Labour & Pop Culture: Jack of all trades

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Jack of All Trades” by Bruce Springsteen. This is a typical working-class ballad from Springsteen, wherein the characters are a struggling and the economic struggle becomes a metaphor for the romantic one.

There is a pretty clear class analysis in the song:

The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin
It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again
It’ll happen again, yeah they’ll bet your life
I’m a jack of all trades, darling we’ll be all right

The most interesting part of the song is this lyric:

So you use what you’ve got and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight

(Note the cheer from the audience at the end of this line).

One of things we don’t talk much about in labour relations is the nasty business that, when class oppression becomes to great, there is sometimes a spontaneous uprising involving guns, ropes, and lampposts. Not every time, but often enough to give the powerful pause when they think about turning the screws.



I’ll mow your lawn, clean the leaves out’ your drain
I’ll mend your roof, to keep out the rain
I take the work that God provides
I’m a jack of all trades, honey we’ll be all right

I’ll hammer the nails, I’ll set the stone
I’ll harvest your crops, when they’re ripe and grown
I’ll pull that engine apart, and patch’er up ’til she’s running right
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be all right

The hurricane blows, brings the hard rain
When the blue sky breaks
It feels like the world’s gonna change
And we’ll start caring for each other
Like Jesus said that we might
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be all right

The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin
It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again
It’ll happen again, yeah they’ll bet your life
I’m a jack of all trades, darling we’ll be all right

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
We stood the drought, now we’ll stand the flood
There’s a new world coming, I can see the light
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be all right

So you use what you’ve got and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be all right
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be all right

-- Bob Barnetson

Alberta hints at lowering boom on repeat employment standards offenders

The Toronto Star has done a good job reporting on the rampant employer violations of Ontario’s Labour Standards. A few weeks back, it published an important piece about how many employers simply ignore the rules, even after getting busted.

Almost three-quarters of employers with a “history of non-compliance” — the targets of the ministry’s latest round of inspections — were revealed to be still violating employment standards, according to a detailed breakdown of the investigations requested by the Star.

This is not surprising. There are minimal (and often no) consequences for employers who violate employment laws. Minimal penalties reflects that these violations are seen as regulatory failures (i.e., unintentional errors that employers will correct if pointed out) rather than what they really are: intentional law breaking deserving of sanction.

The high rate of recidivism among employers (a common issue in all jurisdictions) reveals the “regulatory violation” approach to be incorrect and ineffective. This matters because employment law is mostly complaint driven: the government relies on workers to report violations. 

As David Weil writes in his paper “Broken windows, vulnerable workers, and the future of worker representation”, workers are unlikely to report violations if they perceive reporting as useless and ineffective. This then sets the stage for greater violations as employers learn that the laws have no meaning.

Alberta is currently reviewing its Employment Standards Code (which was last meaningfully amended in 1987). Among the changes foreshadowed by the survey document is an emphasis on greater enforcement.

To support the resolution of complaints in a timely manner and improve the government’s ability to deal with repeat offenders and uncooperative parties, options for new enforcement tools are being considered to support a progressive and clear system of employment standards enforcement (Section 4).

The tools mooted include progressive penalties (including ticketing employers), greater ability to recover stolen wages, increasing how far back in time the government can issue wage orders for, and increased prosecution of offenders. The government also queries support for public naming and shaming of employers who steal wages and fail to make restitution.

Should the government adopt any of these strategies, a key issue will be one of resourcing. As I noted in November, there are only 45 employment standards officers in Alberta. They presently handle about 5400 claims a year and are responsible for enforcing the rules for over 1 million employees.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: In the City of Chicago

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “In the City of Chicago” by Christy Moore. This song talks about the immigrant experience of Irish who fled the Irish potato famine of 1845-1852 and settled in Chicago. During this period, approximately 1 million Irish died and another million emigrated.

Emigration is often best understood by considering both push and pull factors. Contemporary research suggests that push factors include the need to seek employment and, more importantly, a sense of dissatisfaction with life in their home community.

