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

Research: Government interference in collective bargaining

Earlier this week, the Parkland Institute released a report that I contributed to, entitled Thumb on the scale: Alberta government interference in public-sector bargaining.

This report examines how, in a time when workers’ Charter-protected associational rights appear to be expanding, the rate at which governments interfere with collective bargaining has skyrocketed.

It specifically looks at Alberta’s ongoing use of secret bargaining mandates, which turn public-sector bargaining into a hollow and fettered process.

This report is relevant because both UNA and AUPE have exchanged opening proposals with the government in the last few weeks and will be bargaining against secret mandates. The government opener in both cases was, unsurprisingly, identical and there is a huge gap between what workers are asking for and what the government is offering.

-- 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

Disaster responses, OHS and COVID

One of many tasks of OHS practitioners is to plan organizational responses to disasters. The most common kind of workplace disaster we develop plans for are building fires. In fact, the laws passed in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire are some of the earliest forms of OHS regulation.

In planning a response to a fire (hint: get out), it can be useful to know how people respond to rapidly evolving, high-stress, low-frequency events and why they respond that way. Last week, I ran across a 2004 article entitled “Why people freeze in an emergency: Temporal and cognitive constrains on survival responses”

Basically, the author looked at the literature, examined disaster inquiry reports, and interviewed a bunch of disaster survivors to verify the existence of freezing behaviour in disasters and quantify it. He concluded:

Responses to unfolding disaster can be divided broadly into three groups.

In the first group, between 10‐15% of people will remain relatively calm. They will be able to collect their thoughts quickly, their awareness of the situation will be intact, and their judgment and reasoning abilities will remain relatively unimpaired. They will be able to assess the situation, make a plan, and act on it.

The second group, comprising approximately 75% of the population, will be stunned and bewildered, showing impaired reasoning and sluggish thinking. They will behave in a reflexive, almost automatic manner.

The third group, comprising 10‐15% of the population, will tend to show a high degree of counterproductive behavior adding to their danger, such as uncontrolled weeping, confusion, screaming, and paralyzing anxiety (Leach, 2004).

This finding is important because, generally speaking, the mechanisms we create to allow people to protect or save themselves in such situations requires them to take immediate and sensible action (e.g., use fire exits, put in a life vest, open an emergency exit on a plane). If only 10-15% of people can be relied upon to do so, then these mechanisms likely won’t achieve their desired result (i.e., nobody dies).

The author attempts to explain maladaptive emergency behaviour by conjecturing that sub-optimal responses are related to our brains’ information-processing limitations. He asserts that, when faced with a novel event, our brain requires time to assess it, develop a plan, and execute it.

Disasters, which are novel and complex and involve significant stress, often unfold too quickly for us to meaningfully react. However, he says, since your brain can select among a pre-existing behaviours much faster than it can design new behaviours, training on how to respond can attenuate this effect. (This is why we do fire drills and why you get a safety briefing before every time a plane takes off.)

The explanation advanced by this article has intuitive appeal (i.e., it sounds plausible on first blush), but the question is whether the explanation is correct. Recall that the conclusion (i.e., brain too slow) is conjecture, rather than the results of any empirical testing. I spent some time looking for evidence that this conjecture was correct and didn’t find much (although this isn’t my field and maybe I looked in the wrong places; I also ran into a bunch of paywalls that I could not get past).

What I found was:

• An article entitled Executive Dysfunction in a Survival Environment (2010) saw the author explore in more detail which aspects of executive functioning were impaired by novel and stressful conditions. It finds some support for the conjecture.
• An paper entitled Startle, Freeze and Denial: An analysis of Pathological Pilot Reactions during Unexpected Events (2012) explored multiple potential explanations for maladaptive behaviour, suggesting more complex dynamics. 

So maybe there is something to the original author’s explanation for this well documented phenomenon but YMMV. An important barrier to proving it is simulating the necessary degree of stress in an experiment.

The reason this article came up in my feed (I think on Bluesky but maybe Twitter) is that someone was likening the three-group typology to explain people’s reactions to Covid. Basically the asserted that the calm, muddled, and counterproductive groups in the 2004 disaster study are analogous to active avoiders, passive avoiders, and minimizers.

This analogy was intuitively appealing, bolstered by the seeming authority of the original study. It is useful, though, to deliberate a bit about whether the disasters that the original article looked at (e.g., a ferry sinking or a plane catching fire) is similar enough to Covid for conjectured explanation to apply. A key difference that jumps almost immediately to mind is the time scale.

