtime threshold is 44 hours. If a worker works a 60-hour week (say six 10-hour days), they would normally be eligible for 16 hours of pay at over-time rates. Under an overtime averaging agreement, those 16 hours could be averaged (i.e., spread across) up to 52 weeks (roughly 20 minutes per week). This would spread the OT far enough not to engage the 44-hour weekly OT threshold (the daily OT threshold can be evaded under averaging agreement).

Under such an agreement, a worker could work up to 208 OT hours a year (i.e., more than five extra weeks) and the employer would never have to pay any OT premiums. The changes effectively guarantee that very few, if any, non-union Alberta workers will ever receive overtime pay, unless the employer agrees to pay it as an act of altruism or a job perk. Further, when a worker is entitled to be paid OT under an averaging agreement, that pay may be delayed until the end of the averaging period (now as long as 52 weeks).

Bill 32 also compounds 2019 changes to how banked OT is paid out. Under those changes, a worker who enters into an OT banking arrangement (which is notionally voluntary, but practically up to the employer) and wishes to take banked time as time off with pay (instead of being paid out), does so at straight time.

Analysis

The amendments proposed in Bill 32 will enhance employers’ opportunities to avoid paying OT premiums. When the government makes it easier for to require over-time work without paying workers the over-time premium (as it is with Bill 32), the government is effectively transferring money from workers’ pockets to employers’ profits. Statistics Canada data from 2018suggests that there is roughly $3.3 billion in over-time premiums annually.

Rationally, every employer should enter into an OT averaging agreement. Not every employer will be able to do so. Unionized employers will remain subject to whatever their collective agreement says (this covers about 20% of the workforce in Alberta). Other employer may not be sophisticated enough to operate an agreement. There is no credible way to estimate the value of the transfer from workers to employers, but the annual amount is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Minister Copping framed these changes as “expanding choice for workers”in a Calgary Herald op-ed, noting:

…some workers may prefer to work four 10-hour days, instead of five eight-hour days. Then, they could receive three-day weekends. But changes made by the previous NDP government effectively made it difficult for employers to set up these schedules… .

This is the precise spin that conservative governments across the country have used to justify legal rules that permit employers to avoid overtime pay. In this framing, Copping fails to note that (1) under the present system, workers (as a group) have the opportunity to choose (or refuse) flexible schedule, and (2) Bill 32 takes away that choice by vesting decision-making with the employer. He also ignores that employers can manipulate this system to evade paying overtime premiums and that that long shifts increase the risk of injury to workers.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: COVID anxiety and cannabis use at work

The Institute for Work and Health (IWH) does some really excellent research. They also do an excellent job of making that research accessible to the public. The IWH’s Spring 2020 issue of At Work is just out and contains a bunch of interesting pieces.

• Anxiety among heath care workers: Nearly 60% of health care workers surveyed in April reported levels of anxiety surpassing an accepted threshold level of clinical report. A key factor contributing to this anxiety is the unavailability of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the workplace. Nearly half of respondents indicated that fewer than half of their PPE needs were being met.
• Cannabis use at work stable: The legalization of cannabis in 2018 has not resulted in higher reporting of use in the workplace. Usage rates in the two hours before work, at work, during work breaks, or at the workplace at the end of a work shift, remained at 8%. Interestingly, 16% of respondents who used cannabis indicated they used it to manage a work-related injury or illness. Employer who were reported as having policies on substance use increased from 63% to 79%

The IWH also provides issue briefings. The most recent examines what Ontario employers spend on health and safety. On average, expenditures were $1303 per worker per year. There was wide variation between sectors, with good sectors spending much more than service sectors. Spending was heavily weighted to organizational management and supervision functions (58%) and staff training (22%)

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: I wish that they'd sack me.

It has been a pretty tough year for Alberta public-sector workers. After two years of wage-freezes under the New Democrats, the newly elected United Conservative Party legislative intervened in collective agreements to stall wage arbitrations and then demanded rollbacks of 2 to 5%. There have also been hiring freezes and more roll backs and layoffs are just around the corner.

