More on COVID and OHS

Back in September, I blogged about how Alberta’s OHS inspectors seemed unwilling to address uncontrolled aerosol hazards in a workplace. My suspicion was that they and public-sector employers were facing political pressure from the government to ignore the risk posed by COVID to workers.

In October, an Alberta court ruled that the Minister of Education’s direction to school boards banning mandatory masking was ultra vires (she would need to enact a regulation). A month later, the UCP cabinet passed a regulation banning masking mandates as well as barring schools from switching to online-only classes. 

At the time this regulation was passed, schools were seeing unprecedented levels of staff and student absenteeism due to illness (due to a combination of COVID, RSV, and influenza—all airborne illnesses). Barring masking and online classes removed two very effective ways employers can control the spread of these diseases and protect workers (and children) from serious (and potentially fatal) illness.

Yesterday, Premier Danielle Smith announced that MLAs are calling organizations that are in receipt of government funding and asking them to rescind mandatory vaccine mandates. (At this point, vaccination provides modest protection against contracting COVID but does a good job attenuating the consequences of getting COVID. This still makes vaccination a useful component of any hazard--control strategy.).

According to CBC, Smith said:

"For instance, the Arctic Winter Games wanted $1.2 million from us to support their effort and they were discriminating against the athletes, telling them they had to be vaccinated," Smith said at a news conference in Edmonton on Monday.

"So we asked them if they would reconsider their vaccination policy in the light of new evidence and they did."

There was no indication what “new evidence” was offered to this organization. And, while no formal policy linking receipt of funding to rescinding vaccine mandates appears to exist (yet), the implicit threat to current and future funding is pretty clear.

At this point, I think the data is clear that public-sector employers have been told to (and, in some cases, legally enjoined from) taking the steps necessary to control occupational diseases. The government is also likely interfering in the enforcement of OHS laws (although the evidence here is more anecdotal). Not surprisingly, the result is a high level of avoidable work-related illness:



The data in the table above understates COVID claims in the public-sector because teachers are, for the most part, outside of the ambit of workers’ compensation legislation in Alberta.

What can workers do? Well, worker can wear masks, although single-person masking is much less effective than group masking. Workers might also get together and agree to group masking in the absence of employer support.

Work-refusal are also an option. But, since OHS seems unwilling to engage with aerosol hazards, refusals are likely to only work if they are carried out by a group that is prepared to risk sanction for engaging in an illegal strike. I see no appetite for supporting this kind of job action in Alberta’s labour movement.

Finally, workers can remember that the UCP was happy to sacrifice their health and their lives (and the health and lives of their children) in order to cater to anti-vax voters and cast their ballot in the next election with that in mind.

-- Bob Barnetson

Cargill as a teaching case

A friend and I were chatting the other day about the ongoing occupational health and safety (OHS) problems at the Cargill meat-processing plant in High River. More than half of the 2000 workers at the plant have contracted COVID-19 and, subsequently, spread it to family members. One worker and one family member have died.

Cargill would make an interesting teaching case for an OHS class because it exemplifies so many of the tensions and trends that OHS practitioners have to grapple with. In no particular order and off the top of my head:

1. Hazard control: Workplace design is an important factor in this outbreak (close proximity) and the employer had chosen controls (basically PPE) that are at the bottom of the hierarchy of controls (cheapo and less effective) to avoid having to redesign the work.

2. Internal responsibility system: Workers flagged COVID concerns to the employer early in the pandemic and the employer under-responded, resulting in worker injury. This is evidence of the limited effectiveness of the IRS.

3. State inspection: Alberta’s inspection (via FaceTime) of the plant in response to complaints was inadequate and green-lit the employer for continued operations when the plant wasn’t safe. This is evidence that Alberta’s inspection regime is basically ineffective (this pattern is evident elsewhere in Canada).

4. Refusals: While Cargill workers are not yet refusing unsafe work, refusals in COVID are being denied in several jurisdictions. This demonstrate the practical weakness of workers’ safety rights, which are individual. The right to collective action (including mid-term strikes) might be much more effective at protecting workers.

5. Penalties: We’ll have to see how the government’s investigation plays out, but I would bet Cargill gets off with effectively no sanctions. Creating a law that fails to punish likely contributes to employer’s disregarding the law.

6. Injury recognition and disease: Some forms of injury have greater recognition than other. Employer responses to COVID have been inadequate, in part because injury causation is a bit murky (did you get it at work or in the community?). WCB compensation is also going to be interesting to watch.