Contemporary Covid behaviours are the result of a lengthy process. While Covid is a novel event, the time-scale is not the same as the disasters that the original author explored (where the speed of the disaster may have outpaced decision making).

So, while the proportion of active avoiders, passive avoiders, and minimizers may (or may not) mirror the groupings in the disaster study, the similarities between disasters and Covid are likely superficial and coincidental. Thus, we ought not put much stock in the claim that the 2004 study is in any was applicable or instructive to understanding Covid responses.

-- Bob Barnetson

Climate change and safety: treeplanters and wildfire smoke

A few weeks back, the Tyee ran a story on the effect of increasing levels of wildfire smoke on tree planter OHS. This story is interesting because it looks at the effect of climate change on worker safety.

There are several reasons why this particular hazard and worker group are worth examining:

• Intensity of exposure: Tree planters often work in close proximity to wildfires and their work is physically demanding (increasing respiration and heart rate). Consequently, they are likely to have one of the highest intensities of exposure to wildfire smoke.
• Duration of exposure: In addition to long working days, most tree planters live in camps (e.g., tents) and lack any respite from the smoke in their off hours. This means these workers have a much longer duration of exposure than, say, a worker who might face dust in the workplace but then go home to clean air at the end of the day.
• Lack of specific controls or OELs: There are no specific occupational exposure limits (OELs) for wildfire smoke and general OELs for dust were not designed with wildfire smoke (which has very tiny particles) in mind.
• Latency: Injuries due to inhalation often have long latency periods and murky causality, thus the link between the work exposure and the ill-health can be hard to see.
• Proxy for nonworkers: The exposures experienced by tree planters can be useful in predicting larger population effects caused by increased wildfire effects (essentially the dangerous working conditions experienced by these workers create a natural experiment).
• Compliance: PPE slows tree planting work. Tree planters are generally paid on piece-rate basis. This pay structure basically forces tree planters to trade off their own health against their need to earn an adequate income and almost certainly reduces compliance. Contractors also have production targets, which means they too have an incentive to trade worker safety for profit.

A notable take-away from the article is the complete lack of a regulatory response to the risk posed by wildfire smoke. WorkSafeBC acknowledges the risk but can’t be arsed to issue any directives. Alberta’s OHS minister couldn’t even be bothered to respond to the reporter. This likely reflects regulatory capture of regulators by the forestry industry.

By contrast, Oregon and California require air quality monitoring and the availability of respirators when air quality gets to a specific point. This doesn’t mean these controls are adequate, but they are at least something.

-- Bob Barnetson

Reflections on Unifor's strategy during Regina's Refinery strike

Andrew Stevens and Doug Nesbitt recently published an article entitled “Refinery town in the petrostate: organized labour confronts the oil patch in Western Canada" (this article does not yet appear to be open access). This piece examines the lengthy strike and lockout at the Co-op refinery in Regina in 2019 and explores three main themes.

First, it examines how the union’s long-term approach to bargaining (which the authors term conciliatory and cooperative) left the union unprepared to cope with an aggressive employer intent upon driving major concessions into the union’s agreement (this is likely an important finding or many unions…). This included taking significant steps (e.g., building a camp to house a scab workforce) to ensure that a lockout of workers would be successful.

Second, it explores how the state and employers colluded to limit the union’s ability to effectively apply pressure on the employer through traditional and legal means (e.g., striking, picketing) through court injunctions and demands that workers’ picketing behaviour be treated as criminal. Allied employers also began demanding further legal constraint of picketing activity.

Third, the paper examines the effectiveness of civil disobedience and building solidarity networks to apply pressure to the employer in the face of collusion between the state and the employer and profound anti-union sentiment. The state’s response to union tactics that infringed upon the employer’s property rights included imprisoning union leaders and demonizing the union as an outsider. Of particular interest in the article is the analysis of how community support for the oil and gas industry benefitted the employer’s efforts to grind the compensation of workers.

The authors suggest that a more thoughtful approach to community engagement an the deployment of civil disobedience tactics by the union might shift the terrain of future disputes and increase the union’s leverage.

-- Bob Barnetson

UCP's record on labour issues

 

Alberta Views recent published an article I wrote about the UCP's record on labour issues. The article reprises and extends a chapter I wrote with Susan Cake and Jason Foster in a new book entitled Anger and Angst: Jason Kenney's Legacy and Alberta's Right (which is also worth a look).

