I WAS A UNION MEMBER TWICE: For several summers as a labourer installing gas pipeline in Northern Ontario and for a four month stint as a part-time Bookmobile driver and librarian in Guelph, Ont.
I lived for a few years in Sault Ste. Marie and saw what the Steelworkers have had to go through there with Algoma Steel. I lived in Windsor for three years and the Canadian Auto Workers union was always front and centre.
I say all this to illustrate that I think I have a bit of a grasp on what the union/corporation relationship can be. Unions have admirable goals, saying they’re just looking out for their members’ best interests – which, in turn, will lead to stronger companies for which those workers toil.
Sounds pretty good, right?
The trouble is that unions often equate looking out for their members with preserving the status quo at any cost. The two things are not the same.
Take the Telus strike right now. The Telecommunications Workers Union wants to preserve the old contract it had with BCTel – which basically said that all work must be done by company employees. Little to no contracting out was allowed.
When the telco was a doddering old monopoly, this was fine. The same workers who serve customers and maintain networks could also, however slowly, do rebuilds and upgrades with existing or new technology. The progress was slow and sure and existing workers could easily do it, once trained. There was no pressure to move quickly because there was no competition in the market. No one was there to put pressure on the big telco to hurry the hell up and make service better already.
But, as Telus looks around and sees Shaw and Rogers and Bell and Vonage and others motoring along and picking away at their customer base, it’s stuck in neutral because its union wants to hang on to the way it used to be.
For whatever reason, the TWU either can’t or won’t see how the new competitive environment affects them. Telus has actually promised job security and raises to the existing employees in the contract it just imposed, but it needs the flexibility to hire outside contractors – some with skill sets its employees don’t yet have – to quickly build what needs to be built in its markets in order to compete.
It doesn’t want to hire hundreds of new employees to install all the DSLAMs it needs to launch Telus TV, for example. It just needs a bunch of people for a limited amount of time to do the job – and then they’ll move on. Really, it would be irresponsible and ridiculously expensive for the company to hire a bunch of people, just to lay them all off once the build is done.
Contracting is the way telecom and cable builds are happening all over North America.
The labour issues at CBC seem to be falling the same way. Despite its position as a taxpayer-funded broadcast behemoth, it too needs flexibility in hiring contract employees and moving the workers it does have into other jobs and departments, as is needed. The union is resisting, saying CBC wants “to hire and fire on a whim,” according to the Canadian Media Guild web site. That misrepresents what contract work is, where someone agrees to do work for a set period of time and then move on. Voluntarily.
Years ago a friend of mine was hired to oversee a large project at the CBC (I’ll be a bit vague here to protect my friend) and found that help was required to do some faxing, e-mailing and administrative work. Maybe even a little creative writing. My friend wanted to hire some young go-getter on a contract, knowing that it was a short-term job, but one that would be attractive to someone maybe just out of school looking to get their foot in the door at the CBC. Plus, it would be inexpensive for the project and the Corp.
Instead, the CBC’s union made my friend jump through a number of hoops, suggesting that the list of senior people recently laid off had to be plowed through first, so couldn’t my friend train a 50-year-old camera operator who was just let go to write and fax – and pay him scale? Er, no. Project needs to get done. Help is needed now.
Eventually, my friend got the young go-getter, after weeks of union stone-walling.
I don’t think unions are bad things. Collective bargaining can be good for all sides and workers do need protection in some instances. But when all you’re fighting for is the preservation of the status quo – or a status quo that no longer exists thanks to competitive marketplace changes – it becomes a lose-lose situation for workers, the company and consumers.