Pull factors included employment prospects in the destination community, as well as the desirability of the destination (e.g., ability to find and integrate into a social community, availability of housing). As the Irish potato famine (or the more recent exodus of Syrians from their country) reminds us, sometimes the push factor overwhelms the pull.



[CHORUS]

In the City of Chicago,
As the evening shadows fall,
There are people dreaming,
Of the hills of Donegal.

1847, was the year it all began,
Deadly pains of hunger, drove a million from the land,
They journeyed not for glory,
Their motive was not greed,
A voyage of survival,
Across the stormy sea.

[CHORUS]

Some of them knew fortune, some of them knew fame,
More of them knew hardship,
And died upon the plain,
They spread throughout the nation,
They rode the railroad cars,
Brought their songs and music,
To ease their lonely hearts.

[CHORUS]

-- Bob Barnetson

Alberta Labour's 2017-20 business plan

Alberta Labour has released its 2017-2020 business plan. Business plans provide a high-level indication of where government departments are headed and how they will assess their progress.

EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS
Employment Standards will need to make some significant performance improvements to meet its targets this year. Its rate of investigation completions within 180 days (six months!) of a complaint being filed was 49% in 2015/16. By the end of the 2017/18, it is expected to be at 60%, increasing to 70% by 2019/20.

Over the past few years the target has been 63% and the government has achieved in the mid-40%. Achieving 60% (let alone 70%) will be a challenging. As I noted in November, there were only 45 employment standards officers in Alberta and they are responsible for roughly 80% of paid employees. The options the government has include:

1. Hire more employment standards officers.
2. Change the internal processes to increase speed of resolution.
3. Hope the volume of claims goes down.

The government has implemented changes in its internal processes in the past few years. This netted a four percent increase in completion rates. I suspect that this kind of efficiency gain is mostly tapped out. Completion speed may also be affected by the surge of complaints noted in 2016 (it is unclear if this surge continues).

One of the internal changes the government could make is to increase voluntary settlements between workers and employers. The current rate of settlement is 79% and the target for next year of 85%.

The key risk of emphasizing voluntary settlement is that this often requires workers to give up some of the wages they are entitled to in order to get resolution (otherwise, why would the employer agree to pay up?). This sits uneasily with the basic notion of employment standards as a set of minimum entitlements. An interesting indicator would be wages owed versus wages recovered through settlement.

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY
The government is also seeking an increase in OHS inspections, from 9100 in 2015/16 to 10,500 in 2017/18. (The 2015/16 inspection total was reported at over 9500 in the annual report, but there may be some data definition differences). A longer-term target is 11,500 inspections.

This is a positive trend but needs to be seen in the context of (1) there being 150,000ish employers in Alberta and (2) some inspections will be re-inspections of employers found to be non-compliant. 

Basically, inspection rates remain very low and, overall, Alberta continues to have a complaint-based system of enforcement. This system relies upon workers to report violations, which they may not be able to identify and which they may be scared to report.

LABOUR MARKET TRAINING
An interesting omission in the Business Plan is any specific mention of the Canada Jobs Grant (CJG). This federally funded (but provincially administered) program was foisted on the provinces by former federal employment minister Jason Kenney in 2013/14.

The CJG was supposed to help unemployed workers connect to the labour market and, by covering 66% of training costs, encourage employers to spend more on skills development. It displaced the 2008-2014 Labour Market Agreements (LMAs) that were doing a good job of helping unemployed and disadvantaged workers attach to the labour market and stripped funding away from LMA-funded training programs.

A preliminary evaluation of the CJG on behalf of the provinces and territories hints that the CJG is less effective at helping unemployed Canadians attach to the labour market than was the LMA. Of particular concern is evidence that suggests the CJG has shifted training dollars from programs that benefited diverse groups of unemployed Canadians to training that benefits (mostly) white, able-bodied men who already have post-secondary credentials and who are already employed in high-skill jobs (the BC report in the link above is particularly searing). 

