Two protests in the next few days

Over the next few days, there are a couple of interesting labour-related events in Edmonton. On Sunday, March 2, there will be a protest at Winston Churchill Square over the government’s recent attack on public-sector pensions.

On Monday, March 3 the group Canadians Against the Temporary Foreign Worker Program will be hosting a protest at the Legislature reflecting ponds at 9 am. The Legislature steps are apparently booked for the same time for something official, which could make for an interesting collision of messages.

As far as I can tell, CATFWP is a grassroots group of folks who are concerned about the erosion of job security and working conditions given employers’ greater ability to replace Canadian workers with foreign migrants. There also appears to be some folks concerned about the treatment of foreign workers with a very slight leavening of xenophobes. Quite an interesting Facebook group to follow.

-- Bob Barnetson

Freezing public-sector wages by returning the right to strike

On Valentine’s Day, Justice Denny Thomas granted an injunction that effectively suspends the operation of Bill 46 indefinitely. Bill 46 is the Redford government’s effort to legislate a wage freeze for Alberta’s 22,000 civil servants effective March 31. My favourite part of the decision is this:

[65] …Alberta did not meet its obligation to negotiate in good faith. The timeline and events prior to consideration and passage of Bill 46 are interpreted by me to conclude Alberta never intended that the 2013 negotiations with AUPE were to be meaningful.

Ouch.

Deputy Premier Dave Hancock’s response was brief and bizarre:

The Public Service Salary Restraint Act was passed by the Legislature with the intention of getting AUPE back to the negotiating table, and that has happened.

 No reasonable person could reasonably conclude that Bill 46 was designed to bring AUPE back to the table. Indeed, Justice Thomas, who presumably had all of the evidence the government could muster, concluded that negotiations were still ongoing when Bill 46 was enacted:

[57]… Negotiations between AUPE and Alberta were ongoing when Bill 46 was tabled and passed. I do not accept Alberta has proven that an “impasse” had emerged and therefore a legislative response was appropriate.

Bill 46 was really about freezing the wages of civil servants. Wage-freeze legislation is all the rage with conservative governments these days. But I wonder if, somewhat counter intuitively, the government wouldn’t be better off to return the right to strike to civil servants if they really want to hold salary increases at zero.

My thinking is this. If civil servants have the right to strike, then the government can stone wall at the bargaining table indefinitely (thereby denying any increases). This state of affairs continues until the workers force the government to cough up some cash by striking. My guess is that civil servants would be unable to bring that kind of pressure to bear on the Tories. 

Yeah sure, for the first few days of a public-sector strike the public might be behind the workers. But eventually the public will realize that civil servants actually do pretty important things (“hey, why is no one tranquilizing that moose in my backyard?” “hey, why is no one getting me the pay my employer illegally deducted?”) and support for the strike would turn to dismay about the disruption.

That dismay would (doubtlessly with government nudging) turn against the workers. Conservatives have spent years creating the image that civil servants are in lazy and pampered because civil servants, for example, trade wage increases for pension plans so they would have adequate retirement income. The nerve of those civil servants, planning for retirement. And funding it themselves with forgone wage increases and contributions out of their own pockets!

Absent public support, there is really zero pressure on politicians to settle a public-sector strike. They have provisions in the Labour Relations Code for public emergency stuff (e.g., keeping ERs open and the lights on). But if the tide turns against the workers, politicians can actually make hay letting the workers walk the line. And save even more money through foregone wages.

Returning civil servants the right to strike would be a much more honest way to hold wage increases at zero than bargaining in bad faith, concocting unconstitutional wage-freeze legislation and trying to pretend that behaviour is anything other than a dirtbag move.

-- Bob Barnetson

Britain vs Alberta: It's OHS Hammer Time

Nearly two weeks ago, Minister of Jobs, Skills, Training and Labour Thomas Lukaszuk indicated that the OHS “hammer is out is out again”. Lukaszuk was responding to a pair of stories showing (1) a near-record 188 workplace deaths in Alberta in 2013 and (2) OHS inspectors has issued no tickets or administrative penalties. To round out the picture, it is useful to know there were only 5 successful OHS prosecutions in 2013.

A reader passed onto me some comparative data from the UK. It is obviously important to compare apples to apples so I have tried to control for that in the table below. For example, “injury fatalities” exclude occupational disease and motor vehicle fatalities. The UK stats span the fiscal year 2012/13 while Alberta’s numbers are for the 2013 calendar year.

