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

Blue-collar work and the Kenney government

CBC recently ran a very interesting first-person account from a Calgary welder about his experiences in the oil-and-gas sector. You can read the piece here. The nub of the account is that working conditions for welders in the sector are poor and are driving workers away. It is an interesting and well-written piece.

I flag it for a couple of reasons. One of the more tedious talking points of the Kenney government is that there is some kind of esteem gap between white-collar and blue-collar occupations. The gist of the narrative is that people (e.g., students, parents, teachers, and workers) think they are too good to do a blue-collar job (so basically it is a worker-blaming narrative, not all that different than equally ridiculous assertion that people no longer want to work).

Like most things Jason Kenney said as premier, there isn’t really any evidence that this esteem gap exists. (The two people I have been happiest to see in my life are an ER doc and a plumber, and not necessarily in that order.) Rather, this putative esteem-gap is just a dog-whistle pretext designed to justify increasing investment in skilled trades training and reduced investment in university education. Why would Kenney do that?

Well, Kenney’s actions as a federal minister suggest he often assists employers to minimize labour costs buy flooding the labour market with workers (think back to the temporary foreign worker deluge of 2008-12). Increasing the number of skilled trades people allows employers to suppress demands for better wages and working conditions because there is always a surplus of workers.

The first-person account of working in a welding shop in the oil-and-gas industry unintentionally highlights a number of structural reasons that workers may be reluctant to engage in blue-collar work (that have nothing to do with people thinking they are too good for that work):

• Job demands: The author flags that the work is difficult, dangerous, and often entails working in unpleasant conditions at odd times. Workers are often unwilling or unable to work in these conditions. This has historically constrained the labour force and driven up wages. Corporations have responded in many ways to reduce labour costs, such as automation, off-shoring, and subcontracting work.
• Insecurity: The oil-and-gas sector has organized work in ways that externalizes risk onto workers (in the form of layoffs and wage cuts) to maximize corporate profitability. The author notes that one new and very skilled worker had soured on the industry after three layoffs in five years. (This insecurity also a key barrier to apprentices completing their training, but note that Kenney’s training announcements never engage with this issue.)
• Restructuring: The author notes that austerity, tax cuts, and rising energy prices had made him hopeful that his job would have more security. This didn’t happen because trickle-down economics (which is what he’s talking about) doesn’t work. Very crudely speaking, if you give wealthy individuals and corporations additional income (through tax cuts), they don’t create jobs with it: they just horde it. By contrast, policies that raise wages for low-income workers do create new jobs because low-income workers spend the money and that creates demand (and new jobs).

In the end, the author acknowledges that working in the industry used to provide a stable living but no longer does. Not surprisingly, he leaves the industry to teach high-school kids welding skills and all but two members of his original crew either quit or were laid off.

So, what can we learn from this:

• Employers care about profit and treat workers instrumentally. If there is a way to increase profit and the effect is to make workers’ lives worse, employers will do so. This is particularly the case when there is a surplus of workers so the workers have little labour market power to exert.
• Governments, especially conservatives ones, are typically happy to help employers create a loose labour market that worsens wages and working conditions. To stifle dissent about policies that are actually screwing the workers who comprise the bulk of the electorate, governments will happily invent or manipulate facts. No one wants to work. People think they are too good for blue-collar work. And so forth. 
• Workers are often unable or unwilling to incorporate this dynamics into their analysis of how the world works. Instead, they will cheer-lead policies that harm their interests (e.g., tax cuts and austerity that destroy the public services they depend upon) in the hope they will see greater stability or a modest wage increase. They will also adopt explanatory narratives that blame workers (people look down in the trades) while ignoring that workers may well be making rational and well-informed choices about what job options are best for them.

Even a modest amount of critical thinking raises some pretty profound questions about these narratives. Why, for example, might workers not be keen to take certain jobs? Is it because they are innately lazy or think too highly of themselves or are misinformed? Or is it because the jobs are organized in ways that make them, relatively speaking, difficult, unstable, and poorly paid, and thus workers don’t see them as a good choice? Are there impediments (such a childcare availability and shift work) that make it impossible or uneconomical for workers to take these jobs?

