New course: LBST 325: Labour mobility and migrant workers

 

Athabasca University has opened a new online course.

LBST 325: Labour Mobility and Migrant Workers examines various forms of labour mobility and how they affect workers, their families, and the sending and receiving communities.

The course draws upon research done by scholars associated with a recently concluded SSHRC grant (On the Move) with an emphasis on labour mobiilty in western Canada.

-- Bob Barnetson

Massive drop in Alberta OHS ticketing

Alberta Labour and Immigration’s annual report for 2019/2020 is now available online. Here are the highlights of the employment standards and occupational health and safety sections. The most interesting item is the 96% drop in OHS tickets issues in the past year.

Employment Standards

The number of employment standards complaints was pretty static but there were significant improvements in complaint processing times. That said, it still takes an average of 45 days for a complaint investigation to begin, which isn’t great if your employer just scooped your wages or fired you without notice or pay in lieu.

Interestingly, the number of anonymous tips jumped a lot (about 10% of these tips were investigated). There was also a significant percentage jump in workplace inspections. That said, the overall percentage of workplaces inspected remains very, very low.

Occupational Health and Safety

Workplace inspections were down about 20% this past year. Fewer inspections is attributed to pulling staff from frontline duties to train new OHS officers (really?) and a new system whereby employers can pinky swear that they fixed problems and avoid a re-inspection (eye roll). Orders written and unique worksites visited were also down. 



In terms of enforcement, 22 tickets were issued in 2019/20 (15 of which went to employers). Although the report doesn't mention it, this was down from 479 tickets in 2018/19. Hmmmm. This 96% drop in tickets cries out for explanation. At a guess, I’d say inspectors were told to stop issuing tickets because ticketing is up for review in 2020/21. Issuing virtually no tickets creates ”evidence” that this form of penalty is unnecessary and thus can be done away with as “red tape”.

Five administrative penalties were also issued to employers. Again, not mentioned is that this was down from 14 in 2018/19. Complaints of discrimination for exercising OHS rights were up this year (90 versus last year). Five of these were upheld, 23 were dismissed, and 62 remain under investigation. OHS charges were up, however, from 16 to 18 this year. This is a very low number given the number of injuries and fatalities.

While injury rates are not very good measures of injury due to massive under reporting, they do offer a year-over-year measure. Overall, both lost-time and disabling injury rates were stable in 2019 but were higher than they were in 2015. There were 129 fatalities accepted by the WCB in 2019—about the same as the year before.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: He thinks he’ll keep her

My wife flagged this 1993 song by Mary Chapin Carpenter as labour related. It traces the journey of a women who, at 36, opts to leave her marriage and role and primary caregiver to re-enter the workforce.

Most of the song chronicles the unpaid, social reproductive labour that the women does. It is interesting to see this work treated so explicitly as both skilled and demanding labour. And yet these skill have little market value when she decides to rejoin the paid workforce. It also nicely tease is out the often hidden power dynamics of one-income marriages.

I’m not a huge fan of the new country era, but the backup singers on this video are are pretty amazing. Trisha Yearwood, Emmylou Harris, and Patty Lovelace, to name a few.

She makes his coffee, she makes his bed
She does the laundry, she keeps him fed
When she was twenty-one she wore her mother's lace
She said, "forever," with a smile upon her face

She does the carpool, she P.T.A.'s
Doctors and dentists, she drives all day
When she was twenty-nine she delivered number three
And ev'ry Christmas card showed a perfect family

Ev'rything runs right on time
Years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines, he thinks he'll keep her

Ev'rything is so benign
The safest place you'll ever find
God forbid you change your mind, he thinks he'll keep her

She packs his suitcase, she sits and waits
With no expression upon her face
When she was thirty-six she met him at their door
She said, "I'm sorry, I don't love you any more"

Ev'rything runs right on time
Years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines, he thinks he'll keep her

Ev'rything is so benign
The safest place you'll ever find
God forbid you change your mind, he thinks he'll keep her

For fifteen years she had a job and not one raise in pay
Now she's in the typing pool at minimum wage

Ev'rything runs right on time
Years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines, he thinks he'll keep her

Ev'rything is so benign
The safest place you'll ever find
At least until you change your mind (he thinks he'll keep her) all right

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Good Girls Revolt

If you are looking for an interesting historical dramatization to fill you winter evenings, Amazon Prime is presently offering Good Girls Revolt, a 10-episode miniseries set in 1969 and 1970 at Newsweek Magazine.