7. Precarious work: Broadly speaking, employment precarity appears to increase workers’ exposure to COVID. Cargill’s workers, although unionized and eligible for CERB during the shut down, face profound economic pressure to return to work.

8. Precarious citizenship: The Cargill workers who are temporary foreign workers have effectively no choice but to go back to work for Cargill because of their restricted labour mobility. This is a good example of intersectionality where precarious employment and precarious citizenship compound workers’ vulnerability to employer misbehaviour.

9. Racialized workers: Most Cargill workers are either new resident or temporary foreign workers. Some of the discourse around this outbreak has been racist, with efforts to blame cultural practices (which are really just rational responses to economic exploitation) for the spread of the disease.

10. Public health: There isn’t a bright line between occupational and public health hazards. COVID caught at work has spread into the community and into other workplaces. But the linkages between OHS and public health have been limited. And public health’s engagement with employers has seemed naïve.

11. Profit: The underlying driver of Cargill’s behaviour has been maintaining production (and thus profit-making). Some of the costs of this are being externalized onto workers in the form of ill health.

This case would make a fascinating teaching case to carry through an entire OHS course. It also suggests that things at Cargill are so bad that it reveals Alberta’s OHS system as a sham.

-- Bob Barnetson

Back to the future: Alberta introduces performance-based funding

Earlier this week, Alberta announced it would be implementing a new funding model. This model links up to 40% of institutional funding to performance on various targets. The Minister claims “[t]his is a new and completely transformative funding model.” This claim both is and isn’t true.

It isn’t true as Alberta (and other jurisdictions) experimented with performance-based funding in the late 1990s and Ontario is back at this. Alberta eventually abandoned performance-based funding, at least in part, because it was administratively burdensome and institutions could do little to improve their performance where they did not meet the targets.

The Minister’s statement is true in that the size and punitive approach of the new model has not been seen before in Alberta. The 1990s model provided a small amount of additional funding if performance target were met. The current model places significant amount of current funding (up to 40% by 2023) in jeopardy if targets are not met.

The exact institutional performance metrics have not been decided (or so we’re told). But a list of possible measures was included:

• graduate employment rate
• median graduate income
• graduate skills and competencies
• work-integrated learning opportunities
• administrative expense ratio
• sponsored research revenue
• enrolment (including potential targets for domestic students, international students and under-represented learners)

These metrics will, according to the Minister, “help ensure students are set up for success by encouraging institutions to produce job-ready graduates.”

It is hard to assess an incomplete proposal, but here are a few thoughts:

Performance measures are conceptual technologies, in that they shape what issues we think about and how we think about them. For example, assessing the employment rate and income of graduates emphasizes the labour-market training role performed by post-secondary institutions. Not assessing other roles (e.g., developing an informed and critical populace) obscures these other roles.

Continuing with this example, measuring graduates’ employment rates and incomes also suggests (however implicitly) that institutions have some control over these outcomes. Certainly institutions can (to some minor degree) influence these outcomes based upon which programs are offered and the career services institutions provide. But graduates’ behaviour and general economic conditions are likely to be far more important determinants of these outcomes.

These more important contributors to labour-market outcomes are entirely outside of institutional control. Yet, bizarrely, the government is suggesting making institutions accountable for outcomes they have little control over.

And, institutions that fail to meet targets will be financially penalized (i.e., have less money to improve performance). Absent radical internal re-allocations (which will be difficult since grants will also shrink over time), these institutions be unable to take meaningful steps to improve performance which, it must be remembered, is largely driven by factors outside of institutions’ control anyhow.

So where does such a system take us? Well, that depends on the details (that we don’t have).

One possibility is that performance targets are set such that institutions are already meeting them (or can easily met them). That doesn’t seem in keeping with the UCP’s narrative that the public sector is inefficient. Further, it would mean the new performance metric system is just a bunch of additional government red tape that serves no real purpose (except maybe to make institutions more easily controlled by government).

A second possibility is that institutions re-allocate funding internally to ensure they meet challenging targets. Since funding is tight, this might include dumping programs that drag down institutional averages on performance metrics and expanding programs that push up averages. The exact outcomes are hard to predict and may be unexpected. For example, during a downturn in oil and construction, the graduate employment measure may pressure institutions to curtail trades programs. I mention that example only because the government is constantly messaging the importance of getting more youth involved in the trades.