The nub is basically that UCP labour policy can be best understood as an effort to shift the cost of labour from employers to workers by grinding wages and working conditions. The effect, particularly on and in Alberta's public-sector has been significant. Since the Alberta View's article is open access, I'll leave it for you to read more if you like.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Some thoughts on an arbitrator-selection project

A widely held belief by labour-relations practitioners is that a union or employer can influence its likelihood of success at grievance arbitration via arbitrator selection. That is to say, practitioners believe that arbitrators have observable, stable, and significant decision tendencies that affect their chances of winning an arbitration. That’s not to say that facts, evidence, and jurisprudence don’t matter. But a party rarely has much control over these factors (i.e., you have the case you have). What is within a party’s control (more or less) is who hears the case.

“Who you get affects what you get” is an interesting conjecture that, if true, could suggests strategies for parties to adopt to increase their odds of success. Taking this conjecture as starting point, a colleague and I have been working to test whether or not arbitrators have observable, stable, and significant decision tendencies that can be used to predict future decisions. This is a conceptually and methodologically challenging project and I thought thinking aloud about this project might be of interest to SOSC 366 and IDRL 316 students (as well as a useful process of metacognition for me).

Our underlying approach is rooted in social constructivism. This theory, loosely speaking, asserts that there is infinite stimuli in the world. What stimuli we pay attention to and how we interpret those stimuli is shaped by our experiences, values, and beliefs. In this way, we socially construct our world. For example, bosses often frame conflict with workers as rooted in a communication or attitude problem rather than as an expression of conflicting interests.

Social constructivism is, I think, a reasonable starting point for analyzing arbitration decisions. Arbitrators are normally tasked with making complex decisions, often by sifting and weighing evidence and arguments and applying principles and precepts to come to decisions about what has happened and what ought to happen. This kind of work entails exercising significant judgment about what information is important and what it means. While arbitrators carefully apply many useful conventions and tests when making these decisions (e.g., around witness credibility), social constructivism assumes that arbitrators are ultimately relying upon their experiences, values, and beliefs (more on this below) when exercising their judgment.

This approach suggests, to the degree that arbitrators have, among themselves, different experiences, values, and beliefs, they might come to different conclusions in a case when faced with the same information. (There is some research that concludes (1) arbitrators are consistent in the factors they consider their decisions over time, and (2) different arbitrators can come to very different conclusions when deciding identical cases. This research broadly accords with the social constructivist approach we've adopted.)

The nature of grievance arbitration makes it hard to test the “who you get affects what you get” conjecture. Facts, evidence, and jurisprudence clearly affect individual decisions in important ways. The unique nature of each case impedes direct comparisons of decisions rendered by different arbitrators. And, to the degree that social constructivism occurs outside of our awareness, its operation may be difficult to see in arbitration decisions (although I do acknowledge how arbitrators carefully walk readers through the facts and arguments, and their analyses).

A different approach to testing this conjecture (and the one we've settled on) is to look at patterns in arbitrator decision-making over a large number of cases. The idea here is that the unique facts of each case (which will sometimes favour the employer and sometimes the union) will “average out” over a large enough number of cases (>1000 at this point) to create a baseline of wins and losses. Once the dataset is coded, we can then assess:

1. whether there are significant differences in the win-loss ratios (i.e., decision tendencies) among arbitrators and compared to the baseline,
2. how stable these decision tendencies are over time, and
3. the degree to which these tendencies are usefully predictive of future decisions.

I’ve read and coded over 700 awards in the past year or so. The patterns we saw early in the analysis (such as those reported here) continue to hold true. The raw win-loss ratio data is quite stark and, at times, eyebrow raising. This suggests that the “who you get affects what you get” conjecture may have some merit in the sense that some arbitrators seem to have clear tendencies which may make them, from an outcomes perspective, more (or less) desirable as adjudicators for specific cases.

We’ll need to wait until I finish coding all of the awards/decisions before we move onto testing the degree to which past decision tendencies can predict future decisions. That will involve (I think) segregating decision data into two groups for each arbitrator (maybe two thirds as a predictor pool and one third as a test pool) and assessing the degree to which we can, knowing an arbitrator’s win-loss ratio in the predictor pool, predict the outcomes of arbitrations in the test pool. (Obviously, there are many complexities to control for in the analyses, such as differences on which side bears the initial onus of proof and such).