Amazon cancelled the show after one season. But what a season it was! The show is based upon a book the chronicles a sex discrimination lawsuit by female researchers at Newsweek.  The researchers are exploited horrendously, often being more qualified and better writers than the male reporters, but paid a fraction of their wages and denied credit.

 

The most interesting part of the show is how it documents what is essentially an organizing campaign by the women to assert their rights. I can’t think, off hand, of another mainstream series that follows an organizing campaign over time. Usually collective action is framed as spontaneous or the result of a long-standing power base. 

 

In Good Girls Revolt, we get to see a group of workers create a new power base in a workplace. This includes recognizing and articulating their interests and how they differ from the interests of other workers (the men). It also engages how race and class can affect solidarity within a group. The character’s flaws and mis-steps are also realistically portrayed. 

 

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour and Pop Culture: Frankie Drake

I recently had the… opportunity?... to watch a few episodes of CBC’s Frankie Drake Mysteries series. The series centres on an all-female detective agency in 1920s Toronto (so kind of a flapper lady Matlock dealie). The series is available on Amazon Prime but perhaps also the CBC website.

Episode 2 of the first season (“Ladies in Red”) sees Frankie hired to investigate an attack on a factory owner. The owner is convinced the attack was the work of communists in his plant (that manufacturers some kind of confusing glass window product). The show makes reference to the 1919 Winnipeg strike as well as the 1920 Wall Street bombing (which may have been the work of Italian anarchists or communists… or maybe not) to explain the owner’s concerns.

The detectives’ investigations turns up a group of communists (or red sympathizers) in the plant. But their interest is mostly in world peace and perhaps in better working conditions. There is a subplot around sexual harassment and, in the end, the real villain in the plant manager who is skimming, sexually exploiting, and trying to deflect blame onto the workers.

If you can get past the many inconsistencies (e.g., the show is pretty race blind until race is a useful plot point) this episode has a positive portrayal of collective action by workers and highlights the plight of working women in urban Canada after the first war.

I have to admit, by the end I was on my phone googling. But my impression is that the episode ends with Frankie cajoling the plant owner into raising the women’s wages. This seemed very out of character and pretty Pollyanna.

-- Bob Barnetson

Activists not allies: Organizing in a distributed workforce

This blog was previously published on the Organizing Work blog.

Bob Barnetson describes a campaign by his faculty association at Athabasca University, a public, higher education distance learning institution in Alberta. During a contract fight, the union made the bold move of just mobilizing members for pickets and not relying on community supporters.

In 2017, my 400-person union faced a crisis as a result of new labor laws. For the prior 30 years, bargaining impasses had been resolved by a combination of interest arbitration over wages and a “stonewall” clause over language (i.e., absent agreement, the existing language continued). This resulted in a disengaged membership that viewed bargaining as primarily a technical exercise and would rarely take direct action against the employer.

New laws imposed by a putatively labor-friendly government meant an immediate switch to strike-lockout for faculty associations across our province (including some who were well into bargaining). Like the other faculty associations, my union had no credible strike threat. Not surprisingly, Athabasca University opened the next round of bargaining seeking a wage freeze and serious rollbacks in working conditions backed by the spectre of a 24-hour lockout. These aggressive demands were part of a broader employer strategy of union busting.

A key part of my union’s response to the move to strike-lockout was to engage and mobilize our members in order to create both a credible strike threat and, more broadly, a base of power in the workplace. In addition to a culture of passive unionism, a major challenge we faced was that half of our members worked from home offices spread across the country while the other half worked on campuses in three different cities. The employer’s aggressive bargaining position—a position much more aggressive than required by the government’s mandate of a freeze on the lost of living—created an opportunity to agitate among a relatively privileged set of workers. We then moved towards educating the members about ways that they could push back.