Another possibility is institutional gaming (which is often a response to performance measures). Institutions will, to the degree possible, prioritize measures that they do well on while de-emphasizing measures that they do poorly on. Institutions may also play some accounting games. For example, the ratio of administrative to academic expenses can be changed by recoding certain salaries and expenses as academic. This gaming and the broader enterprise of collecting and analyzing this data will, ironically, consume resources that could be better spent on educating students.

A fourth possibility is that performance-based funding is designed to cause financially precarious institutions to fail. In the short term, institutions seeing operating grants decline would likely seek wage-rollbacks and layoffs. This government-induced financial crisis would reduce public-sector expenditures (seemingly a key government priority). In the longer-term, an inability to balance budgets would provide a pretext for closing or amalgamating institutions (I’m thinking particularly of rural colleges, which are electorally popular in Tory ridings but of unclear financial viability).

It will be interesting to see which performance measures Alberta and individual institution come up with and how institution’s behaviour changes ins response to them.

-- Bob Barnetson
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Budget 2019: Bad news for labour market training in Alberta

There has been much written about the Kenney government’s attack on organized labour in its 2019 budget (which include layoffs and wage freezes, as well as interfering in ongoing arbitrations and future collective bargaining). Alberta’s 2019 budget also purports to improve labour-market training opportunities in order to get Albertans back to work:

“Supporting a highly skilled labour force and a competitive business environment will make lasting contributions to Alberta’s economy. Alberta will once again become the destination of choice for investors and skilled workers.” Travis Toews, Minister of Finance

A closer examination of the labour-market training pieces of the budget suggests this is mostly smoke and mirrors. The government is reducing its funding of post-secondary institutions (which do most of the training) by 5 per cent this year. The institution-specific cuts are unevenly distributed with no suggestion that the cuts reflect anything other than capacity to absorb the cuts. 

These cuts hamstring institution’s ability to deliver the education and skills training alleged desired by the government. Even more concerning is analysis that suggests that additional cuts of 20 to 25% are planned by 2022/23.

These cuts are to be offset, in part, by rapid tuition increases, with institutions allowed to increase tuition by 7% per year for the next three years. Tuition increases, combined with eliminating the tuition tax credit, reducing the teen minimum wage, and closing the Summer Temporary Employment Program (STEP), will make it much harder for students to afford to enroll in post-secondary education and training.

So, if you are playing along at home, your bingo card now shows fewer training opportunities that are less accessible to future workers. Sounds promising, so far!

While governments frequently talk about addressing skills shortages, the evidence that skills shortages actually exist is weak to non-existent (there is a long line of research suggesting that a great many workers are actually under-employed). When there are skills shortages (which tend to be industry specific and geographically localized), such shortages are often difficult to predict and almost impossible for institutions to react to (because mounting and delivering training takes time and the labour tends to adjust). 

A new post-secondary funding mechanism (likely with labour market metrics) is to be introduced in the coming months. This was tried in the mid-1990s and basically didn't work. Meh.

Expected skill shortages in the skilled trades are a recurring UCP talking point. The key barrier to qualifying more trades people lies with employers’ unwillingness to offer adequate apprenticeship opportunities. The last data I saw showed that only 19% of employers that use qualified trades people participate in training apprentices. More money (or more directive finding mechanisms) for post-secondary institutions won’t alleviate that bottle neck.

The government also announced an additional $4 million to expand work experience and apprenticeship programs for elementary (!!!), junior and senior high-school students. The current Registered Apprenticeship Program (RAP) provides a useful pathway for students interested in the trades. But there are issues.

Research suggests that Alberta students sometimes struggle to find apprenticeships and the female participants struggle against long-standing gender discrimination. One in five students reports an occupational injury during a RAP apprenticeship. One in twenty RAP participants (whom we should remember, are kids) is injured so severely that they cannot work in the field.

Overall, there is little reason to believe that the Kenney government is serious about enhancing labour market training opportunities. Rather, this appears to be an elaborate rhetorical offensive to distract Albertans from the profound damage that public-sector cuts will do post-secondary education. These cuts, of course, are necessary only because the Kenney government gave away $4.5 billion in corporate tax breaks. (Which, as predicted, corporations pocketed, instead of creating jobs).