Perhaps the biggest potential critique of this research is the premise that arbitrators’ values, beliefs, and decisions play a meaningful enough role in the outcome of decisions to warrant paying attention to them. You could very reasonably take the position that the impact (if any) of social constructivism would be rendered irrelevant because of the importance of the facts of each case plus the careful decision-making process that arbitrators routinely exhibit.

This view accords with the widely (but not universally) held belief that adjudicators (e.g., judges) are for the most part, neutral actors who are unlikely to be systematically biased in one direction or another. If we set aside, for the moment, that labour-relations practitioners, who have extensive experience with adjudicators, don’t believe this to be true, it is fair to ask if there any evidence that arbitrator bias operates in important ways? (We’re also setting aside the broader literature on bias in other forms of adjudication).

I’ve been keeping a diary of observations during coding. One of the striking things is how few of the 700+ decisions I’ve read where I got to the end and went “yeah, the arbitrator totally blew that call”. I’ve only run across (I think) one case so far where I’ve thought the decision was just clearly wrongheaded. In all of the other cases, the decision (based on the analysis presented by the arbitrator) was plausible (even if, maybe, I might have made a different decision). I don’t know if that pattern reflects that (1) arbitrators are good at getting to a sensible decision, (2) arbitrators are good at writing reasons that justify the decision they’ve reached, or (3) both.

I went back and forth about whether to link to the “you blew it” decision and, in the end, decided not to. There is no reason to dog pile on an arbitrator who made a decision in a complicated case with some ambiguous facts and whose other decisions seem generally fair minded. I mention the case only because it illustrates how an arbitrator’s values, beliefs, and expectations can shape the decision. It is a bit hard to explain this without going into identifying details of the case so you'll have to trust me a bit here.

The case revolved around an assault in the workplace and the worker defending themselves. There was clear and uncontested evidence that the worker had to and had cause to defend themselves: they were assaulted, put in a headlock, and feared for their safety. The arbitrator discounted this evidence and instead blamed the worker for triggering the assault because the worker was inattentive to the assailant’s needs. The arbitrator used the circumstances of the assault (e.g., a vulnerable assailant, moderately ambiguous and inconsistent evidence) to conclude that the worker’s termination was justified. The subsequent dissent by the union representative on the panel was, at the risk of understatement, pretty sharp.

An award that is not plausible is a pretty surprising outcome. Awards are designed to require arbitrators to clearly justify their decisions. This structural feature of awards ought to preclude decisions that clearly reveal arbitrator bias in interpretation of the evidence and drawing conclusions. Basically, the decision ought to be at least plausible on the face of it (and the vast majority are). That we have an example where the arbitrator’s reasoning is just not plausible runs contrary to the purpose of the system, which is to preclude both the fact and appearance of bias.

This is, certainly, just a single case and, Lord Vader knows, I’ve had off days myself. I think the point of it is that this decision is evidence, independent of the views of labour-relations practitioners, that arbitrator bias can occur. (I suspect most often it is harder to detect because the impact of an arbitrator’s values, beliefs, and experiences are less obvious, perhaps being less stark and profound or better obscured by the procedural narrative.

In any event, this case combined with the widespread belief of labour practitioners supports, however tentatively, inquiring into whether arbitrator’s values, beliefs, and decisions play a meaningful enough role in the outcome of decisions using a social constructivist frame. Basically, there’s some smoke here; let's see if there is also fire.

Anyhow, I hope that was an interesting view into how a researcher thinks about research questions before and during the process of collecting and coding data.

-- Bob Barnetson

Inventive framing of grievances

Typically, when we teach undergraduate students about grievances and rights arbitration, we assume the alleged breach of the contract is obvious and therefore skip over the importance (in practice) of careful grievance framing. This reflects the need to simplify the grievance arbitration (which is pretty complex) in order to not overwhelm students who are new to the process.

As part of a research project, I came across a 2012 case that highlights how the framing of a grievance can be very important to whether or not a union is successful. The decision is:

Canada Safeway Ltd v United Food & Commercial Workers Canada Union, Local No 401, 2012 CanLII 58574 (AB GAA)

You can find the decision on canlii.org by searching the CanLII number (58574). CanLii is an excellent repository of Canadian law.

The basic facts are these:

• An employee of a grocery store was caught stealing three chocolate bars (valued at $6.37) from the store at the end of his shift. This behaviour is both a violation of employer policy and a crime.
• An employer loss-prevention officer apprehended the worker in the parking lot. The employee was returned to the store and interviewed by security.
• The employer failed to provide the worker with union representation, which was required by the collective agreement. During the interview, the worker admitted the theft.
• When the company learned the interview had taken place without union representation, it discounted all information from the interview, sought to re-interview the member with a union representative present, and, when the union said “yeah no”, the employer terminated the worker based upon the testimony of a witness to the theft.