-- Bob Barnetson

U of A grad student organizing drive?

This spring, it is expected that Alberta will introduce legislation giving faculty associations the right to strike (and be locked out). This is a part of the province’s efforts to comply with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour.

This change will have significant effects for collective bargaining in universities. My own faculty association has begun strike planning. A secondary question is whether the government will allow faculty to periodically choose different (or no) bargaining agents.

This question has become more salient because it appears that efforts are underway to organized graduate students at the University of Alberta. Grad students are currently represented by the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) of the University of Alberta.

Like the rest of Alberta’s GSAs, the U of A GSA sought to retain the current labour provisions in the Post-Secondary Learning Act. This would both prelude strikes and prevent students from selecting a different bargaining agent. A number of grad students have vocally objected to this position.

A Student Worker Action Group (SWAG) is hosting an organizing meeting on Monday, March 27, 2017. SWAG styles itself as “an organizing committee of academic labourers at the University of Alberta”. Its concerns include worker rights, compensation, tuition, safety, and racism/sexism/discrimination.

(There was an identically named drive at the U of A about 10 (?) years ago that was associated with the Wobblies that seems to continue here on Facebook  It is unclear if the same folks are involved this time around (the name could be coincidence).)

The SWAG that is hosting the March 27 meeting could be a self-organizing effort by students. Alternately, it could be an effort by organized labour to make in roads into the post-secondary system. If the latter, then this would be one of the first concrete effects of Alberta’s proposed changes to PSE labour relations.

In either case, a more radical, labour-oriented graduate student association (whether affiliated with a specific union or operating as independents—and that may depend on the government’s changes to PSE labour law) would be a big shift. While it is unlikely that Alberta GSAs would soon be undertaking action along the lines of the 2012 Quebec student protests, they could hardly fail to be more active and powerful than the moribund GSAs that Alberta has had historically. 

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Dead End Street

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Dead End Street” by the Kinks. The 1966 song looks at poverty among the lower class in the UK. The song was written to highlight that not everyone experienced the 1960s as fun and flamboyance.

Instead, many remained trapped by a strict class system that included high level of un- or under-employment. This is reflected in the lyrics “Out of work and got no money” and:

What are we living for?
Two-roomed apartment on the second floor.
No chance to emigrate,
I'm deep in debt and now it's much too late.

Interestingly, as Guy Standing notes in The Precariat, not all that much has changed for many Britons. There remains a significant intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage in the UK and elsewhere.

The video (wherein the band play Victorian undertakers) was one of the first ever music videos:



There's a crack up in the ceiling,
And the kitchen sink is leaking.
Out of work and got no money,
A Sunday joint of bread and honey.

What are we living for?
Two-roomed apartment on the second floor.
No money coming in,
The rent collector's knocking, trying to get in.

We are strictly second class,
We don't understand,
(Dead end!)
Why we should be on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
People are living on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
Gonna die on dead end street.
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)

On a cold and frosty morning,
Wipe my eyes and stop me yawning.
And my feet are nearly frozen,
Boil the tea and put some toast on.

What are we living for?
Two-roomed apartment on the second floor.
No chance to emigrate,
I'm deep in debt and now it's much too late.

We both want to work so hard,
We can't get the chance,
(Dead end!)
People live on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
People are dying on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
Gonna die on dead end street.
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
(Dead end!)

People live on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
People are dying on dead end street.
(Dead end!)
Gonna die on dead end street.
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
Head to my feet (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
How's it feel? (yeah)
How's it feel? (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah)
Dead end street (yeah

-- Bob Barnetson

Submission on Bill 6 Recommendations

The Government of Alberta is seeking feedback on recommendations made by industry working groups about the application of the Employment Standards Code and the Labour Relations Code to farms and ranches in the wake of Bill 6. You can view the recommendations and provide feedback here. Here are the thoughts I sent in:

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback on the Bill 6 Employment Standards and Labour Relations Working Groups’ reports. I have broken my response into six sections.