-- Bob Barnetson

Indigenous gendered experiences of work in an oil-dependent, rural Alberta community

The Parkland Institute recently issued a very interesting report entitled “Indigenous gendered experiences of work in an oil-dependent, rural Alberta community.”

This case study of Wabasca “focuses on the lived experiences of Indigenous working families in the oil industry and how working conditions impact families and gender relations” (p. 1).

This study remedies the lack of attention paid by researchers to the economic, employment, or other benefits (and the tradeoffs among them) involving Indigenous communities and the gendered nature of these experiences.

The authors draw a number of conclusions and raise some very thought-provoking questions:

Interviews demonstrated that individuals working in the oil industry have experienced gender and racial discrimination at and related to work. At the same time, Indigenous companies have been able to carve out space in what has been an industry primarily dominated by non-Indigenous people. (p. 20)

The oil industry’s boom-bust cycle and the pressures of capitalism can bring significant imbalance and disruption to communities, as described here. However, through relationality in the community, specifically paid and unpaid caring work that is largely performed by women, the community works to establish balance. The industry itself may foster and exploit women’s engagement in this type of care work through its very structure and practices that create barriers and deterrents for women and ultimately reduce their participation in the higher-paying oilfield jobs. (p. 20) 

Some interviewees have internalized hegemonic racist stereotypes and narratives that Indigenous workers lack the drive to move up the labour ladder. At the same time, some workers are conscious of the stereotypes and resist them. These workers, especially Indigenous tradespeople, described the need to work harder than white workers to move up the ladder. (p. 20) 

Many Indigenous workers may end up streamed into unskilled labourer positions. The few Indigenous workers that become skilled journeymen or journeywomen sometimes end up being business owners by starting their own contracting companies. Indigenous business owners are a different class than their employees because they are wealthy enough to own some means of production. (pp. 20-21) 

Capital is a form of social and economic power that is not necessarily recognized as such. The long-term concern is that capitalist relations will get implanted in Indigenous communities, hooking them into the trans-local practices of ruling that are integral to corporate power (building stronger support for continued extractivism, as business revenue streams come to require it), and dividing the community against itself. From the perspective of miyo-pimatisiwin, how can Indigenous understandings of being relations (“all my relations”), and caring for the collective good be maintained when capitalist structures divide the community by class and individualist approaches impact community relations? (p. 21)

Overall, this is a very useful extension of the significant research done (primarily by University of Alberta scholars) on the social impacts of Alberta’s oil-dependent economy.

-- Bob Barnetson

New book: Canada's labour market training system

If you're looking for a last-minute Christmas present, I’ve just released a new book entitled Canada’s Labour Market Training System. You can buy the book for $30 or download a pdf version for free.

The book examines how the labour market training occurs in Canada and whose interests it serves. We often hear complaints that the system—post-secondary institution, government policies, community agencies and workplace training—is failing at producing the right number of workers with the right skills.

The book suggests that the “system” is not one in the sense of it being a machine that turns out widgets. But, rather, it is a system in the political sense, where different stakeholder groups seek to advance their interests. The outcome of the system tend to reflect the relative balance of power between stakeholders.

This book is the main text in a new course that we’ll be opening in January: EDUC 210: The Canadian Training System. The course should also be available as an open course (i.e., you can learn the material without doing the assessments or receiving credit) shortly. We’ve done something similar with IDRL 308: Occupational Health and Safety that Jason Foster and I wrote Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces.

-- Bob Barnetson

Poverty wages okay if you're an Alberta public-sector worker

On September 28, support staff in Living Waters Catholic School District went on strike. Living Waters and AUPE have been negotiating for two-and-half years and the key sticking points appears to be a wage increase (to cover the cost of living) and having defined hours of work.

Living Waters operates schools in Whitecourt, Slave Lake and Edson. Support staff include educational and financial assistants, library clerks, maintenance staff, secretaries, typists and custodians. They are the people who allow the school system to operate.

Educational assistants make a maximum of $26,500 per year. This reflects low wages and sporadic (and declining) hours of work. Some workers are forced to rely upon the food bank to feed their families. Despite this, the school board refuses to address these issues and applied for a lock-out.

The first week of picketing included two picketers being struck by cars driven by administrators. The RCMP took no action about these events, instead focusing their efforts on escorting administrators and scabs across the picket lines.

A return to the bargaining table in early October yielded no agreement. Not surprisingly, parents and students are siding with the strikers—joining them on the picket lines and making supportive social media posts. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the next school board elections.

