Real Canadian Superstores: The UFCW's Low Wage Wasteland Part 3
Part 3: Weasel-Words To Live By
Is the UFCW trying to organize Canadian Wal-Mart workers because it genuinely wants to improve their working lives or are its efforts merely good cover for a clandestine campaign to make a favoured employer more profitable? Actions provide the best insight into motives. In this four part series we take an indepth look at what the UFCW has done for its # 1 brand. You decide what's really going on here.
Belonging to a union isn't just about being able to use your collective power to get better wages and benefits. It's also about negotiating restrictions on management's ability to engage in unfair management practices like:
- Awarding jobs, shifts and hours based on favouritism;
- Firing workers because they just won't kiss ass;
- Forcing workers to do other jobs - including managers' jobs - without any extra pay;
- Screwing around with workers' days and hours of work;
- Encouraging workers to quit after only a short stint - and so keeping the majority of the workforce at poverty level entry rates of pay - because there's no hope of better pay, better hours or a better working life.
Without specific restrictions on what management can't do, management can do pretty much whatever it wants. The way that the legal scheme governing labour-management relations in Canada and the US works is that management has the right to screw you around unless your union negotiates restrictions on that right.
Many unions negotiate provisions into their collective agreements that specify the rules for important aspects of workplace life like hiring, promotions, scheduling, hours of work, changes in duties, opportunities to do higher paying jobs as well as rules that restrict management's ability to fire workers for anything other than "just cause" and that provide workers with an effective complaint procedure if they believe that they've been jerked around. Most collective agreements contain all kinds of restrictions on management's right to jerk workers around and in each successive round of negotiations unions seek to tighten those up and to add new restrictions as managers find new ways to jerk around. That's what a lot of unions do. Then there's the UFCW.
Over the past decade the UFCW has bargained concessions that have not only ratchetted down wages and benefits but have broken new ground in the universe of management-friendly clauses (collective agreement provisions that give management more rather than less flexibility to jerk workers around). Their agreements are loaded with weasel words and agreed upon statements that make management's right to jerk workers around a principle to be upheld and honoured. Here's a fine example of from a 5-year collective agreement (1998 - 2004) between Turner Distribution Systems Ltd. and UFCW, Local 777 - the special local that set up the race for the bottom in the Canadian retail food industry.
Weasel-Words To Live By yellow caution flags are out in the race for the bottom in the Canadian retail food industry.