Bargaining

In Labour Relations History Truly Repeats Itself

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Sandra Matic/Shutterstock

What is going in the world of labour relations now, and what can we learn from labour history?

Remember learning the significance of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike?

Click here if you need an LR history refresher.

The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike saw 30,000 people, including telephone operators, postal workers, police, fire fighters, cooks, and contractors take to the streets. But how relevant is this historical event to labour relations today?

In the hundred years that have passed since 1919, business has changed, employers and employment laws have changed, and employment standards have improved markedly for workers in most developed countries. If standards and laws have improved so much, why are general strikes and civil protest still happening?

In 2015, 400,000 public sector employees went on strike in Quebec. In France, a quarter of a million employees went on strike in October 2017, and 10,000 civil servants and railway staff joined forces and went on strike in April 2018.

Let’s look at the most recent strike occurring in France.

Click here to read a short article on this latest strike.

This has moved beyond a typical single employer/employee labour dispute, and is turning into a social movement. It now includes railway workers, teachers, and air traffic controllers. It has become a general strike.

The question is, why in seemingly well-developed societies, like Canada or France, have we not found a better way to resolve labour disputes than taking to the streets in protest? Is it because workers or employers are unreasonable people with unreasonable demands? If so, who determines which side is unreasonable?

Is there a better way? According to Roger Fisher and William Ury from Harvard University, there is.

Click here to read a summary of their book, Getting to Yes.

Getting to Yes talks about BATNA, an acronym coined by Fisher and Ury, which stands for the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). Fisher and Ury emphasize that positional bargaining is not the most effective way to reach an agreement, and that it can actually do more harm than good. With positional bargaining one side must win and the other must lose. This is no way for employers and unions to treat each other in the 21st century.

Getting to Yes has been around for 40 years, yet employers and unions are still using positional bargaining. Why? Perhaps many unions and employers do not feel it meets their needs.

Does history repeat itself? It certainly seems to with Labour Relations. Where are we 100 years after the Winnipeg general strike? It looks like we’re in the very same place. Perhaps it is time to move past the adversarial model of Labour Relations. The question is, do employers and unions have the will to do that?

 

Discussion Questions:

  1. Read this summary of the concepts in Getting to Yes.
  2. Discuss why unions and management might be against using Getting to Yes principles.
  3. Can you describe specific situations where it would be more beneficial to use Getting to Yes concepts, such as interest-based bargaining, rather than traditional positional bargaining?

 

Are the Teamsters the new Luddites?

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Oh, how workplace relationships have changed since the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.

Or have they? Are the Teamsters the modern-day equivalent of the 18th century Luddites? These are very interesting questions for a Human Resources practitioner to ponder.

Granted, with the rise of unions in the 19th century, there is greater employment and safety laws in the 20th century, and greater government regulations to protect workers. Due to this, the quality of working life for the individual workers has improved greatly. But has the fundamental relationship between workers and employers really changed?

That thought brings us to current events that reinforce that the fundamental relationship between employers and employees in the 21st century is the same as the 18th century.

Here is a brief labour relations history lesson for those of you who don’t know who the Luddites were, and need a refresher about the Teamsters.

Let’s start with getting to know the Teamsters. Here is a brief background right from their website:

  • The Teamsters are America’s largest, most diverse union. In 1903, the Teamsters started as a merger of the two leading team driver associations. These drivers were the backbone of America’s robust economic growth, but they needed to organize to wrestle their fair share from greedy corporations. Today, the Union’s task is exactly the same.
  • The Teamsters have over 1.4 million union members.

Now, who are the Luddites?

The term Luddite now refers to an individual who is against the effects of technological change. To be more historically correct, the Luddites were against new technology that changed working methods that reduced jobs. In other words, they were against automation. To read a history of the Luddites, click here.

In reality, the Luddites were British craftsmen who smashed and burned the new technology of weaving machines that was taking away their highly skilled jobs. The Luddites wanted the government to ban the new weaving machines but they did not reach their objective. The government passed a law that anyone who damaged a machine would be put to death.

What are the Teamsters trying to accomplish two hundred years later? They are trying to prevent a loss of trucking jobs to drones and autonomous vehicles. Currently, the Teamsters are in collective bargaining negotiations with UPS and have placed demands on the table that UPS will not use drones or autonomous vehicle to deliver packages.  Click here to read greater details about the UPS/ Teamsters negotiations.

The Teamsters have not acted the same way as the Luddites. They have not attempted to sabotage, smash, or burn the new technology. They have been more successful than the Luddites in obtaining political action. The Teamsters have:

So, the fundamental relationship between employers and employees has not changed. Each party wants to protect their interests and increase their share of the economic pie.  Will the Teamsters be successful against the rise of new technology, unlike the Luddites?  Only time will tell, but past history is not on the Teamsters side.

Discussion Questions:

What are your thoughts – should government step in to prevent automation from taking away jobs?

Research the advancements on Artificial Intelligence (AI). What jobs are experts predicting will disappear in the next 20 years? How is HR and society as a whole going to respond to these changes?

Labour Disputes: Understanding Competing Pressures of Collective Bargaining

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Asia Images/Shutterstock

Collective bargaining (CB) is the process of establishing or reviewing the conditions of employment between an employer and its unionized workforce.

On the face of it that seems to be a very simple concept. In fact, nothing is further from the truth. It is very difficult to understand and learn how to manage the collective bargaining process until you have actually experienced the process several times.