The school board’s hard line is difficult to fathom. The district has been posting operating surpluses and has admitted it could afford to give raises. Bargaining to impasse in these conditions seems irrational. I would guess the district is picking up on the government’s messaging that public-sector wages must be frozen for two years.

Yet does this government requirement jive with the government’s messaging around the minimum wage? In justifying a 47% increase in the minimum wage over three years, the Notley government has been quite explicit that it is not acceptable for workers to earn below-poverty level wages. For example:

Ms. Notley: …You know, the Alberta families that I’m thinking of are the ones who work full-time at very difficult jobs and which deserve the respect of everybody in this Assembly, who do that to raise their families and feed their families, and after working 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week, still have to stop at the food bank on their way home to feed their families because right now our minimum wage does not come close to providing a living wage. …Mr. Speaker, the member opposite …would love for us to walk by those people who are unable to feed their families, who are unable to pay their rent, who are unable to secure affordable housing. (Alberta Hansard, April 21, 2016, 739)

So the government is happy to raise private-sector wages to prevent workers from having to go to the food bank. But it’s somehow cool for public-sector workers to make so little that they have to use the food bank?

That’s a pretty hypocritical position for the government to advance. It’s also a politically strange one, since the government will require public-sector votes if it expects to be re-elected. More importantly, it's a shameful way to run a school system.

-- Bob Barnetson

Free joint health and safety committee e-course

Alberta's new OHS legislation has (finally) made joint health and safety committees (JHSCs) mandatory for employers with more than 20 employers. The legislation requires employers must allow 16 hours (or two shifts) of work time for JHSC members to be trained.

The legislation empowers the Minister to establish training criteria. At present, these criteria and approved providers are under development. 

Private training providers are, however, already offering courses, such as this one (for $499) from the Occupational Safety Group Inc or this one for $199 from Online Learning Enterprises Inc.

Earlier this summer, Alberta partnered with the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety to offer a free (to Alberta residents) two-hour e-course on how joint health and safety committees are supposed to operate.

You can sign up for the course here and, if you can score 80% (in three tries) on the exam, you get a spiffy certificate like this one on the right.

My understanding is that completing this course will be considered a part of the required training for JHSC members. I found the course to be a decent introduction to JHSCs and their duties.

I wouldn't say it was hard (I quickly clicked through the slides and did the quiz while in a phone meeting and got 87% on my first try). But it is a decent start for new JHSC members.

-- Bob Barnetson

New labour market training agreements announced

In late June, the federal government announced it had signed new labour market training agreements with Alberta worth $1.7 billion over the next six years. There are two main funding streams:

The Labour Market Development Agreements (LMDA) address Type 2 Employment Insurance (EI) training benefits. EI claimants as well as some EI premium payers can receive training under this program. It looks like Alberta gets about $154m per year to provide thee benefits to Albertans.

The Workforce Development Agreements (WDAs) replace the Canada Jobs Grant Fund (CJGF) as well as the Labour Market Agreements for Persons with Disabilities and the Trageted Initiatives for Older Workers (both of which re now defunct and subsumed by the WDA). The WDA funds training that is not eligible to be covered under LMDA and Alberta gets about $91m per year under WDAs.

Interestingly, it appears that Alberta will continue to operate the Canada-Alberta Job Grant. This grant was the brain child of Jason Kenney when he was the federal employment minister. Kenney promised that the grant would see employers select unemployed people, offer then training and then hire them. Specifically, Kenney said

The whole point of the job grant is it will involve employers in selecting employees who they believe will have the propensity to work, getting them specific training, and the employers offer them a job at the end of it.

The mechanics of the CJG were that employers could spend up to $5000 for training and seek matching funds at a 1:2 ratio (i.e., up to $10,000) from the government to offset training costs. In effect, the CJG transferred the power to determine what kind of labour market training would by funded to employers.

Even a few years into the grant, it was apparent that things were going poorly. British Columbia reported that, after two years of operating the Canada-BC Job Grant, 99% of participants were drawn from the ranks of the already employed. This finding reveals that the CJG is not meeting its goal of increasing labour-market attachment among unemployed British Columbians.

Additionally, the majority of participants already had some PSE and most saw no wage-increase following the training. Less than 4% of employer applications identified participants as a youth, a person with a disability, Indigenous, or a new immigrant. Only 30% of participants were women. Finally, only a minority of employers used the CJG to pay for new or additional training. Most employers used CJG funding to offset existing training costs.