 

2013	Alberta	UK
Population	4 million	63 million
Injury fatalities	52	141
Fatalities per million pop	13.0	2.2
Prosecutions completed	5	706
Prosecutions per million pop	1.25	11.2
Prosecutions per fatality	0.38	5.0

Controlling for population size, this means:

1.   Alberta has 5.9 times more fatalities due to workplace injury than the UK.
2. The UK completes 7.5 times more OHS prosecutions than Alberta.

Perhaps most disconcerting is that UK completes 5.0 prosecutions per workplace fatality while Alberta completes 0.38—that is to say, the UK rate of prosecutions per fatality is 13.15 times Alberta’s rate. The spectre of punishment may help explain why UK fatality numbers are lower than Alberta’s.

In related news, yet another farm worker was killed on the job after being sucked into a grain augur and “mangled to death”. How this happened will likely never be clear as the RCMP only investigate to determine if the death was criminal and OHS has no jurisdiction on farms (my guess is the guard was missing or removed). 

According to the Herald:

New Labour Minister Thomas Lukaszuk told the Herald last week he is “warm” to extending the law to include agribusinesses, but the problem has been determining where to draw the line between family farms and agribusinesses.

The notion that farms are somehow difficult to regulate because they are places where people both live and work has become the Tories’ mantra for inaction.

Even a minute’s thought tells you this excuse is untrue. Every other province somehow manages to regulate farms. And Alberta regulates greenhouses, sod farms, nurseries and mushroom farms—some of which have to include on-site residences.

The real issue is a lack of political will to regulate farms or workplaces more broadly. Until that changes, Alberta’s fatality numbers are unlikely to go down.

-- Bob Barnetson

By Thor's Hammer... reality check on workplace health and safety

Last Friday, the government released 2013 workplace-fatality totals. The number of fatalities accepted by the WCB was up significantly in 2013.

Year	Fatalities
2005	143
2006	123
2007	154
2008	166
2009	110
2010	136
2011	123
2012	145
2013	173

These 173 fatalities are only those accepted by the WCB for compensation. These numbers do not report fatalities not accepted, fatalities in industries not covered by WCB (e.g., agriculture) and fatalities not reported. In short, these numbers under-report the true level of work-related death in Alberta. 

To these totals you must also add 15 delayed fatalities (fatalities that occurred in 2013 but were caused by an event in a previous year). This brings the total number of workplace-related deaths to 188.

  

In a follow-on story, the Calgary Herald reports that the government has not issued any administrative penalties (which came into effect on October 1, 2013) or workplace tickets (which came into effect on January 1, 2014).

This sits uneasily with then-Minister of Human Services Dave Hancock’s promise when the legislation was enacted:

There will be no more slaps on the wrist in Alberta; a worker or employer who puts health and safety at risk, or is misleading or unfair in their business dealings, will be held accountable.

Confronted with this, now-Minister of Jobs, Skills, Training and Labour Thomas Lukaszuk told the Calgary Herald:

"Am I disappointed? I had a very strongly worded conversation with my department today.” 

"I definitely have an expectation that any and all tools that are available to enforcement officers are used to ensure our workers are safe." 

Lukaszuk pointed out he introduced administrative fines and ticketing, vowing at the time to drop the hammer on dangerous job sites. 

"The hammer is out again," he warned.

It is pretty hard to take Lukaszuk’s bluster seriously. Have a look at the last 9 years of prosecutions under the OHS Act in Alberta.

Year	Fatalities	Prosecutions
2005	143	12
2006	123	10
2007	154	12
2008	166	22
2009	110	7
2010	136	11
2011	123	20
2012	145	9
2013	173	5

As you can see, with the exceptions of 2008 and 2011, the trend is downward. Ratios provide a useful, albeit crude, measure of enforcement. In 2005, there was one prosecution for every 12 fatalities. In 2013, there was one prosecution for every 34 fatalities. Some hammer.

Part of the issue, according to the government, is that only 8 of 151 OHS officers have received the training necessary to qualify as peace officers—status that is required to hand out tickets. Given the government’s virtually infinite resources, this bottleneck reflects a lack of will (or perhaps poor planning) rather than some sort of insurmountable barrier.

It is interesting to step back from the fatality totals and consider how the government has handled workplace regulation since 1993. With a few exceptions, Tory politicians have generally maintained (and occasionally even toughened) the health and safety and employment standards rules. But minister after minister has starved (and otherwise discouraged) enforcement to the point where the rules are meaningless—behaviour which is shameful.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research on the effect of salary disclosure

Last Friday, Alberta disclosed the salaries (and value of benefits) of anyone appointed under the Public Service Act and making over $100,000.