The union could have grieved this, arguing that discipline was warranted but the penalty was too harsh. Usually stealing results in termination, but the facts (e.g., low value of theft, worker had a significant cognitive disability, worker admitted theft immediately) might have resulted in a reduced penalty. Or maybe not. Instead, the union framed the grievance as a denial of union representation and sought damages for the griever and for the union (in lieu of reinstatement). We don’t know why the union framed its grievance this way, but we can guess a bit.

To start with, the facts were better for a representation grievance than for a termination grievance. The worker stole the chocolate bars in front of a witness. (My first thought reading that as a former grievance officer is “oh yeah, you’re fucked buddy.”) Arbitrators generally view theft in the dimmest of terms (essentially extinguishing the relationship of trust necessary in an employment relationship). Fighting the discipline (despite the possibly mitigating factors) would be a tough slog for the union.

The employer’s error (not providing a union rep) pushes aside the context (i.e., theft) and triggers the fight on much better terrain for the union. Union representation was a clear requirement of the collective agreement and arbitrators generally come down hard on employers who deny worker union representation. In this case, the admission of theft during the interview also opened the worker to potential criminal charges. (If he’d had a union rep, the rep would have terminated the interview and gotten the griever a lawyer.) And the employer’s efforts to remediate the disciplinary process are a de facto admission of the violation.

There is also the issue of available remedy. If the union had won a grievance on the termination, about the best they could have done given the facts was reinstatement (maybe with back pay, but probably without). There is also some hint that the worker did not wish to return to the job.

Under the representation angle, the union sought $10,000 for the worker in damages and $25,000 for the union. If the union won the representation grievance, it stood to attach significant financial and reputation costs to the employer’s conduct (which hopefully would affect the employer’s behaviour going forward).

(There was also the matter of the jurisprudence around theft changing at this time and this was a good case to test whether an older approach, that favoured employers, was still valid. We don’t know if that was in the union’s mind at the time, but maybe it was, since employee theft is a recurring basis of discipline in the retail industry and getting a favourable interpretation of the jurisprudence would be useful to the union in the long term.)

In short, there was a better chance of winning the representation grievances and a much bigger upside to doing so than of winning a termination grievance. This case suggests that experienced union-side advocates, when faced with an apparent violation of a worker’s rights, will often ask themselves “what kind of grievance is most likely to be successful?”

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Grievance Arbitration Project

Back in November, I posted a bit about a research project I’m involved with that is looking at grievance-arbitration decisions in Alberta. As of this morning, we’ve coded about 441 decisions by arbitrators (spanning 2006 to 2011) and I’m in a position to talk a bit more about the project and the themes we’re seeing.

When a union and an employer are unable to resolve a disagreement about how the employer has applied the collective agreement (or law, policy, or past practice), they can remit the dispute to an arbitrator for a decision. Arbitration is a form of adjudication akin to the courts. One of the main differences between arbitration and the courts is that, in arbitration, the two parties normally jointly select the arbitrator who will hear the matter (although, sometimes other appointment processes are used).

During the selection process, it is common for a side to internally discuss the merits of proposing or accepting particular arbitrators to hear a matter. This discussion appears premised on the assumption that arbitrators can be (un)sympathetic to certain arguments, evidence, types of grievances, and kinds of grievers. This belief is consistent with a constructivist view of the world, wherein there is infinite stimulus and what one pays attention to and how one interprets that stimulus is driven, in part, by one’s thoughts, beliefs, and expectations.

If the “who you get affects what you get” hypothesis is true, it suggests that identifying patterns in arbitrators’ decision-making can be used to increase the odds of success. This hypothesis (and, if true, the efficacy of various strategies that lever it) is part of what we’ll be examining once we’ve finished coding the dataset (ideally by Christmas 2023, but who knows).

In coding the dataset, we’re assigning the outcome of decisions one of three codes: union win, employer win, or mixed decision. An example of a mixed decision might be a termination grievance. The employer might seek to have the termination upheld, the union might seek to have it overturned and the worker reinstated without penalty, and the arbitrator may eventually decide there was grounds to discipline the worker, but that termination was unreasonable in the circumstances and then substitute some lesser penalty (e.g., a short suspension).