We began with low-risk actions, such as running a series of straw polls. Each week, we would outline one of the employer’s proposals and its implications in an email. We’d then poll our members on whether they would accept such an outcome. These polls were a dress rehearsal for a strike vote. We used the results to agitate and to demonstrate to the employer that, if they really wanted each proposal, they were going to have to chance a lock out. Over time, the employer withdrew or otherwise abandoned these proposals.

Our broader goal, though, was to lay the groundwork for direct action that was not mediated through the union. In particular, we were interested in developing a set of picketers to normalize the behavior (since a work stoppage was looming) and exert public pressure, in the hope of forcing an acceptable contract on the employer. We began by hosting a series of picket sign-making lunches, where we encouraged staff to repurpose university slogans and logos.

Our picketing goals were twofold: (1) to get 100 different members (25% of the unit) out to at least one information picket, and (2) to increase the size of the information pickets each time. While we had access to allies—both from other unions on campus and in the broader labor movement—we decided early on not to rely upon allies for picketing. Although many allies turned up and their support was helpful and heartening, our goal was always to build our own power base, where none had existed, rather than stretch existing labor power by embroiling allies in yet another dispute. Relying mainly on our own members for picketing demonstrated—to both the members and the employer—that we were able to mount a strike if necessary.

Over the space of four months (March to June), we staged four information pickets. Our first picket of a Board of Governors meeting saw 14 members and 1 ally force Board members to sneak in the back door. A second picket saw 32 members (including 27 first-timers) and 5 allies picket in conjunction with the 19th (!) day of bargaining. A third picket (at the Board Chair’s place of business) saw 20 members (including 12 first-timers) and 4 allies make the Chair’s employees and customers aware of how badly she was allowing us to be treated. Our final picket saw 35 members (including 10 first timers) and 20 allies picket a university meeting during the downtown lunch rush in Edmonton, much to the surprise of the university executive. (The high numbers of allies reflects that the university paid these staff to be onsite that day.) An acceptable contract was concluded shortly thereafter.

While we didn’t fully meet our numeric member engagement goals, we did achieve the strategic goals: thwarting the employer’s rollbacks, both by demonstrating we had a viable strike threat and attaching reputational costs to the employer’s bad behavior. More subjectively, the pickets built up the confidence of the members in expressing their dissatisfaction and in realizing that they were not each alone in their opposition to the employer’s terrible behavior. We were very careful to inoculate members about potential employer countermoves. As it turned out, the employer was unable to mount any kind of effective countermove.

Normalizing activism and having an internal group of activists proved important a few months later when the employer escalated its union-busting strategy by taking advantage of Alberta’s unusual labor laws to try and carve two-thirds of our members out of the unit. We immediately organized member actions including petitions, a march on the boss, disrupting four meetings, and an email campaign that applied a lot of social pressure, to support our legal and media campaigns. This issue remains ongoing.

As we head into another difficult round of bargaining, we’re focusing on generating buy-in to our proposal so that members will support making gains, not just defending existing rights. Changes to past practice have included more member engagement in proposal development, members ratifying the opening proposal, regular surveys and blog posts about member issues, and one-on-one telephone contact with members.

While our allies, particularly among the other unions on campus, have been very helpful in our confrontations with the boss, in the end our power flows from the willingness of our members to take actions that attach costs to the employer’s behavior. Our assumption is that, if the cost of bad behavior is high enough, the employer will behave differently. Workers, not allies, can generate the highest costs to employers. Social disapproval, work slowdowns, and work refusals are powerful tools—arguably more powerful than grievances and media campaigns—to resist employer attacks. These require focusing on mobilizing our own members, not coat-tailing on the power of other unions.

-- Bob Barnetson

Bill 32 reduces workers' overtime choice and pay

This blog previous appeared on the Canadian Law of Work Forum.

Alberta is proposing changes to its Employment Standard Code that would permit employers to evade paying overtime (OT) premiums to workers by stripping workers of their right to refuse to participate in overtime averaging agreements. This has the potential to move hundreds of millions of dollars in OT pay from workers’ pockets to employers’ profits.