A good place to start when examining the CB process is with what happens when there is a conflict during negotiations and a new Collective Agreement (CA) between the parties cannot be reached. The resolution model for a contract dispute typically involves a union going on strike, or the employer locking out the union members. In both scenarios production stops and little or no unionized work gets done. This is exactly what happened in the GM Cami plant.

The last strike that occurred at the plant, located in Ingersoll, Ontario, was in 1992, and it lasted 5 weeks. It was what we in the labour-relations world would call a bread and butter strike. The union went on strike for better workplace relationships, wages, and benefits.

Click here for more details about the 1992 Cami GM Strike.

Let’s move forward 25 years to this current strike. Today’s Cami plant strike is not about wages, it is about saving jobs and improving job security. In 2015 the Cami Plant lost 400 jobs to Mexico.

The union is looking for GM to guarantee that the Cami Plant becomes the lead production facility of the Equinox, which would essentially mean a commitment to maintaining union jobs in Ontario. The union workers are committed to taking this stance as 99.8 percent of Cami plant workers voted to support the strike.

Click here to read more about the current Cami Strike.

This Cami plant strike is dealing with much bigger concerns than the typical bread and butter issues of employment conditions. It is really trying to address what is happening in today’s global economy, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and keeping manufacturing jobs in Canada. These are big issues that all HR professionals have to think about, whether they are working in a unionized or non-unionized industry.

 

Discussion Questions:

Discuss and critically support your position on the following statement. Does a union have a right to ask for an employer to provide job security?

Identify and discuss the concept of the triangle of pressure during collective bargaining negotiations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Failure to Communicate

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kenary820/Shutterstock

For personal reasons, there are certain communities that are near and dear to this blogger’s heart. The Deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing constituencies served by the Canadian Hearing Society are in that category. So, reading about the on-going labour struggles between the union and management of this particular organization raises conflicting emotional and intellectual responses for someone who has sat on both sides of that particular table.

The Canadian Hearing Society provides services to thousands of people in Ontario who are Deaf, deafened or hard-of-hearing. It is a unique organization in that the service providers are also members of the communities that they serve. Both employees and management members use the services of the organization, such as sign-language interpreters, and are active in the promotion of consumer advocacy.

As of the writing of this blog, the employees of the Canadian Hearing Society (represented by CUPE) are on strike. They have been without a renewed collective agreement for four years and have been unable to negotiate a new agreement with their employer.

As a result of the on-going strike action the parties have now received a fair bit of media attention.

Click here to read a CBC interview about the strike.

Click here to read an update on the strike.

Among the many unfortunate things that happen in any strike is that the parties are unable to sit down together and communicate with each other. Instead, they start to ‘negotiate’ their perspectives through the media. As we see in both of these news articles, each side presents the rightness of their respective positions. Both the union and the management side have a valid rationale for explaining the position in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, this approach is not constructive. As we may experience in our own lives, the more we tell someone else about our story, the more attached we become to our own version of its events.

The same thing happens when parties start to tell their negotiations stories through the media. Instead of communicating with each other, the parties are now communicating at each other.

As a result, the parties become further and further entrenched with no resolution in sight. Until these particular parties are able to sit down and re-establish communications, it does not seem that this strike will have a successful resolution any time soon.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What are the ‘issues’ for each party causing the strike?
  2. What would your approach be to bring these parties together for resolution?
  3. How can the employer re-establish a positive public image with its community members and employees?

Promises Made, Promises Broken

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Simply put, the collective agreement is an employment contract.  As you will remember from your employment law studies, any employment contract that is formed between two parties, must have an offer, acceptance, and consideration in order for that contract to be enforceable.   In a unionized environment, each time the collective agreement is renewed through the legitimate process of collective bargaining, these principles of offer, acceptance, and consideration remain in play.  Once the parties have agreed to the terms of renewal, they have a contract between them.  Signed, sealed, and delivered.

Source: ALEXSTAND/Shutterstock
Source: ALEXSTAND/Shutterstock

The collective agreement is not a one sided ‘union’ contract that the employer can ignore.  It is a contract between two parties.  Nothing will harden and sour the relationship between an employer and a union more than the perception that the employer is ignoring the terms of a negotiated, settled, and accepted collective agreement.

Let’s look at this from a personal perspective.  If I agree to sell my house to a buyer, we negotiate the sale of the house and everything that is agreed and committed through a signed contract.  If that contract includes the agreement on my part to leave all of the window dressings in place, then I leave them in place!   I don’t take them with me or destroy them – That is not what I agreed to do.  If I do take them with me, I should expect a very unfavourable reaction from the other party because I have deliberately broken the contract between us. Actions are similar with collective agreement administration.  If the employer agrees to something during the life of the agreed upon contract, and then breaks that agreement, the union is going to react in a negative way.  This result should not be a surprise to anybody with the responsibility for administering a collective agreement.

Yet, it happens, as is discussed in the article, below.

Click here to read the article. 

It is easy to be an armchair critic and wonder why the employer, in this case, would have agreed to a commitment of no layoffs during the life of a collective agreement if they knew they could not afford it. We must remember that any contract negotiation is never straightforward and we have to live with the results.

What are the Human Resources lessons to take from all of this?  Effective HR planning and preparation for realistic implementation of a collective agreement is critical!  And, do not make promises you can not keep.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What types of terms could have been negotiated into this collective agreement?
  2. What could the employer have done differently in order to lessen the impact on unionized employees?
  3. Identify three specific pieces of information that an HR practitioner could have included as part of collective bargaining preparation?
  4. What steps would you advise the union to follow in this case?