One of the outcomes of this disclosure is that we now can determine the veracity of a December statement by Derek Fildebrandt, the Alberta director of the so-called Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Back then, he supported Bill 46—Tory legislation to freeze wages among civil servants represented by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE)—by noting that:

...(T)he government's own data showing the average core provincial government employee costs taxpayers, on average, $120,000 a year in salaries, wages and benefits. 

While there are many deserving and hard-working members of (AUPE), its leadership hasn't grasped the seriousness of the province's fiscal situation. Rather than work with the government to address the serious problems with the costs of public sector employee compensation, they walked away from the negotiating table.

As it turns out, only 88 of the 22,000 workers (0.4%) affected by Bill 46 are in the list. The average government worker makes around $58,000.The real high rollers are managers (who are outside of the union), especially extremely senior bureaucrats.

That kind of sloppy argument—lumping two clearly different classes of employees together to get a politically useful but completely misleading number—ought to make us wonder about the quality of other CTF “research”.

Anyhoooo… so what was the purpose of this so-called “sunshine” list? According to then-Minister of Service Alberta, Doug Griffiths:

Disclosure just makes sure we keep both sides of the coin exposed. We’re able to attract great people but we’re also able to make sure we control the salaries in a way that’s appropriate for meeting our fiscal responsibilities to taxpayers.

How exactly the list will control salaries is unclear. Will individuals be so embarrassed that they voluntarily decline increases or demand rollbacks? Will their bosses put the brakes on salaries? This graphic (courtesy of the Wild Rose) suggests not…

Ontario enacted a similar law in 1996. The only analysis of the effect of that salary disclosure law that I could find was a 2010 research note from Canadian Public Policy. It examines changes in the salaries of university presidents and academics between 1996 and 2006:

…(I)n the academic sector at least, disclosure has not been associated with restrained salaries. Instead, if any tentative conclusion can be reached, it appears that salary disclosure has most likely been inflationary. This is consistent with numerous theoretical propositions that contend that disclosure puts more upward than downward pressure on wages.

So, what research there is on public-sector disclosures suggests it triggers aggregate salary inflation. There are greater gains at the bottom (as those who earn less demand parity) but, overall, there are across the board wage increases.

Obviously generalizing from one study is not great practice so I started looking at private-sector disclosures. Again, there is a paucity of data. The one Canadian study I found suggests private-sector disclosure among CEOs seems to yield similar dynamics:

…(F)irms paying highly restrain pay increases and save money, and firms paying below market limit their chances of incurring costs associated with such a low position by adjusting pay upward. On the left corner however, mandatory disclosure enables some other firms to race for the market’s top pay position. The empirical results show that this overbid for the top paying spot has a market-wide inflationary effect on the CEOs’ pay.

I’d like to say that it is strange how the Conservatives tend to be impervious to evidence when making policy decisions. But I can't. Ignoring evidence is standard operating procedure for Tories. For example, this afternoon I’m off to a focus group on Alberta's new workplace health and safety strategy that appears to (once again) emphasis education over enforcement—the exact opposite of what the evidence suggests is effective.

-- Bob Barnetson

On credibility, Bill 46 and PSE

Yesterday, a judge ordered a temporary stay on the implementation of Bill 46, which would otherwise have imposed a contract on public servants on January 31. This temporary stay (until Valentine’s Day) gives the judge a chance to review AUPE’s application for a long-term stay of the Bill (i.e., until the constitutional challenge can be sorted out).

It has been interesting watching Deputy Premier Dave Hancock try to spin Bill 46 over the past few days. Bill 46 strips the right of civil servants to arbitration and replaces it with a (lousy) legislated contract. Bill 46 also provides that the legislated outcome can be avoided if AUPE (the union representing civil servants) and the government negotiate some other agreement before Friday (or possible March 31, if the government extends the deadline).

Hancock claimed in the Legislature that Bill 46 was designed to bring AUPE back to the bargaining table (this oft-repeated statement is clearly one of the government’s key messages). This ignores that it was the government’s intransigence in the spring that lead AUPE to declare impasse and send the matter to binding arbitration.

After the judge temporarily stayed Bill 46, Hancock said “We are willing to negotiate anywhere, anytime. I hope the AUPE will meet us at the negotiating table.” Apparently Hancock thinks a dynamic that AUPE characterizes as “negotiating with a gun to its head” is a meaningful negotiation. Or maybe he doesn’t think that and his is just trying to make lemonaide while the cameras are rolling.