Background

Like all Canadian jurisdictions, Alberta has set limits on hours of work. In most cases, Alberta restricts work to a 12-hour window (ESC, s.16(1)). Alberta also normally requires that employers pay an overtime premium (1.5 times wage rate) if workers work for more than 8 hours in a day or 44 hour in a week (ESC, s.21). The policy rationale for limiting hours of work and requiring OT premiums centre on ensuring workers’ quality of life, reducing the safety risks associated with worker fatigue, and incentivizing additional hiring.

Alberta also allows employers and workers to enter into overtime averaging agreement (ESA, s.23.1(1)). Averaging agreements allow an employer to average the hours worked by a worker over a period of time when calculating whether the worker has met the weekly OT threshold and is entitled to the OT wage premium. Presently, overtime agreements can specify averaging over a period ranging from one to twelve weeks. Averaging agreements allow for workers and employers to agree to compressed work weeks (e.g., four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days) without triggering the OT premiums.

Any overtime paid out at the end of the averaging period is paid at a rate of 1.5 times normal wages. Although the legislation is slightly unclear on this, government policy asserts that time off taken in lieu of OT is paid at straight time. Here is the government’s existing summary of the average agreement device.

Proposed OT Changes in Bill 32

Bill 32 (Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act) was introduced in the legislature in early July. If passed, this bill will make a large number of changes to both the Employment Standards Code and the Labour Relations Code. Relevant to this post, Bill 32 will allow employers to impose OT averaging agreements on workers with two weeks notice (Bill 32, s.1(11)) unless there is a collective agreement in effect. Presently, workers must agree to overtime averaging.

Bill 32 will also increase the period of time over which OT can be averaged from 12 weeks to 52 weeks and do away with the two-year limit to such agreement and loosen the rules around changes in work schedules (which otherwise require 24-hours of notice).

These changes provide employers with oppportunities to evade paying OT premiums. For example, the weekly overtime threshold is 44 hours. If a worker works a 60-hour week (say six 10-hour days), they would normally be eligible for 16 hours of pay at over-time rates. Under an overtime averaging agreement, those 16 hours could be averaged (i.e., spread across) up to 52 weeks (roughly 20 minutes per week). This would spread the OT far enough not to engage the 44-hour weekly OT threshold (the daily OT threshold can be evaded under averaging agreement).

Under such an agreement, a worker could work up to 208 OT hours a year (i.e., more than five extra weeks) and the employer would never have to pay any OT premiums. The changes effectively guarantee that very few, if any, non-union Alberta workers will ever receive overtime pay, unless the employer agrees to pay it as an act of altruism or a job perk. Further, when a worker is entitled to be paid OT under an averaging agreement, that pay may be delayed until the end of the averaging period (now as long as 52 weeks).

Bill 32 also compounds 2019 changes to how banked OT is paid out. Under those changes, a worker who enters into an OT banking arrangement (which is notionally voluntary, but practically up to the employer) and wishes to take banked time as time off with pay (instead of being paid out), does so at straight time.

Analysis

The amendments proposed in Bill 32 will enhance employers’ opportunities to avoid paying OT premiums. When the government makes it easier for to require over-time work without paying workers the over-time premium (as it is with Bill 32), the government is effectively transferring money from workers’ pockets to employers’ profits. Statistics Canada data from 2018suggests that there is roughly $3.3 billion in over-time premiums annually.

Rationally, every employer should enter into an OT averaging agreement. Not every employer will be able to do so. Unionized employers will remain subject to whatever their collective agreement says (this covers about 20% of the workforce in Alberta). Other employer may not be sophisticated enough to operate an agreement. There is no credible way to estimate the value of the transfer from workers to employers, but the annual amount is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Minister Copping framed these changes as “expanding choice for workers”in a Calgary Herald op-ed, noting:

…some workers may prefer to work four 10-hour days, instead of five eight-hour days. Then, they could receive three-day weekends. But changes made by the previous NDP government effectively made it difficult for employers to set up these schedules… .

This is the precise spin that conservative governments across the country have used to justify legal rules that permit employers to avoid overtime pay. In this framing, Copping fails to note that (1) under the present system, workers (as a group) have the opportunity to choose (or refuse) flexible schedule, and (2) Bill 32 takes away that choice by vesting decision-making with the employer. He also ignores that employers can manipulate this system to evade paying overtime premiums and that that long shifts increase the risk of injury to workers.

-- Bob Barnetson