This coding allows us to visually (and statistically, I suppose) represent arbitral decisions like so. Yellow are union wins, green are mixed results, and blue are employer wins.



Note that, in this representation, both the union win and the mixed outcome category result in the worker being better off than they were before the decision. This suggests that looking at the “employer win” category (blue) is a useful way to get a quick and dirty sense of decision patterns.

The graphic above summarizes all decisions. The literature suggests that different types of disputes (e.g., discipline and termination grievances, salary and benefits grievances, grievances addressing seniority, selection, promotion and layoff) will have different win-loss patterns. I have teased apart the data that we have along these lines in the graphic below. Sorry the images are a bit har to read, the lines (top to bottom) are grievances addressing seniority, selection, promotion and layoff, salary and benefits grievances, discipline and termination grievances, and the overall average.



We do seem to see some interesting differences. Note that, in the discipline and termination decisions, the employer typically bears the onus (at least initially) or proving discipline was warranted. In most others kind of grievances, the union bears the onus of proving the grievance should be upheld.

If the “who you get affects what you gets” hypothesis is correct, we should see differences among the decision patterns of different arbitrators. I have presented below a randomly drawn selection of the early data in this regard (carefully anonymized) with the overall average at the top.



What this suggests is that there appear to be large differences in decision outcomes among arbitrators. Two important caveats are worth keeping in mind. This first is that the number of cases in the dataset to date for each arbitrator varies and is, overall, small. Small samples tend to yield swingy numbers, so we shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on a small sample. These differences may attenuate over time as we add cases (although we’re not seeing that yet in the data)

The second is that the facts of each case almost certainly impact the decision of the arbitrator. Our expectation is that, over many cases, differences between cases should attenuate (i.e., wash out) these case-specific differences. Together, these caveats also suggest that eliminating arbitrators with relatively few recorded decisions from the final dataset is likely appropriate.

When we look at arbitrator records on discipline and termination cases (which seem to be the largest single category of cases), we see similarly large differences among arbitrators. I have not visually presented that data, given the small number of cases for each arbitrator.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Grievance arbitration in Alberta project

I’m presently coding data for a research project examining grievance arbitrations in Alberta. There are some 1000+ arbitration decisions (2006 to present) to read and code before a colleague and I can start the actual analysis. We are presently about 20% of the way through the coding. While we can't tell whether our hypotheses are correct or not (we need a much larger dataset), we do have some initial descriptive data on the 2006-2008 decisions (n=203) to share, for what it is worth.

Sector

Not surprisingly, the majority of grievance arbitration decisions come from the public sector, with the public-service, health care, and education being the most common industries. In the private sector, manufacturing, retail (grocery mostly), construction, and forestry are the industries most frequently represented.



Gender

Most arbitrations are decided by men. Grievers are about equally split between men and women, but the most numerous kind of grievances (typically policy/group grievances) tend to have mixed-gender griever groups.



Type of grievance

The three most common types of decisions about grievances address termination/discipline (30.5%), salary and benefits (22.7%), and procedural wrangling ahead of the substantive issue (15.3%). Disentangling procedural decisions from more substantive ones poses some interesting coding challenges because of how they are inconsistently reported.

Outcomes overall

Overall, employers tend to “win” most grievances (in that they achieve the outcome that they wanted). The pattern (so far) is broadly consistent with the literature.



Looking just at termination/discipline outcomes (the largest category of grievance awards), we see a similar pattern. 



This is a bit surprising, because in most of these cases, the employer bears the initial onus to prove discipline/termination was warranted. This is different from most other grievances (where the union bears the initial onus). Early days though—we may see a shift as more decisions are coded.

--Bob Barnetson

Research: Where did AU's HR director go?

Students are typically taught research methods as a very formal process. Basically, the literature yields hypotheses that we then test to confirm or reject. This is a pedagogically sound approach to teaching methods, but it often obscures the kinds of research that most students will do in their jobs. In the workplace, research is often triggered by running across something curious. We then look for other information that we can use to substantiate and explain whatever it is that we found. 

For example, every June 30, public-sector employers in Alberta are required to disclose the compensation of any workers who makes over a certain amount ($141,183 in 2022). The resulting administrative data can be a rich source of information, including information incidental to the actual purpose of the disclosure (which, one supposes, is transparency).

If you look at Athabasca University’s disclosure list for 2021, one of the things you can find is that the Director of HR was on the disclosure list in 2018, 2019, and 2020, but is no longer on the list in 2021. That’s weird, because she is still (in late 2022) the Director of HR.