In reading the recommendations, it is worth noting that only 29% of Alberta farms employed waged labour in 2011. Most of this employment occurs on farms with annual revenue of $250,000 or more. These farms can afford to provide fair and safe workplaces.

EXPANDING EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS EXCLUSIONS
The working group makes a number of recommendations that effectively roll back protections for various workers.

• In some cases, the working group seeks to have family members who are also waged employees excluded from Employment Standards under the pretext that many families do not comply with the existing standard. 
• In other cases, the working group seeks to have portions of the agricultural industry that are currently covered by some Employment Standards provisions (i.e., nurseries, sod farms, greenhouses, and mushroom farms) deemed to be primary production operations and, therefore, excluded from these provisions.

The main purpose of Bill 6 was to extend the rights of farmworkers. These recommendations have the effect of rolling back existing rights and, therefore, are fundamentally incompatible with the legislative intent of Bill 6.

The rationale for family exemptions is essentially “well, since we already ignore your laws, you may as well roll them back.” This is akin to suggesting that speeding could be resolved by raising the speed limit (instead of enforcing the existing limit).

The rationale for excluding operations already subject to some employment standards is stated as: 

The nature of work and type of product from these establishments is generally similar to those in the agriculture sector as a whole. Consequently, they should be classified as ‘primary production’ and be subject to the same rules and regulations as the rest of the agriculture industry. (p.13)

The assertion that these operations are the “generally similar” to those in the agricultural sector is not perfectly true. These operations typically do not have the weather- or reproductive-based time pressures of farming and ranching respectively. Further, they tend to be more labour intensive operations, often employing significant numbers of paid staff. Consequently, these operations look less like most agricultural operations and more like small manufacturing operations. Further, ignoring the different nature of these operations sits uneasily with the working group’s own objective of having regulations that are “product-specific” and “recognize the diversity of the industry” (p.3).

Given this, there is no rationale for expanding the exclusions to Employment Standards and these recommendations ought to be ignored.

HOURS OF WORK, DAYS OF REST, AND BREAKS
The Working Group recommends excluding farm workers from the provincial rules around hours of work, days of rest, and breaks. The key argument for these standards is safety: long hours contribute to fatigue, which, in turn, increases the risk of injury. For example, being awake 17 hours is the same as having a blood-alcohol level of 0.05 (i.e., being legally impaired in Alberta). Given that agriculture is already one of Canada’s most dangerous industries, failing to regulate fatigue poses a threat to the health and life of workers.

The working group has also recommended exempting agricultural operations from overtime provisions. Alberta normally requires overtime pay when employers demand more than 8 hours of work in a day, or 44 hours in a week. The purpose of this standard is to discourage employers from imposing on workers long work weeks (via a wage premium).

Eliminating the rules around overtime—especially in conjunction with eliminating maximum hours of work—will reduce wage costs for agricultural owners. The cost of this change will be borne by farm workers (whom Bill 6 is designed to protect) because they will receive lower wages and be placed at higher risk of fatigue-related injuries.

The argument that “An overtime rate would only lower the base pay rate which would not increase total earnings of employees and furthermore cause complications in calculating pay (p. 9)” seems specious since (1) most farm workers make only slightly more than the minimum wage (thus there is not far for the base rate to fall) and, (2) farms are subject to labour market dynamics (wherein reducing the base rate of pay may impede recruitment).

The working group is also recommending eliminating extra pay for farm workers who work statutory holidays. There is no real argument for this recommendation, except minimizing employer wage costs.

Overall, these recommendations are designed to externalize labour costs (in the form of low wages and unsafe working conditions) from producers onto workers. This is inconsistent with the intent of Bill 6 and these recommendations should be disregarded.

CHILD LABOUR ON FARMS
The application of Alberta’s child labour laws (as presently written) would preclude children (under 12) and adolescents (aged 12–14) from being hired to work on farms. Bill 6 already exempts family members from all employment rules, so these standards apply only to children and adolescents whom farmers seek to hire as waged workers.