This kind of questioning is typically taught in the liberal arts, which is the exact kind of education that the Kenney government has aggressively defunded. That is probably not a coincidence.

-- 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

Reflections on the efficacy of joint committees during COVID

 As Labour Day rolls around, I’ve been giving some thought to the two-and-half years I spent as a worker rep on Athabasca University’s joint health and safety committee (JHSC). While the employer had long had a JHSC, it was effectively non-functional until the government changed the rules to make JHSCs mandatory (which better empowered the worker reps). 

I say non-functional because workplaces hadn’t been inspected for years, there were dozens and dozens of unidentified and uncontrolled hazards, and staff did not receive basic OHS training (among other deficiencies) The single biggest OHS issue during my time on the committee was, not surprisingly, COVID. 

Early COVID response

When I raised the issue of COVID with the committee in early 2020 (before the pandemic arrived in Alberta), I basically got laughed out of the room by the employer reps and no action was taken. Some worker reps had their union pressure the employer to act (including transitioning to working from home, suspending travel and eliminating the sick note requirement). It also published a blog to alert workers to things they could do in the absence of an institutional response. 

This approach is pretty in keeping with what we know about the most effective tactics worker reps can adopt to get achieve change through JHSCs (which can only make recommendations). The employer basically adopted the union’s recommendations a week later and AU transitioned to working from home.

Transitioning to Working from Home

This transition to working from home was not without its difficulties, including several OHS issues. These included serious ergonomic issues as staff were now working from wherever they could find space in their homes and many were using small laptop computers, sometimes with inadequate internet service. These issues lingered unattended for months. 

There was also a significant workload issue as certain institutional processes were not easily adaptable to online delivery coupled with a huge surge in enrollments. These issues were essentially left to individual staff members to sort out and numerous staff reported very high working hours and rapid burnout.

Workload problems were compounded by the departure of 53 staff (5% or so) who had taken a buyout option, overall heightened stress due to the pandemic disruption (including school and daycare closures), and social isolation. All of these issues were left unattended for long periods of time.

The union continued to work with its members to identify issues the university would need to address when it re-opened. As it happens, AU did not ever return to in-person working and the university used the two-years to slowly advance its plan to eliminate on-site work entirely (including closing two of its course campuses and classifying most of its staff at home-based workers). 

Aerosol spread and hazard protocols

During COVID it became clear that the main method of transmission of the virus was through aerosol spread (although transmission by touching and droplets was also possible). Very loosely speaking, aerosol spread basically means the virus hitches a ride from an infected person to others on water molecules that an infected person exhales. The molecules with the virus can then be inhaled by people in the surrounding area. If you inhale enough of the virus, you too can become infected. This is a bigger issue in enclosed spaces than outdoors because virus-laden molecules typically dissipate faster and further outdoors.

The easiest way to understand aerosol spread is to think of it as farting. When you fart, the smelly particles are initially concentrated near the “farter”. But, overtime, the particles spread throughout the room and everyone can smell it. Simply being 6 feet apart (a common COVID protocol to prevent droplet spread from a sneeze or cough) does not protect from aerosol spread. If Travis “farts” and Stacey is 8 feet away across the room, Stacey is eventually going to smell it, right? Same idea with aerosol spread of COVID. The longer you are in close proximity to someone “farting” COVID, the higher the concentration of the virus-laden molecules, and the greater the risk of contracting COVID.

For this reason, effective hazard-control protocols for COVID include not working in enclosed spaces with other people. No exposure means no risk of transmission. If you are sharing spaces, other controls include enhanced ventilation (to reduce the concentration of the virus in the air) and masking. Masking prevents the virus from getting into the air (concentration is lower). And it also prevents someone from inhaling as many particles (which reduces the risk of catching COVID). Vaccination does not seem to control spread very much with Omnicron (so it is not really an effective control strategy); its primary value seems to be reduced severity of the disease.

