Saturday, August 28, 2010

Why aren’t McWorkers on board with unions?

http://www.planetsmag.com/story.php?id=150

Like it or not, Reagnomics and Thatcherism has pretty much won the day in mainstream North American political and economic thought. Our attitude towards work — and towards the people who keep the lights on, our streets paved, our homes, offices and stores built — has devolved over the years, to the point where we as a society take it all for granted.

As a result, it’s no surprise that only about a quarter of Canada’s work force — roughly four million people — are union members. Clearly, the labour movement has a long way to go to organize the rest of the Canadian work force.

People join and maintain unions because they want consistency and fairness at work, and they want their health and safety protected. It’s also because they, unlike an increasing number of governments, don’t necessarily define the public interest as the corporate interest. Even the best boss in the world, when the Big Whistle blows, answers to the company — not to the workers.

But the problem is, how do you organize a workplace where people are more used to fighting their own battles — or just leaving them behind, for that matter? Or, a place where people — recent immigrants, high school students, part-time workers and the working poor — are usually so happy to be getting a paycheque that they’re unwilling to rock the boat? For all the complaining about the right-of-centre Saskatchewan Party’s business-friendly labour policies, it seems as though the union movement’s biggest crisis is that it can’t convince the people who should be their BFFs to join a union. Why?

“Listen, the labour movement isn’t a monolith,” says Jim Warren, co-author of the 2005 book On the Side of the People: A History of Labour In Saskatchewan. “Hats off to the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) and the RWDSU (Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union): they’ve always have seen their mission as to organize the unorganized.

“But there are unions that work very hard to advance the cause of labour, and there are a lot of unions that don’t.”

The problems with keeping employees happy in Saskatchewan’s retail and service sector are nothing new. Saskatchewan’s first labour action (as Warren recounts in his book) happened in July 1777, when Hudson Bay Company’s trading post workers in Cumberland House went on strike. Poor pay and lousy working conditions inspired the job action — go figure.

But these days, the Wal-Marts and McDonald’s of the North American workplace are the junior college of the workforce training system. Nobody stays long at most non-unionized retail stores or fast-food franchises. If you can run a cash register or stock shelves at Giant Tiger or Wal-Mart, for the minimum wage or a bit more, you can do the same at Safeway, Sobeys, or Extra Foods/Superstore, where the work place may be unionized and the pay is relatively higher.

And it’s not as if those unionized stores aren’t hiring: the turnover rate at unionized grocery stores is about 30 to 35 per cent annually, says Gary Burkhart, secretary-treasurer of the RWDSU’s Saskatchewan branch. (Which isn’t bad, actually — turnover at non-unionized big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart is often over 100 per cent annually.)

“Everybody I know who shops there tells me they never see the same employees twice,” Burkhart says. “There’s no commitment to the business — and companies like Wal-Mart don’t care: they can always get more workers somewhere else, or so they think. There’s no commitment to your fellow workers — they’re going and gone all the time. And there’s no commitment to the job or the customer, either.”

That makes launching a union drive difficult, of course — because union organizers rarely speak to the same group of employees twice in the same store.

One could argue that the massive pool of McWorkers — drifting from part-time job to temporary job to seasonal work, from store to store and from mall to big-box store — is the 21st century equivalent of “the bunkhouse men,’ a pool of about 50,000 young Canadian men drifting from job site to soup kitchen and back, during the first three decades of the 20th century. Living in frontier work camps, they did unskilled work such as logging, mining, harvesting and construction. Many were foreign born: most toiled for little wages, and even less likelihood that their economic conditions would improve.

But there’s a big difference between the today’s McWorker and yesteryear’s bunkhouse men. The latter formed the backbone of some of the more militant wings of the trade union and labour movement — such as the Wobblies, the Communist Party of Canada, and the CCF. Nothing approximating that class consciousness has seeped into the current pool of McWorkers.

Warren says the McWorker culture is now ingrained in the service industry, more so than in the work places that were unionized a generation ago.