So, how might we explain that (i.e., what are the possible hypotheses)? There are a couple of potential explanations. The most likely explanation is simple error. Regulatory disclosures require manipulating a lot of data and, from hard experience, I know it is pretty easy to lose a row of data.

We could test this explanation by asking if this is an oversight (which is what I did). Even if we get very politely told to mind our own business (lol), if it is an oversight, flagging it should result in a correction. Absent a correction, we can likely discount the oversight explanation.

Some other potential explanations include:

• Name change: A change in name may create the appearance the data is missing by moving the location of the data. Sorting the data by job title reveals this explanation is not correct. 
• Salary reduction: A 37% reduction in salary would result in the Director’s salary data being excluded from the disclosure. That is a possible explanation (that is difficult to further test), but it seems unlikely so I'm going to set it aside for now.
• Personal safety: Data can be excluded if inclusion would create a threat to someone’s personal safety (e.g., someone has a stalker). Since the Director appears on externally facing websites, we can likely discount this explanation.
• Change in status: Disclosure is only required for employees; if the Director somehow negotiated a change in her status from employee to a contractor, she would be excluded from the disclosure.

Looking at these explanations, the last one is the most likely. So, can we find other data that supports this explanation? Surprisingly, yes. A quick google search turns up this in incorporation document from Ohio.

Basically, someone with the same (and rather unique) name as the HR Director incorporated a company in early 2021. Additional googling (that I won't share) suggests this person moved to Ohio in the autumn of 2020 and is about the same age as the current Director. The firm that initially filed these documents is a firm that deals with cross border (i.e., US and Canadian) tax files.

Although these facts don't conclusively prove anything, they do create some compelling circumstantial support for the premise that the Director’s disappearance from the salary disclosure is the result of a change in status. This explanation also has an internal consistency to it: converting a senior employee to a contractor would be a highly unusual step. Such a conversion might make sense, though, if the person was working from another country.

If we wanted to further substantiate this potential explanation through triangulation, we could either look for an administrative record that the university has some kind of contractual relationship with Caerus Consulting LLC or tap into our social network to find out if anyone knows if the Director relocated to Ohio.

This sort of research is relevant because it may help us understand, in part, the resistance by members of the university executive to the demand by the Government of Alberta that executive members live in the community of Athabasca. (My understanding is that some other executive members also live out of province).

This sort of real-world research is pretty common for HR and LR practitioners and uses many of the same skills and techniques as the more formal approach to research that is taught in such courses as SOSC 366: Research Methods in the Social Sciences. But the application and the conclusions tend to be a bit looser and less exacting.

-- Bob Barnetson

Alberta Labour's 2021/22 Annual Report

At the end of June, the government of Alberta dropped the annual reports for all ministries for the year ending March 31, 2022. The Labour report provides a snap-shot of government enforcement of labour laws as well as a hint at some of the outcomes. What the report addresses (and what it omits) is interesting.

For example, last year, the annual report noted that the government was sitting on a report of the minimum wage commission (struck in 2019, reporting in early 2020), The expectation was that this report recommended expanding the existing two-tiered minimum wage and that the government would use this as a pretext for reimplementing a lower wage for some servers.

That report was never released (as far as I can tell). This year, there is literally no mention of the minimum wage. Perhaps the government has given up on the idea given the struggle faced by employers to recruit servers? This, in turn, suggests that the existing minimum wage (stagnant since 2018) may be inadequate.

Or maybe, with three Labour ministers in a year, each worse than the last, the department just lost track of this issue? Anyhow, let's have a look at the various regulatory areas the government reports on.

Employment Standards

Employment standards set out the minimum terms and conditions of work. If your employer screws you, you can file a complaint. Over time, complaint numbers have dropped significantly.



There is, once again, no concrete explanation for this drop. Many things can affect complaint volume, including the number of workers and their expectation that complaining will be beneficial (e.g., result in a net gain, not result in retaliation). A 41.9% reduction in complaints since 2016/17 is pretty significant, especially since employment numbers rebounded during 2021/22.

Overall inquiries by Albertans about Employment Standards are also down. There were 131,189 phone and email inquiries in 2019/20 and only 70,826 in 20221/22 (a 46.0% reduction). Again, no compelling explanation for this change is offered. One possibility is that Alberta workers are decreasingly seeing Employment Standards as a viable way to enforce their rights. The drop since the UCP came to power is particularly striking.