Re-opening and COVID protocols

In September of 2021, government changes that gutted the effectiveness of JHSCs came into effect. You could literally see the energy go out of the JHSC as the tools the worker members used to keep the employer attentive to its OHS obligations effectively disappeared (e.g., there is no longer any requirement for workplace inspections).

In February of 2022, Minister of Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides directed all PSEs to end masking and vaccination protections. Directing post-secondary institutions to end mandatory masking eliminated one of the most effective controls on COVID transmission and placed post-secondary workers at risk of COVID. It also forced institutions to violate the OHS Act because they were no longer controlling workers’ exposure to COVID to the degree reasonably practicable. The Minister of Advanced Education has no authority to direct PSEs to act in this way or to waive the OHS obligations.

In May of 2022, Athabasca University altered its COVID protocols (presumably in response to the Minister’s direction). While most staff were expected to continue working from home due to the danger of infection, those staff who were on campus were no longer required to wear masks. This announcement basically says “it is too dangerous for you to come to work but, if you are onsite, don’t worry about wearing a mask”. This contradiction was so stark and evident that staff openly mocked it. It also dramatically increased the risk of aerosol transmission of COVID in the workplace.

The university’s Joint Health and Safety Committee was not consulted about this change. A review of Athabasca University’s hazard assessment revealed no consideration of aerosol transmission or controls. When this was brought to the university’s attention with a request to reinstate masking on campus, these concerns were dismissed and COVID control were further relaxed!

OHS Complaint and Inaction

Canada’s OHS system makes workers and employers jointly responsible for identifying and controlling hazards (the internal responsibility system). When this system fails, workers can file a complaint with government OHS inspectors (the external responsibility system). The existence of government oversight reflects that disputes about hazard identification and control can arise, sometimes via an innocent error and sometimes via a deliberate decision by the employer.

As worker co-chair, I filed an OHS complaint about the lack of controls around the aerosol spread of COVID (this is is how the system works). OHS investigated (without any discussion with workers) and declined to take action. 

When I finally got to speak with the officer to find out what she’d decided (because there is no report-back system and you have to say certain magical words to get the officer to call you back), her explanation of inaction was:

1. The employer did not identify aerosol spread on its hazard assessment and she could not force them to add it on, and
2. She could not direct the employer to implement masking (which was explicitly noted in my complaint was NOT my request—I just wanted direction to the employer to develop a control strategy) in the absence of direction by the Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMOH). 

She also noted that she did not see many workers sharing spaces and that they were seated six feet apart. The OHS officer’s explanation for her inaction was defective in a number of ways:

1. An employer cannot evade controlling a hazard simply by leaving it off a hazard assessment. Allowing this kind of evasion opens the door to employers ignoring all hazards by simply leaving them off the hazard assessment (like come on!). The OHS officer could well have identified the hazard the employer missed and directed the employer to develop a control strategy (which was my explicit request).
2. The presence or absence of masking guidelines by the CMOH does not limit the ability of OHS officers to direct employer to develop a control strategy for a hazard. Masking is the obvious control, but the employer could also have improved ventilation or prohibited shared spaces. What is likely going on here is that OHS officers have been directed (or perceive themselves to be directed) not to require employers to implement control for the aerosol spread of COVID because of the government’s decision to let’er rip.
3. The assertion that being six feet apart was an adequate control confuses controls for droplet spread with controls for aerosol spread. I could not have been clearer about this in my complaint. This raises questions about competence in my view.
4. The absence of many workers working in close proximity is basically saying “well, not too many workers are at risk…”. The OHS Act and Code does not contain a threshold of injury or death that is required before an employer must take action.

The upshot is that both the internal and external enforcement system failed. There is no appeal of the OHS decisions available because workers can only appeal an order, not the absence of an order. About the only bright spot here was that AU was intent on keeping staff off campus while it completed its transition to a near virtual working environment (i.e., 95% of staff working from home full time).

Surprise Re-opening
Over the summer of 2022, AU embroiled itself in a stupid and public fight with the provincial government of AU’s long-pterm efforts to reduce the number of jobs in the local community. As a part of AU’s efforts to resolve this dispute (which imperiled institutional funding), AU announced on August 30 that the remaining two campuses would be open effective September 6. 