Alberta reported a very similar experience, noting that the Canada-Alberta Job Grant is being used to mostly train employed men with PSE in skilled management and non-management occupations. Manitoba concluded:

No evidence was found the Grant increased the supply of skilled labour, increased participation of underrepresented groups, or developed the long term human resource capacity of employers. Over the short term, training did not increase labour market attachment, as very few participants obtained or retained jobs as a direct result of the training. The vast majority of training participants were employed before receiving training (99%). (p.51)

The Northwest Territories was particularly critical of the impact of the CJG on existing labour-market training programs:

The cost sharing element of the Job Grant also negatively impacted funding for existing employment and training programs, particularly those targeted for unemployed, and under-employed individuals who do not have a job offer, and for individuals entering or re-entering the labour force. These impacts will increase as the Job Grant is fully phased in to reach 60% of the Job Fund. (pp. 65-66).

While there are exceptions to this general pattern (as well as data gaps in the evaluations), the CJG appeared to redirect federal training dollars towards already employed men in high-status and high-wage occupations. The CJG funding model also shifts federal funding away from assisting unemployed workers to become job-ready. In these ways, the CJG replicates existing patterns of advantage (and disadvantage).

In terms of access, control and benefit, the CJG privileged the interests of employers. Employers determined which employees received what kind of training under the CJG because employers made applications for the funding. Employers were the main beneficiaries of the CJG, receiving taxpayer-subsidized training for their employees.

Workers may benefit from this training, if it leads to more satisfying or remunerative work, either with their current employer or another employer in the future. The workers who received the most benefit from CJG were largely well-educated men who were already employed in skilled occupations and who didn't identify as Indigenous, immigrant, or disabled. Further, the CJG focuses training dollars on workers who are essentially job-ready, thereby disadvantaging Canadians with little prospect of labour-force attachment.

Basically, the Canada Job Grant was a terrible, terrible idea (which is what most practitioners said when Kenney proposed it). Why any province would retain a training program that yields such inequitable results is beyond me.

-- Bob Barnetson

new course: IDRL 215: Intro to Labour Relations

A few weeks ago, Athabasca University opened a new course. IDRL 215: Introduction to Labour Relations replaced the venerable IDRL 201 and  IDRL 312 courses (which we have closed).

This change (which should have no effect on students who are in program) is part of our ongoing efforts to revitalize the curriculum.

IDRL 312 and 201 represented some of AU's early efforts to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field of labour relations.

As our course offerings have grown (and the world has changed), some rethinking of what is taught and how we teach it has become necessary. We're hopeful that IDRL 215 will be an enjoyable introduction to labour relations.

In a month or so, we will also be opening IDRL 316: Collective Bargaining and Grievance Arbitration, which will replace two older courses: IDRLs 305 and 404. Again, this change is mostly about increasing the coherence of our program and we have arranged things so program students will not be negatively affected.

We'll be taking similar steps with some of our EDUC courses over the next few years. For example, EDUC/HRMT 310 (The Canadian Training System) was our first foray into the topic of human resource development. It covered a little bit of everything.

Since then, we've added four more undergraduate courses on that topic. This has left the purpose of EDUC/HRMT 310 a bit unclear.

I am currently revising the course to make it EDUC 210: The Canadian Training System. This course will offer a clear introduction to labour market training in Canada and to our other offerings:

EDUC 316: Program Planning and Methods in Adult Learning
EDUC 317: Training and Development in Organizations
EDUC 406: Work and Learning
IDRL 496: Comparative Labour Education

As I revise EDUC 210, I am also writing a textbook, that students will receive in both digital and paper formats. I am hopeful the new course will open in about a year.

-- Bob Barnetson

New PhD in Labour Studies at McMaster

McMaster University recently announced North America’s first PhD program in labour studies is opening. It builds upon McMaster’s existing MA in Work & Society and BA in Labour Studies.

The faculty line up behind the program is pretty impressive (Wayne Lewchuck, Suzanne Mills, Stephanie Premji, Stephanie Ross, and Robert Storey). I wish this program had been available when I was a student! Application deadline is February 15.

-- Bob Barnetson

UManitoba strike a glimpse of things to come in Alberta

As Alberta moves towards a model where academic staff will have the right to strike (and employers will have the right to lockout), the ongoing strike at the University of Manitoba is being closely watched.