There was an increase in Employment Standards enforcement this year. Instead of one administrative penalty, Alberta issued three penalties, the largest being $1500. The lack of consequences for noncompliance (beyond maybe having to pay some or all of what an employer should have paid in the first place) not only makes Alberta’s Employment Standards laws pretty toothless, but, in fact, economically incentivizes employers to cheat workers because they will likely get away with it.

Occupational Health and Safety

Alberta’s OHS system is designed to reduce workplace injuries and fatalities by educating employers and workers about safe work practices, conducting inspections to ensure compliance, and issuing orders and penalties when employers fail to operate safely.



The bump in inspections in 2020/21 was due almost entirely to additional COVID-related inspections and numbers seem to have returned to historical numbers. Almost 12,000 inspections seems like a lot of inspections, but we need to consider the context.

There were about 155,000 employers registered with the WCB. That undercounts total employers but whatever—this is back of napkin work. If we use 155,000 as a rough proxy for total employers and there were 11,798 inspections, we’re (roughly speaking), looking at a workplace being inspected once every 13 years.

If you did something more fine-grained (e.g., bigger employer pool; controlled for employers getting inspected more than once in a year), that telescopes the inspection cycle out some (maybe once per 15 years, maybe longer). The point, though, is that most worksites will effectively never get inspected.

If workplaces do get inspected, what happens? Mostly likely, if there are violations found, employers just get ordered to remedy them. But the number of compliance orders has dropped by about half since 2018/19 (the last full year of the ND government).



OHS almost never uses the enforcement tools available to it. OHS tickets dropped from 479 tickets in 2018/19 (again, the last year of the NDP government) to 32 this past year (a 93.4% drop). Of the 32 tickets issued in 2021/22, nine went to employers while the rest went to supervisors or workers. The largest ticket to an employer was $575 while the largest ticket to a worker was $230. These values have not changed in recent memory

Interestingly, the number and value of administrative penalties went up significantly this year, especially in dollar value. I don’t know what explains this. Only 11 charges were laid under the OHS Act, compared to 17 the previous year. Fines from prosecutions remained steady at $1.9m, with $1.2m being paid in the form of creative sentences (e.g., donations to community groups).

Effectiveness of Injury Prevention

So is this approach to injury prevention effective? One way to measure prevention effectiveness is to look at injury outcomes (particularly injury rates per 100 person-years worked) over time. Using a rate controls for fluctuations in the population over time and allow us to see patterns.

Alberta uses two main injury rates: lost-time claims and disabling injuries.

• Lost-time claims are accepted are injuries that required time off work beyond the date of injury. These are usually the most serious kinds of injuries. 
• Disabling injuries are accepted injury claims that required time off or modified work duties. 

Both rates are subject to under-reporting issues (i.e., employers pressure workers not to report). Both rates have climbed over time. While, yes, correlation is not causation, rising injury rates is highly suggestive that Alberta’s approach to injury-prevention (particularly declining consequences for operating unsafe workplaces) is not effective.



The government notes that COVID played a significant role in rising disabling injury rates, If COVID-related claims are excluded, the DI rate would be 2.32 in 2020/21 and 2.46 in 2021/22.

Labour Relations

The Alberta Labour Relations Board (ALRB) administers and adjudicates applications and complaints about labour relations. The most interesting datapoint in the annual report is the number of certification applications (i.e., when a union applies to represent a group of workers).

In 2017, the ND government made it easier for workers to unionize by allowing card-check certification. Like every other jurisdiction where this change has been implemented, unionizing efforts increased significantly (because employers are deprived of the opportunity to meddle in the workers’ choice). In 2019, the UCP removed card check and, not surprisingly, certification dropped significantly. There are some confounding factors here (lag effects, COVID in 2020 and rising interest in unions in 2021) that we can’t control for, but that pattern is plain enough.



There are also a couple of interesting things tucked away in the details. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of days it takes for an application to get to hearing. This matters because delay usually benefits one side (almost always the employer).

The Board also continues to lag in rendering a decision in a timely manner. Again, delay tends to benefit employers.



This is partly explained as a function of writing time lost to additional administrative demands related to virtual hearings.

Conclusion

Overall, the administrative performance of Alberta’s labour law regime has declined over time, particularly since the UCP took office. Particularly worrying is the increase in injuries and the decline in certification applications. The underlying issue likely reflects policy directions and/or funding reductions enacted by the UCP.

-- Bob Barnetson