As part of the surprise re-opening announcement, new COVID protocols were announced. Basically, they amount to extra cleaning (to address touch spread) and staying home when sick, which is ineffective since (1) COVID carriers are contagious before being symptomatic, and (2) many COVID carriers are asymptomatic. There are no controls for droplet or aerosol spread. Staff are allowed to voluntarily wear masks if they want:

AU no longer mandates wearing masks unless a hazard assessment dictates one is needed; however, we support you wearing a mask if you want to.

This approach individualizes responsibility for preventing the spread of COVID. It is just straight-up negligent because of the lack of droplet and aerosol controls. But the absence of any will by the government to enforce the OHS law means the employer can basically do whatever it wants.

Staff have little recourse except to (1) wear their own mask (the efficacy of which will be reduced because masking works best when everyone does it) or (2) try to avoid working on site if possible. Work refusals are unlikely to be effective since OHS has already refused to address aerosol spread and workers can choose to wear their own mask.

The only real option is for one of AU’s unions to file a grievance that AU is failing to address its obligation to provide a safe and healthy workplace under the OHS Act. That will take literally years to reach resolution and AU will likely use the OHS officer’s decision not to issue an order and a defence. Another option is for the unions to organize some kind of illegal walk out (an outcome that I judge to be unlikely).

Upshot

The recent changes to the OHS Act and Code have rendered JHSCs largely useless (which was likely the intent). The government’s political decision to eliminate COVID protections have also rendered the external OHS system ineffective. Together, these factors will create a significant amount of unnecessary ill health (potentially with lifelong consequences). As an OHS researcher and practitioner, I gotta say, this just makes me despair and very happy that I'm close to retirement.

-- Bob Barnetson

Analysis of Athabasca jobs fight

Current AU President Peter Scott

Over the past two weeks, Athabasca University’s (AU) executive and the United Conservative Government (UCP) have been embroiled in a very public fight over locating jobs in the town of Athabasca. Today, the UCP appeared to slightly soften their stance, offering to negotiate with AU instead of imposing relocation on 500 staff. So what does that actually mean?

Background

AU was (re)located in the town of Athabasca in the mid-1980s, partly to generate jobs in that part of rural Alberta. Over the past 15ish years, the number and portion of AU employees in Athabasca has diminished. This has had a negative economic effect on the town. Community residents (including AU staff members) have repeatedly raised this legitimate issue with AU’s executive and Board and have gotten no where. Consequently, a lobby group formed and raised money to hire a lobbyist to seek intervention by the government.

In late March, Premier Jason Kenney appeared in a town meeting and promised AU jobs would be located in Athabasca. My view is that Kenney was looking for votes in his leadership review and this was an easy issue to make promises on in order to gain support. No one from AU’s Board or exec was invited to the meeting. From what I can tell, they were surprised by the news, since they were in the middle of launching their “near virtual” strategy, whereby most staff could work from home offices wherever they lived.

In early April, AU president Peter Scott told staff that the university was not changing direction. At about the same time, the then Board chair sent the Minister of Advanced Ed a chippy letter saying about the same thing. The government sacked the chair in late May, which should have been a pretty good hint the government was serious. The government also required AU to provide a plan, by June 30, to bring jobs back to town.

AU provided a plan (which staff have not seen). In late July, the government rejected the plan as inadequate. The government then provided a new funding agreement to AU’s Board and demanded a second plan to bring jobs to the community. If AU did not comply by September 30, its government grant (~35% of revenue) would be frozen.

According to the President, the new funding agreement contained a requirement for 65% of staff (about 500 more people) to work on campus by 2025 and a portion of AU’s funding was tied to meeting that performance target. Again, no documents to substantiate this claim were released. And, again, this is a pretty clear sign the government was serious.

Instead of seeking to negotiate some kind of compromise that would address the legitimate issues around jobs in the community, President Scott launched a videotaped attack on the government, calling the government’s proposal “ruinous”. This resulted internet handwringing and bad press for the UCP that pretty much petered out after five or six days. The UCP then announced it would be open to discussions about how AU could address the jobs issue, suggesting moving the executive and administrative staff back to town.

