My first thought is that the restaurant and hospitality sector is generally a pretty crappy place to work. Wages are low, scheduling is terrible, working conditions are often exploitive and managers (and customers) are often jerks. My second thought is that the one way in which a lot of workers have confronted these sorts of crappy conditions in the past has been through unionizing. But right now there aren't a lot of workers in the retail, service or hospitality sectors who are joining unions.

In my opinion, I think there are a few reasons for the lack of significant unionization in the service and hospitality sector. In part I think it is because the jobs are so crappy that there is high turnover and people are more inclined to quit and go somewhere else than to stick at a particular job and try to fight to improve it. Also, while these industries (like most industries) are dominated many large corporations that make quite a lot of money, many individual restaurant or retail outlets operate on thin margins and any serious organizing, if focused on just one location, is more likely to get that location closed than it is to get major improvements in conditions there. Finally, because of these conditions, many existing large unions, which employ professional staff who help other workers to join unions, don't spend a lot of resources trying to recruit service or hospitality workers because they figure that ultimately they will be able to gain little either for the workers or for their own organizations in doing so.

I don't think this should be the end of the story, though. I think as globalization and outsourcing destroys many other sectors of the economy, we see the service and hospitality sector growing by comparison. If we as a society don't do something about conditions in these industries, an increasing number of people are going to be stuck working these crappy jobs, without many other options. I think some sort of plan to get unions into this sector could be a way to help improve conditions. Radiorahim helpfully posted an explanation of the "traditional" way to organize unions, under Canadian labour law, on another thread. I am going to re-post it below.

I should also add that, in my opinion, while what Radiorahim described is very helpful our experience to date is that it is not good enough. I am living in the United States which, on paper has similar labor laws to Canada but in practice the situation is much worse. Practically no restaurants outside of a few large ones in a few urban centers are unionized. Practically no retail stores outside of grocery stores and some pharmacies are unionized.

The situation in Canada is much better, of course. But I don't think, even in Canada, that unionization is increasing. In the long run, I think we are probably going to need to go beyond the "tried and true" tactics of paid union organizers showing up at a "hot shop," circulating union cards, holding a vote and then trying to negotiate a contract. I have some ideas, and I think there are some other smart people here who might, too. I thought if we got a thread going, we might be able to flesh some of those ideas out.

[ 23 February 2005: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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Primarily, (but not exclusively) its been HERE and UFCW who've organized in the hospitality sector and yes those unions definitely want to organize more folks. I can't think of any union that doesn't want more members.

Basically, the rules vary from province to province but you approach a union that you want to organize with and you get your co-workers to sign membership cards. Important...you can't sign workers up on company time.

Some jurisdictions allow for "automatic certification" once you've signed up the majority of workers (Quebec for example)...others don't and everything has to go to a labour board supervised vote (post Mike Harris Ontario).

Going to a vote is always harder because it gives the employer a chance to intimidate workers between the certification application and the vote.

You also can get into legal hassles about who has the right to vote and who doesn't...and employers have this habit of trying to drag things through the courts forever on flimsy grounds...they just about always lose...but winning/losing isn't the game...the game is delaying in the hope that support for the union will weaken, some of the folks who did the original organizing will have moved on to other jobs etc.

If you get past the certification stuff and your co-workers are solid, the next thing is trying to negotiate a first contract.

If you end up on strike, only Quebec and BC (Saskatchewan?) have anti-scab legislation...everywhere else employers can scab you...and in the hospitality sector they most likely will.

Quebec and Saskatchewan do have first contract arbitration laws which allow either side to apply for binding arbitration to settle a first collective agreement. I think Manitoba has "final offer selection"...but someone could correct me.

Anyway, "on paper" organizing a union is fairly easy. In practice, its extremely hard. Firing people for organizing a union is illegal in every jurisdiction, but its done all the time.

You need to organize clandestinely and have the job basically all done before the boss finds out about it...and "who dunnit". Your co-workers have to be strong and stick together through what can be a very long process.

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In the Wake of September 11: New York Restaurant Workers Explore New Strategies

Citywide Organizing in Montpelier, Vermont with an update here.

Winning a Living Wage Ordinance From the Grassroots (Alexandria, Virginia, USA)

Thoughts?

[ 23 February 2005: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

[ 22 February 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Although Walmart's closing of the Jonquiere, Quebec store is a bit of a setback, from a public relations point of view, Walmart's name is mud in this country.

I did see an article in the Globe and Mail business section a week ago...its on the password protected part of the Globe's site

Anyway, the author who's name escapes me was comparing Walmart to Rona Hardware, the Quebec-based hardware chain that is growing like crazy...and who's 5600 employees are unionized.

He was saying that they looked pretty bad pre-judging the possible outcome of Quebec's first contract arbitration system by jumping the gun and closing the store.

Also, if Rona can learn to live with a union and grow and expand at the same time then why can't Walmart?

Remember that this is on the business pages!

As for new organizing strategies? I think there should be greater efforts to involve grassroots union members in organizing drives.

How many of us have friends, relatives etc. who aren't union members but would like to be?

I also think that better use could be made of the mass media to promote unionization in general. Why not union "informercials" on TV. If they can sell phone sex, get rick quick schemes, miracle cures etc., why can't we sell unionization?

I also think that there's room for creative cyber-organizing too.

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Originally posted by robbie_dee:
Thoughts?

In the Wake of September 11: New York Restaurant Workers Explore New Strategies

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from the article:
"While HERE focuses on big, “tablecloth” restaurants, ROC-NY works with any restaurants, no matter how small. The goal is to create a labor-friendly climate in these places, so the union can organize them in a few years. Even if the union does not go in later, ROC-NY aims to create a larger and larger force of organized restaurant workers...