There are several issues that drove Manitoba profs to declare bargaining was at an impasse and walk off the job. They include salary, workload escalation, protections against performance indicators, and job security for new instructors and librarians. The government of Manitoba did not help matters when it issued an edict of no wage increases just as bargaining was reaching a sticking point.

So far, the strike appears to be stable and the University of Manitoba is coming under pressure form its students (who are concerned about the erosion of their education). Tuesday, the university urged faculty members to accept its most recent offer and return to work until March in order to not negatively affect students.

“Oh think of the children” has a nice rhetorical ring (and obscures that concerns about eroding educational quality are at the heart of the strike). But the university cannot possibly be so naïve as to think faculty would throw away their leverage (which increases with each lost instructional day) in order to sign a lousy deal and be right back where they were in March—when job action will have little effect on the university which will be winding down for the summer.

The university is also seeking to undermine the authority of the union elected executive with a call to have the union present a clearly unacceptable offer to its membership. The university’s hope is to drive a wedge in the union membership and maybe induce some faculty to cross the picket line. Negotiations resumed Wednesday afternoon.

It will be very interesting to see how university administrators and faculty—who have no real experience with strike-lockout—comport themselves during the first few strikes in work stoppages in Alberta.

-- Bob Barnetson

Holding out for a (course) hero

For those of you hoping for some awesome 1980s music, please amuse yourself with the video below (yes, a tractor duel between Justin Trudeau and Kevin Bacon was high-quality entertainment in the 1980s…).

Now for the rest of you, let’s talk about Course Hero. Course Hero is a website that allow students to upload assignments, quizzes, exams and other materials. If you upload enough of your stuff (or just send the cash), you can then access the material (so-called “study aids”) uploaded by others.  

Reviewing the work of others can certainly seem like a quick way to complete assignments. Alas, it is also an easy way to run afoul of the university’s Student Academic Misconduct Policy, which requires you to do your own course work.

But it is not just downloaders who are in peril: uploading materials is also likely a violation of Section 2.5 which prohibits the distribution of assignments and other course material.

One of my jobs right now is academic integrity officer for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (basically I’m the plagiarism guy). Over the past few months, my workload has risen dramatically because faculty are complaining about uploaders. Year-long suspensions and notations of misconduct on transcripts are pretty common for first-time offenders.

Course Hero is not the only such website, but its recent popularity has pushed the university to speak out against all websitesthat offer “study aids”. You’d be wise to heed the university’s advice about these websites and remove any of your materials from them.

-- Bob Barnetson

Take your kid to work: Why bother?

My daughter starts junior high this week. A friend was joking with me about working from home and “take your daughter to work day” (usually the first Wednesday in November).

“Daddy, do we have to wear our bathrobes all day? How long do we have to keep yelling at the computer? Here, let me show you how that actually works.” It could be worse, I suppose…

Anyhow…. The idea of take your kid to school is to help students plan “their future career by helping them better understand a profession or workplace environment.” Yet it strikes me how “band-aid-y” the whole undertaking is, given the structure of school.

The K-12 system segregates kids by age, which is completely unlike the “real world” and isolates them from contact with work or mentors (excepting hyper-dangerous early apprenticeship programming). If the point of schooling is to help students prepare for a career (and I’m not sure it is), then one day of following a parent around is unlikely to meaningfully counteract the structure of schooling.

The K-12 system also subjects students to a profound amount of control and surveillance. While surveillance is endemic in the workplace, the hyper-structuring of time no longer exists except in the worst jobs (e.g., fast food). While my job is unusually unstructured, no job that I’ve held (and there have been a lot!) have exhibited anywhere near the degree of arbitrary time blocking we see in school. Again, one day in a workplace can’t teach students to be responsible for their own time.

Finally, while I have lots of teacher friends and quite like teachers, I’m skeptical that we should rely on teachers (who mostly made one career choice at age 22) to help students either make a career choice or develop job-search skills. As a group, they are profoundly unqualified to speak about the realities of work and working.

The point of this was not to bash teachers or the school system, both of which do a good job of teaching literacy, numeracy and the knowledge of science and society necessary to be an engaged system. Instead, the point is to question what real value students derive from a one-off exposure to a random (although, I suspect, skewed towards white-collar) job? It seems to be more about generating positive media photo-ops than any real educational outcomes.

-- Bob Barnetson