This has had a deleterious effect on morale across the public sector. While many people likely shrug, declining morale tends to pre-sage declining effort, growing use of sick time (due to stress), and a slow trickle of departures. This intensifies the stress on those who remain and results in a negative feedback loop.

Chumbawamba’s  "I Wish That They'd Sack Me" pretty much sums up much of the conversation at the holiday parties I attended this year.

Six in the morning don't want to wake
Sun laying low and the world sleeping late
Hate like the river runs heavy and deep
Oh I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep

Five days from seven the week's hardly mine
The alarm clock's gone over to enemy lines
Waste my time working for cowards and creeps
Oh I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep

Rain strikes the window heralds the day
Rain won't you wash these eight hours away?
Rain feeds the river runs heavy and deep
Oh I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep

Birds at my window sing in the dawn
By the time that I'm home all this day will be gone
Spend my life sowing what others will reap
Oh I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep

Rain strikes the window heralds the day
Rain won't you wash these eight hours away?
Rain feeds the river runs heavy and deep
Oh I wish that they'd sack me and leave me to sleep

-- Bob Barnetson

Athabasca U's new worker safety training is terrible

On June 1, 2018, changes to Alberta’s Occupational Health and Safety Act took effect. A key change was the requirement for employers with 20 or more workers to have an OHS program. The OHS program must include a safety orientation and training for workers (s.37(1)(g)).

The content of this training is not specified beyond the requirement in ss.3(1)(b) and 3(2) that workers must be aware of their rights and duties and of any health and safety issues arising from the work being conducted.

Athabasca University failed to comply with this training requirement and received a compliance order in late 2018. In late July of 2019 (i.e., 14 months late), the university rolled out its new OHS training. Basically, AU bought access to an online self-paced training product and demanded all employees complete it within 10 days.

Hilariously, the rollout by HR looked like a phishing attack. So, as they’ve been trained, many staff deleted the email unread, and IT immediately blocked access to the website. But at least we know the IT security training is working!

When things eventually shook out, I took the training offered by AU. It is basically a online powerpoint with 118 screens, a few simple activities, and a 10-question multiple-choice test at the end. It took me about 20 minutes to read everything and complete the test (10/10!).

There are numerous shortcomings with this training. Most obviously, this training lacks any applicability to most AU employees, with lengthy sections early on about due diligence (an employer topic, focused on reducing liability for injury) and hand tools and machinery (relevant to about 3 employees). Providing clearly irrelevant training is a sure-fire way to trigger learner disengagement. You’d think this is a dynamic Canada’s leader in distance education might be aware of.

Not surprisingly, I have heard multiple reports of people getting fed up and clicking through the slides as fast as possible and just doing the activities and tests based upon common sense. Given the generic and largely irrelevant nature of the content, I don’t imagine AU cares about this. This training is clearly about making AU minimally (and finally!) compliant with the OHS Act, rather than actually improving safety or giving workers useful information or skills.

There are several places where the training clearly blames the workers for injuries and prescribes injury-prevention techniques that completely ignore the root cause of injury and the hierarchy of controls. For example, the slide below (used under fair dealing provisions) notes that equipment can cause hand injuries but the most common cause is employee error (boredom, inattentiveness, distraction).



While it is easy to identify the proximate (i.e., immediate) cause of injury, to reduce injury we have to look at the root cause. Specifically, why are employees bored, distracted or inattentive? The answer here is found in the way the employer has designed the job to make it boring, overwhelming, or disengaging. But fixing the root cause (i.e., eliminating the hazard by designing better jobs) is way harder and more expensive than simply blaming the employees.

The training then goes on to say cuts and lacerations are among the most common injuries. “This is even true of secretaries, who can be cut by paper edges and punctured by staplers, scissors and thumbtacks.” Setting aside the anachronistic term for administrative assistants, suggesting “even secretaries” can get hurt is deeply insulting.