“When you got a job at General Motors, you had a job for life, primarily thanks to the auto workers union. Nobody thinks on the first day of work at Wal-Mart that they’ve got a job for life.”

Burkhard sits on the executive of a union that’s tried, with little success over the past many years, to organize workers in the retail and service industry. There are plenty of reasons for failure, he says. Saskatchewan’s NDP governments were milquetoast supporters of organized labour, and the Sask. Party’s position is about as friendly to the organized labour movement as a flying mallet to the gonads. Bill 6, in theory, gives management as much right as a union to communicate with workers during a union drive. In practice, he says, management now has a way to threaten employees who may be interested in unionization with dismissal.

It’s not only the psychology of the working person that has changed over the years, Burkhart adds, it’s their economic circumstances as well. A generation ago, people had savings to get themselves and their families through rough patches — whether it was unemployment or subsisting on strike pay. But working people’s paycheques haven’t kept up with the rate of inflation. If people today think they have more money, or are able to buy higher quality cars, homes, big-screen TVs or other assorted toys, it’s not because they’re making more money — it’s because banks have made credit more accessible, and people can and do borrow against the rising value of their homes, he says.

Consequently, union contract negotiators are often frustrated by their own members during contract negotiations. When management lowballs an offer, the union executive urges its members to hold out for more money, but the workers — most living paycheque to paycheque — aren’t willing to risk a strike.

“Times have changed. The way people spend the almighty dollar has them overextended,” Burkhard says. “”Organizing those people into a union, when there’s a possibility that the union membership could dictate to a person whether or not they go to work tomorrow — strike vote, majority rule — has an effect.”

Warren also saves some blame for the union movement itself. Since the 1960s, its’ major success has been recruiting ‘white collar’ workplaces — provincial civil servants, Crown corporation employees, health care and education workers. It requires a different mindset from recruiters to recruit potential union members at a retail store or restaurant than it does when recruiting office workers, he says — and so far, union organizers have done a poor job in tailoring their message of solidarity to those workers.

Does that mean unionizing McWorkers will be impossible? No, says Warren: the union movement faced a lot worse — more hostile governments, business-orchestrated picket line violence, that sort of thing — a century ago. It survived those dark days thanks to the dedication of thousands of activists; it’s time for the current generation to display a similar resilience, he concludes.

“The tendency amongst working people to seek collective action won’t die. I think we’re going to see a rebound, because if the organizations in labour that did all the heavy lifting start to disappear, people will find out that there is a reason we got them in the first place,” says Warren. “There’s a reason why there’s a contradiction between employers and employees. It’s all about divvying up the economic pie.”

Is the US Pulling the Plug on Iraqi Workers?


Early in the morning of July 21, police stormed the offices of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union in Basra, the poverty-stricken capital of Iraq's oil-rich south. A shamefaced officer told Hashmeya Muhsin, the first woman to head a national union in Iraq, that they'd come to carry out the orders of Electricity Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to shut the union down. As more police arrived, they took the membership records, the files documenting often-atrocious working conditions, the leaflets for demonstrations protesting Basra's agonizing power outages, the computers and the phones. Finally, Muhsin and her coworkers were pushed out and the doors locked.

Shahristani's order prohibits all trade union activity in the plants operated by the ministry, closes union offices, and seizes control of union assets from bank accounts to furniture. The order says the ministry will determine what rights have been given to union officers, and take them all away. Anyone who protests, it says, will be arrested under Iraq's Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005.

So ended seven years in which workers in the region's power plants have fought for the right to organize a legal union, to bargain with the electrical ministry, and to stop the contracting-out and privatization schemes that have threatened their jobs.

The Iraqi government, while seemingly paralyzed on many fronts, has unleashed a wave of actions against the country's unions that are intended to take Iraq back to the era when Saddam Hussein prohibited them for most workers, and arrested activists who protested. In just the last few months, the Maliki government has issued arrest warrants for oil union leaders and transferred that union's officers to worksites hundreds of miles from home, prohibited union activity in the oil fields, ports and refineries, forbade unions from collecting dues or opening bank accounts, and even kept leaders from leaving the country to seek support while the government cracks down.