Just Labour (E-Journal - York University)
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CUPE on Strike, 1963-2004
Get PDFCUPE On Strike offers a profile of the 1502 CUPE strikes since the union's inception in 1963 until 2004. In addition to breakdowns by province and industry, it considers strike incidence over time, duration, size of strikes, contract status, results, and the pattern of lockouts and rotating strikes. Like the overall Canadian strike profile, a majority of strikes are in small workplaces and are settled relatively quickly. Not surprisingly, CUPE strikes are clustered in Public Administration, and Health Care and Social Assistance. This demographic might help to explain the fact that CUPE has been involved in fewer wildcats, lockouts and strikes for first contracts than other unions. Although the overall trend for Canada since the 1990s has been a decrease in strikes, a modest shift in the last five years is evident in the data. For CUPE, this means more workers on strike, longer strikes, and more lockouts, all of which suggest an escalation in employer aggression. The Canadian data which highlight increasing public sector militancy and the feminization of that militancy suggest that CUPE will be a key player in the map of labour militancy in the future.
This profile of the strike activities of CUPE, the largest union in Canada, makes visible the experience of strikes from the point of view of workers and their unions. Not only does it contribute to a labour militancy perspective on the quantitative data on work stoppages from Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC), it also demonstrates the potential of the data to enrich our understanding of worker militancies
'I Need People That Are Happy, Always Smiling': Guest Interaction and Emotional Labour in a Canadian Downtown Hotel
Get PDFThis paper discusses interactive service employment within the hospitality industry. Using research undertaken at a downtown hotel in a Canadian city, the paper examines front-line customer service workers engaged in guest interaction. It employs the concept of 'emotional labour', as developed by Hochschild, to illuminate not only managerial discourses, but also the work experiences of those women employed at the front desk (reception) and reservations. The women are shown to engage in intense and prolonged emotional labour, including having to routinely deal with 'irate guests'. The front office workers are shown to engage in covert resistance strategies in order to help them cope with the demands of the job including from aggressive guests. The paper also discusses the way that the work of women room attendants involved a guest interaction element, one that could involve doing emotional labour. The paper concludes by suggesting policy and further research implications, including on what the long-term effects of emotional labour might be
'Subcontracting by Stealth' in London's Hotels: Impacts and Implications for Labour Organising
Get PDFThis paper examines the dynamics of change in employment relations in London's hotels. The industry has traditionally used employment agencies to meet short-term labour shortages, but more recently it has turned to agency workers on a 'permanent' basis to cut costs. Drawing on survey data and in-depth interviews with hotel workers in London, we examine the effects of this on labour, documenting changes in pay, and terms and conditions of employment. Our research confirms a trend towards the casualisation of employment in hotels, and highlights the emergence of 'subcontracting by stealth', whereby increasing numbers of staff are employed by agencies with lower wages and poorer working conditions than in-house staff. Given low union-density in the sector, we argue that the Living Wage Campaign, which has been successfully implemented in other sectors of the London economy, might prove an effective means to counter the negative impacts of subcontracting on hotel workers
Limitations to Inclusive Unions from the Perspectives of White and Aboriginal Women Forest Workers in the Northern Prairies
Get PDFSeveral authors have argued that broadening the traditional understandings of union solidarity is necessary for union renewal. Concerns specific to workers from marginalized groups have been shown to challenge traditional understandings of union collectivity. This paper draws on interviews with white and Aboriginal women forest processing workers to argue that interrogating marginalized workers' negative representations of their unions can provide insights that will help to broaden traditional understandings of union solidarity. I use thematic analysis followed by critical discourse analysis to examine women workers' negative talk about unions. I present examples of how women's negative representations of their unions can be understood as different forms of collectivism when examined in the context of their lived experiences of work and unionism. Some white and Aboriginal women's representations of their unions wove individualistic anti-union statements together with their previous experiences of work highlighting the inequality between unionized and non-unionized workers in the community. The talk of other Aboriginal women critiqued the union for not representing them while demonstrating a sense of collectivity with other Aboriginal workers. By exploring linkages between women's negative representations of unions and their work experiences, unions can better understand the negative union sentiment of marginalized workers and use this to create more inclusive forms of solidarity
Give Me the Room to Learn: Associations Between Job Control and Work-Related Learning
Get PDFSocietal rhetoric claims that the intellectual capital of workplaces must be leveraged if Canada is to compete in the "knowledge economy". To achieve this, however, employers must create work environments that are favorable to workers and conducive to learning. This paper uses a sample of 5800 Canadian workers from the Work and Lifelong Learning Survey and twenty interviews with Information Technology workers from the Education-Job Requirement Matching Project to focus on the relationship between worker control and learning engagement. The data show that increased levels of social and technical control are associated with increased worker engagement in formal courses, informal education (mentoring) and non-taught learning. This research has implications for job design that includes real and meaningful opportunities for worker input and agency into their own tasks and broader organizational decision-making. These results provide important information for future research regarding the inclusion and conceptualization of learning and job control constructs
Struggling With ‘Security’: National Security and Labour in the Ports
Get PDFSystems of social protection are being quickly and quietly recast by developments in a surprising policy area. The rapidly expanding infrastructure of national security policy in Canada compromises labour rights and social forms of security. Security clearance programs, under development for port workers, compromise employment security by making workers and their families subject to invasive screenings that violate privacy, allow for job suspension based on 'reasonable suspicion' of terrorist affiliation, and offer no meaningful independent appeals process. New security regulations threaten to institutionalize racial profiling and undermine collective bargaining. Moreover, there are plans to generalize these programs across the transport sector - a large part of the labour force that includes trucking, mass transit, airport, and rail workers. In this paper I look at ongoing struggles over port security in Canada. I suggest that national security policy as backdoor labour policy works to institutionalize 'anti-social' forms of security
CUPE’s Sympathy Strikes in British Columbia, October 2005: Raising the Bar for Solidarity
Get PDFFrom October 7-23, 2005, the strike by the 38,000-strong British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) was the “main event” in BC labour relations. Teachers demonstrated enormous solidarity and determination to achieve a fair negotiated settlement that they could put to a vote. The focus of this paper is not the BCTF strike itself but the remarkable sympathy strike action organized in support of BCTF, primarily by the BC division of CUPE. Such worker action is highly unusual. Since the 1940s sympathy strike action has been illegal and extremely rare. This paper sets CUPE-BC’s strikes in support of BCTF in the context of the legal framework established over half a century ago and the decline of sympathy strikes that followed. It then summarizes the events of October 2005 and examines the effects and significance of the strikes and what made them possible. It concludes with a reflection on the implications of these events for the labour movement. The analysis here is shaped by the perspective that public sector unions are best able to resist hostile governments when they adopt a militant and highly democratic approach that aims to build a broad social movement, sometimes referred to as social movement unionism