Analysis

The UCP’s proposed relocation of 500 staff to a town of 2800 was never going to happen because (1) there is not enough housing, and (2) there are not enough offices. Given this, this demand is best viewed as the UCP showing its teeth to bring the Board to heel.

In bargaining, you are always thinking of the BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement). The UCP showed AU that AU’s BATNA was way worse than whatever AU might negotiate. Essentially, the government is saying, “If you won’t give us a plan we like, then you can have this, really awful plan.”

For whatever reason, the President of AU decided to go on the offensive and attack the government in public. I get this response on an emotional level. (AU pulls this exact shit on its staff all the time and it is enraging).

But picking a fight with the government doesn’t make much strategic sense. AU hit the public panic button, there was a few days of bad press for the government, and then what? Bad press is not really relevant to a government that is both vindictive and deeply down in the polls.

But what about the government’s overture to AU to re-start negotiations? Isn’t that a victory? Certainly, it is being spun as such by the executive.

But let’s look at where things are actually at. All the government said is it would be open to negotiating and its position remains that jobs (and the university executive) need to come back to the community. This is basically where things were at in June.

Except, and this is important, the government is now holding a financial gun to AU’s head. If AU doesn’t come to some deal that is acceptable to the government by September 30, it can expect the loss of government grants.

If AU’s Board gets too uppity, the government can also just replace them with an administrator under the Post-Secondary Learning Act (likely a current or former bureaucrat and conservative loyalist). The administrator can agree to whatever the government wants and can also sack any university executive types who get in the way.

So, the president has put the Board (i.e., his boss) in the position of having to decide if it wants to look constructive (and bargain) or if it wants to stonewall and look petulant and take the lumps the government is clearly threatening. Early signs are they will bargain, but we’ll see.

So, despite the theatrics of Scott’s video, he’s not improved AU’s bargaining position, he’s used his only weapon (public outrage), and, in doing so, he’s likely further damaged the university’s reputation (enrollments were in free fall even before his outburst).

I don’t really see how he survives this. Picking a fight that led to a potentially “ruinous” conflict with the government instead of either negotiating something or slow-walking until the government changed was just terrible decision-making given the political context.

Possible Resolutions

A sensible approach to this would be for the government and the university to agree to a jobs target (e.g., a number or a percentage) to be achieved by a certain date. AU can then seek to achieve it by incenting current staff to relocate and locating new hires in Athabasca. The government offered to provide resources to facilitate this. This will create a manageable growth in jobs and address local concerns. It will also allow current executive members who don’t want to move to Athabasca to exit at the end of their contracts.

-- 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

2020 national work-related fatality and injury stats

Sean Tucker and Anya Keefe from the University of Regina have released their annual report on workplace fatalities and injuries. This year’s report rolls up the 2020 data but also includes a section on COVID-related injuries and fatalities from 2020 and 2021.

The nub of the report is that, nationally in 2020:

• There were 924 accepted WCB claims for fatalities, with about two-thirds being caused by occupationally-related diseases.
• There were also 254,000 accepted claims for lost-time injuries.

Specific to Alberta in 2020:

• Among provinces, Alberta had the second highest five-year average injury fatality rate, although there was a slight decline noted in 2020’s injury fatality rate.
• Among provinces, Alberta had the third highest five-year average disease fatality rate, although there was an increase noted in 2020’s disease fatality rate.
• Among provinces, Alberta had one of the lowest five-year average lost-time claim rates, although there was a slight increase noted in 2020’s lost-time claim rate.

I have nicked the relevant graphs from the report:

Looking at COVID claims:

Alberta had the second highest number of COVID-related fatality claims accepted (31) in 2021.

• Alberta had the third highest level of COVID-related injury claims accepted (7846) on 2021. There were 4800 accepted in 2020.

Alberta seems to be performing markedly worse than BC (despite BC’s slightly higher population). That said, it is a bit hard to know what to make of COVID claims data at this point because they may be affected by WCB policies as much as anything else.

-- Bob Barnetson