Anyone with any experience in bargaining can see that the government has little incentive to meaningfully negotiate because it will get the contract it wants regardless of negotiations. And, consistent with this analysis, the government has not made any significant changes in its position since it decided to impose a contract on October 8 (despite several bargaining meeting with AUPE) or, indeed, since its opening offer last March.

Hancock’s clearly fatuous statement undermines the government’s credibility as an honest dealer. Of course the government was already on pretty shaky ground here. For example, last spring the government reneged on its promise of three years of 2% funding increases in post-secondary education (PSE) and then hit the system with a minus seven-and-a-bit cut, which resulted in layoffs and programs closures.

Yesterday Hancock also spoke about the post-secondaryeducation file. His main message was that there won’t be a lot of money in the upcoming budget and the government is working under a three-year plan. Of course, the government was also working under a three-year plan last year… which tells us that budget plans in Alberta are really just political tools to manage dissent and expectations—they don’t actually guide government action.

A more intriguing part of Hancock’s talk was this bit:

He said the government is still interested in pursuing measures championed by Lukaszuk in the advanced education system, such as reducing duplication of programming and commercializing research. But he said his primary goal is assisting universities and colleges and getting out of their way.

 So, on the one hand, government wants to assist institutions and “get out of their way”. On the other hand, the government is still committed to Lukaszuk’s ill-defined (but intrusive) “Campus Alberta” plan (so the government isn’t “getting out of the way”). And there likely isn’t going to be any more cash (which is primarily how the government assists institutions).

Hancock also said the government wants the PSE system to prepare for major enrollment growth. But somehow the system is also supposed to reduce duplication. What “reducing duplication” has actually meant is closing programs and offering fewer courses (because of the government’s funding cut). How a reduction in student spaces jives with rhetoric about preparing for enrollment growth is hard to fathom—because it simply doesn’t.

Hancock is smart and pretty slick. But it is also pretty clear the emperor is facing a wardrobe crisis. If your words are untrustworthy in labour relations, you’ll never get anywhere with the other side. (While annoying, the phrase “show me the money” pretty much sums the government’s present level of credibility.) If the conservative government wants to dig itself out of its messes, it might be worthwhile revisiting this bargaining 101 lesson.

-- Bob Barnetson

Athabasca moves forward on call centre model

I’ve had several questions from students about Athabasca University’s undergraduate instructional model following a recent article (including several follow-on letters that are not available online) in the Athabasca Advocate. In short, AU appears to be about to replace the tutor model to a call-centre model. Here is the low down as far as I can tell.

Athabasca currently offers undergraduate courses using two models: the tutor model and the call centre model (sometimes called the student support centre model).

1. Tutor Model: Students are assigned an individual academic, sometimes a full-time faculty member and sometimes a part-time tutor. Students use the course materials (e.g., an online study guide that replaces traditional lectures plus textbooks and other readings) and then interact with the academic as needed (e.g., asking questions, discussing material, clarifying assignments) and the academic also marks the students’ assignments.
2. Call centre model: Students get the same course materials but send queries to a call centre. The support staff in the call centre try to filter out so-called administrative questions and then generate tickets (i.e., service requests) that get sent an academic expert to answer. Academic experts can be full-time faculty or part-time tutors. Academic experts also do marking.

The most obvious difference between the two models is the level of student access to academics. The tutor model offers reasonably direct access by phone or email and the academic can also initiate contact with a student who is struggling or lagging. By contrast, the call centre model requires students to go through the call centre and academic experts cannot initiate contact with students.

Proponents of the call centre say there is little difference in student satisfaction or outcomes. Of course, most of this research is done by proponents of the call centre model and not everyone agrees with their conclusions. A recent survey by the Athabasca University Students’ Union shows widespread resistance to the call centre model among students. 

Proponents of the tutor model have a number of concerns about the call centre. This student’s comments outline many of the concerns:

Currently I am in a business class and when I called twice into the call center for assistance, no reply was given for a week. By the time I had received a response I had forgotten why I had called in the first place and had to search my papers for a prompt to remind me with an annoyed Athabasca University representative waiting impatiently on the phone. Even still, when the call ended I had forgotten other questions I had intended to ask and had to call back.

One example is not conclusive evidence of a problem by any means. But there are lots of similar stories about the technology of the call centre impeding learning.

So why use call centre technology then?

Cost is the main reason. After experimentation in the 1990s, the Faculty of Business adopted the call centre for all of its undergraduate courses about 10 years ago. Under the tutor model, the teaching cost in the Faculty of Business was about $1.5m. The call centre “saved” about $700k, although it is not clear whether that accounts for the additional costs associated with operating the call centre (I’m working from memory—I’d be happy for documentation if anyone has it).