Administrative staff are some of the most at-risk for injuries due to the repetitive nature of their work (e.g., RSIs and other ergonomic-related injuries) and their relative lack of power (e.g., leading to harassment by coworkers). This part of the training was profoundly tone deaf to the realities of Athabasca University.

The training contains a number of elements that several staff have found objectionable. For example, the slide below shows a man forcing a female to photocopy her face (I think—that’s the consensus, anyways).



This is (1) a ridiculous example of violence that (2) both obscures and trivializes actual forms of harassment and violence faced by AU employees and that (3) several workers have found extremely triggering. Is this seriously the best imagery that a professional training organization could come up with?

Similarly, the section on workplace violence is headlined by this image:



Now, I expect that many AU employees have idly fantasized about doing this. But it is not representative of the actual issues faced by AU employees. The most likely kind of violence at AU is verbal and directed at front-line and support staff (who are mostly women). I’m not suggesting that physical violence should be ignored or that women can’t act violently. The point is that this cartoonish representation of violence trivializes the issue by showing us an uncommon and frankly unlikely example.

The training does touch on the issue of working alone, which is important, as half of AU 1100 employees work from home offices. It recommends some sort of check-in procedure. Alberta’s OHS Code actually requires more than that when workers work by themselves and cannot be seen or heard by people capable of rendering help (which is the case for many AU home workers). AU is, in fact, probably in violation of this requirement. The irony of flagging working alone as a risk but AU doing nothing about it is not lost on home workers.

Moving on, the OHS Act requires employers to make employees aware of both their rights and obligations. There is a fair bit of information on employee obligations but only really two screens that deal with employee OHS rights. One lists the rights and the other briefly discusses how employees go about refusing unsafe work.

I expect this meets the minimal requirements under the Code, but it really does little to empower workers. That makes sense since employers generally don't want workers asking questions like “why is the fire hose missing?” The desire to keep workers subservient also likely explains why there is no mention of unions in the training.

The training ends with three slides addressing injury and return to work. The role of AU’s various unions in return to work (as set out in policy) is absent in the training. Further, the training mentioned requirements for communication set out in Bill C-99. I have no idea what is in reference to.

The only thing I could find was some 1996 legislation in Ontario (Bill 99, the Workers’ Compensation Reform Act). This has no application in Alberta or to Athabasca University (although recent changes to Alberta’s Workers’ Compensation Act may be relevant). You’d kinda think a professional training firm or AU’s own OHS staff might have caught such a basic error?

The activities and test in the training were insulting and poorly designed. Consider this activity to test whether trainees have understood the section on personal protective equipment (PPE):



Even if you have never taken any OHS training, surely you could figure out which piece of PPE is best way to protect your HAND when you handle a hot item. (Hint: it is not the boot). The question itself is deeply insulting: a grade 2 student could answer this correctly so asking adults to do it tells them that the trainer thinks they are morons. As a way to self-test workers’ knowledge, this activity provides only the most superficial indication of whether workers understand the requirement for and use of PPE.

Similarly, the test questions include things like:

• True or false: you should check the back seat for creepy dudes before getting in your car. 
• If the ladder is missing a rung you should: (a) fix with duct tape, (b) step-over the missing rung carefully, or (c) get it fixed.
• True or false: It’s cool to climb up shelves if you can't find a ladder.

These questions provide (at best) a superficial assessment of worker knowledge about their rights and how to handle safety issues. Any rando at the mall could pass this test without ever having seen the training. And, indeed, that is basically what is happening with employees—people are ignoring the training because it sucks.

No one really benefits from superficial compliance with the law. Workers remain at risk and the employer will see disengagement continue to rise (negatively affecting productivity). The lousy training is just the latest issue in HR with OHS and return to work. It is probably time to clean house and bring in new staff.

-- Bob Barnetson