The working group proposes allowing adolescents to work on farms subject to two caveats:

1. Workers aged 12 and 13 can only work 20 hours per week. This is different from the normal rules for adolescents, where work is limited to two hours on a school day and eight hours on a non-school day. The impact of this proposal would be to lengthen the allowable work day and work week during the school year, but shorten it during the summer (which seems contrary to the educational interests of adolescents).
2. Workers under 16 can only be employed if the work has no negative impact on schooling, parental consent is be obtained, and the work is not detrimental to the health, education, or welfare of youth. These requirements basically already exist in the Employment Standards Code and regulations.

Given the high rate of injury associated with agriculture and the particularly vulnerable nature of adolescents at work, allowing adolescent employment in agriculture is not good public policy. It will only be a matter of time before a teenager is maimed or killed on the job. How soon will depend upon which occupational health and safety rules apply to farms, and whether farms bother complying (as we saw above, farmers already admit to not complying with certain Employment Standards).

The working group is also seeking to reduce the minimum wage for workers under 16 years of age to 75% of the normal minimum wage. The working group’s rationale is that a lower minimum wage will encourage agricultural employers to provide work experience for young people. This rationale obscures farmers' financial interest in minimizing their labour bill. Further, will young workers really flock to farm jobs if such jobs pay less than jobs in any other industry? Given that Alberta only recently ended lower wages for workers who serve alcohol, I see no rationale for lower wages for young workers.

PUBLIC EMERGENCY TRIBUNALS
The Labour Relations Working Group recommends adding “imminent and irreversible damage to crops and/or livestock welfare in primary agriculture” (p.8) to the circumstances when the government can impose a Public Emergency Tribunal (thereby ending a work stoppage) under the Labour Relations Code.

While the working group’s concern for animal welfare is commendable, there is no reason to believe that a work stoppage would imperil animal welfare. Employers have 72-hours of notice of any work stoppage (a savvy employer would have even longer notice) and be able to take appropriate action to ensure animal welfare. In this recommendation, the working group is catastrophizing as a way to justifying limits on workers’ constitutional right to strike.

The argument the working group makes for declaring a PET due to risk of crop loss is equally without merit. Many employers face significant disruption in production (including unremediable losses) due to work stoppages (e.g., companies the ship spoilable products or companies that host events). The threat of such disruption is the reason why work stoppages are effective tools.

The real issue here is that farm employers don’t want to be periodically subject to effective collective bargaining pressure by their workers. This desire by employers to interfere with constitutionally protected worker rights is evident in the “strategic options” advanced, such as excluding agriculture from the ambit of the Labour Relations Code and entirely banning strikes and lockouts in agricultural labour relations.

THE ONTARIO MODEL
The working group identifies the Ontario Agricultural Employees Protection Act as a possible framework for unionization and collective bargaining in agriculture. It is important to recall that this legislation was enacted in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dunmore and was designed to provide the thinnest set of labour rights that were (then) constitutional. Recent jurisprudence has substantially expanded the scope of protected activity under Section 2(d) and significant portions of the AEPA are unlikely to be found constitutional. This model should be rejected in favour of the same model of labour relations available to every other worker and employer in Alberta.

BARGAINING UNIT SIZE
The working group advances the strategic option of a minimum agricultural bargaining unit size of 5 (versus the norm of 2). This limit is unnecessary because of structural pressures. Recent research I’ve conducted into rural organizing in Alberta using the provincial government’s collective bargaining data-set suggests that bargaining units smaller than 20 workers are uncommon in rural, private-sector operations. This is because (absent very specific circumstances) such units are economically unviable for unions to organize and operate. This analysis suggests that unionization activity is likely to be limited to large agriculture operations that have a significant number of employees (e.g., feedlots, green houses).

Thanks you for the opportunity to make comment upon the working groups’ recommendations.

Bob Barnetson, Professor
Labour Relations
Athabasca University