Of course, “cost savings” is just a euphemism for “reduced tutors’ wages”. Under the tutor system, tutors get a fixed amount of money per month to teach a class plus piece-rate pay for marking. Under the call centre model, the tutors get paid by the minute for teaching plus piece-rate pay for marking.

Proponents of the call centre say the call centre is more efficient: academic experts don’t spend time answering “administrative” questions. In my experience, the number of purely administrative questions I get from students is negligible.

Those administrative questions I do get often open the door to academic discussions. For example, when a student asks “what is the format of the final exam?” (a seemingly administrative question), that is an opportunity for me to probe their readiness for the exam (e.g., “so, are you comfortable with concepts like the commodification of labour?”). The call centre model obstructs teachable moments like that.

I’ve taught in both models and, while this will likely anger some of my colleagues, my experience is that the call centre model is a lousy way to teach and learn. There is less interaction between students and academics (70-80% less according to call centre proponents!). The teaching is almost always reactive--no teaching happens unless a student calls and successfully gets past the call centre (only 20-30% of the time!). And there is often a lag between a question and a response. Much like any call centre experience (e.g., trying to resolve an issue on your cable bill), it is a frustrating experience. And this frustration means students don’t call—which saves the university money!

It is also a lousy way to work. The university grinds tutor wages by disputing the minute-by-minute time sheets they must submit. Some activities—like ongoing professional development—is not compensable. And the entire process is alienating for Athabasca’s tutors who are being treated as disposable workers.

Until recently, the call centre was limited to the Faculty of Business (plus a small number of other courses). Then, in the spring of 2012, the then-VPA quietly announced that the call centre would be rolled out across all courses starting in September in order to save $1 million.  

This decision was never presented to the university’s General Faculties Council because it was an “administrative” rather than an “academic” decision. We’d obviously call bullshit if a health bureaucrat overruled a doctor’s treatment decision to save some cash on the patient's back and this is no really different. Clearly cost-driven and quite fundamental pedagogical change was (and is) afoot with no academic oversight.

Academics resisted this change and it stalled. Presently the issue is languishing in a subcommittee of a subcommittee of General Faculties Council. 

Yet, at the same time, the Faculty of Science and Technology is apparently implementing the call centre so it looks like our current university administrators remain hell-bent on implementation in order to resolve the university’s financial woes. 

While academics continue to push back, it is unlikely academics alone will be successful in preserving the tutor model. Frankly, only students have that kind of power.

One of the most troubling unknowns about AU’s intent to move wholesale to the call centre model is whether other universities will continue to accept Athabasca University courses for transfer. This is important because somewhere around 25% of Athabasca course registration (~19,000) are by “visiting” students—students who pick up 1-3 courses to help them complete a degree elsewhere. Another 36% of registrations (~27,000) are non-program students—many of whom will take their AU courses to another institution for credit at some point (i.e., they are undeclared visiting students).

Currently, Faculty of Business courses seem to transfer well enough. But I suspect academics at receiving institutions have no idea that these courses are “taught” via the call centre model. That will no longer be the case if all courses AU are taught via the call centre.

While the government of Alberta may be able to pressurize Alberta institutions into recognizing call-centre courses, only about a third of visiting students are from Alberta. Another a third of visiting students come from Ontario and the government of Ontario has no reason to pressure its institutions to accept call centre courses.

As 50% of Athabasca’s revenue comes from tuition, any enrollment losses among visiting students are devastating. Ontario’s recent announcement that it is setting up its own online consortium may well make Ontario school less likely to accept AU credits, especially if AU gives those institutions the perfect pretext by making the credits look dodgy “degree-mill” credits earned from a call centre.

-- Bob Barnetson

Edit: A number of people have asked me how they can express their concerns about the call centre model.

AU’s Board of Governors has the power to stop the call centre and you may wish to email the Board Chair (Barry Walker) via the University Secretary (Carol Lund): caroll@athabascau.ca .

My own experience dealing with the Board is that they are more likely to respond to you if you copy your email to the Athabasca University Students Union (ausu@ausu.org) and perhaps the Minister of Advanced Education (Dave Hancock): edmonton.whitemud@assembly.ab.ca .

For those of you who prefer to tweet, here are some useful hashtags: #abpse #AthaU @DaveHancockMLA

For those of you who are old-school, you could also write a letter to the editor of the Athabasca Advocate: vannand@athabasca.greatwest.ca .

I'd be happy to receive copies of your messages at bob.barnetson@shaw.ca or @bobbarnetson .