ROC-NY looks to increase its base of 500 to several thousand over the next few years, and has found outreach in specific target restaurants an ongoing challenge. It can be difficult to explain the workers’ center concept to workers in the few minutes ROC-NY members are able to see them without a manager watching."

i have noticed that food courts are growing, and food preparation have gone towards the trend of "using convenience foods as a method of reducing preparation time and meeting customer demands for quick service". (pdf ref. Cook Occupational Analysis - Red Seal, page 23). perhaps the employees at the taco knell, submarines-to-go-down, chicken-of-the-runs, and noodly-world in these centralized community courts could congregate? [the alliteration wasn't intended,sorry]. each shop probably has fewer than 9 employees, but together they could be a force.

Here's the citation:

McGarrigle, Gavin. "Hope in Hospitality - Winning a First Contract at the Cheesecake Cafe". Our Times. July/Sept 1999

Here's a preview from the Our Times archive site: http://www.ourtimes.ca/contents/99jul.html

One thing that I think unions really ought to look at is the way they do organizing. The bulk of what unions currently do today is chase "hot shops." That means the union organizers sit around the office and wait for someone to get pissed off at their boss and call them. Then they race to the batmobile, zoom out there to meet with the workers, convince them to sign cards and file for a union election.

This seems to have worked out OK, but not spectacularly in Canada. As far as I can tell, unions seem to be adding new members at about roughly the same rate as they lose members when older union shops close down. Some would call that stability, others might suggest its stagnation. The situation in the United States, of course, has been far worse. Rather than sitting still, we've headed right over the cliff. Because our labour laws are weaker, the majority of times an organizing campaign at a "hot shop" just gets everybody fired.

Regardless, in both countries the consequence of the way we've been doing things has been the rise of something called "general unionism," where instead of having one auto workers union and one health care workers union and one restaurant workers union, instead you have a whole bunch of unions each with little pieces of turf every industry. You've got auto workers organizing nurses, teamsters organizing police officers and packing house workers, etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if employers find a way to pit one union against another. Traditionally, the strength of unions has been their ability to "take wages out of competition" by controlling the labour supply for a whole industry. That's a lot more difficult to do if "control of the labour supply" is divided up among a whole bunch of competing organizations.

The other, and in my view more insidious problem with "hot shops" organizing and general unionism, is that it focuses unions on competing with each other for relatively easy-to-organize targets and to ignore the real tough nuts. That can mean largely bypassing whole industries, like the service and hospitality sector. There are exceptions, of course, like the Cheesecake Cafe campaign that Wicked Chicken listed above, or the outbursts at Vancouver Starbucks or Quebec/Squamish McDonalds a few years ago. But these are fringe and localized events. The McDonalds campaign failed. The Starbucks campaign succeeded in organizing about a dozen Vancouver stores in a year and a half, but has not grown any more in the years since (indeed I think there's been at least a couple decerts). When was the last time anyone remembers a major, successful, nation-wide campaign to organize a non-union service sector employer?

The closest thing we have to that going on right now is Walmart. And there are a couple things to note about Walmart. The first is that the UFCW's campaign against Walmart is not a "hot shop" campaign. The Walmart workers didn't go chasing after the the UFCW, rather, the UFCW has been pursuing the Walmart workers. It took a while for the UFCW to come around to doing this, seriously. And the UFCW did not come around to doing this because they thought it would be an ambitious way to break new ground in an unorganized field; rather, it is because the union saw Walmart as an imminent threat to their position in the already-unionized retail grocery sector. Further, the UFCW is focusing its organizing efforts right now in the two or three provincial jurisdictions with the most union-friendly labour laws in all of North America.

The second thing to note about the Walmart campaign is that it is far too early to tell whether or not it is going to be successful. Indeed, the early signs are not that promising. Walmart closed the first store at which the UFCW won certification. The UFCW's response was to circulate an internet petition and file a complaint with the Quebec labour board. The Quebec labour minister has previously claimed that he does not have the power to order Walmart to reopen the store it is closing. We'll have to see if he changes his mind, or if the UFCW has any more success at their second unionized Quebec store or in forthcoming efforts in B.C., Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Ultimately, the Walmart campaign may be a good test of Canadian unions' future prospects, assuming they choose to pursue more determined organizing efforts but still stick to the prevailing "model" of unionism and comporting with the relatively friendly labour laws that support it.

Personally, I am skeptical about whether this will work. And I have support from some high-powered authorities in the field. A few years ago, Professor Harry Arthurs, who is one of the most prominent labour law scholars in Canada and someone who is currently assigned to the task of modernizing Canada's federal labour code, cast doubt on the ability of labour law, even very union-friendly labour law, to compel the largest and increasingly dominant multinational companies to engage in meaningful collective bargaining at all. Here's a link to the interview: Canadian Labour Law: Back to the Future?

Here's a snippet:

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In a sense, the legislative or public policy framework is increasingly irrelevant because of globalization. The policy can remain unchanged, the legislation unaltered, and yet the dynamic of the labour market and the behaviours of the actors in the labour market can change quite dramatically. Transnational companies, more and more, are centralizing power and authority at their head offices, with the result that the role of subsidiaries is shrinking. For example, many Canadian companies, like Ford Canada and GM, were publicly held Canadian companies in which the largest single shareholder was a multinational. Those companies are being reincarnated as private companies. They are ditching their Canadian shareholders and becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of the multinational. They either no longer have Canadian boards of directors, or the directors no longer have any significant role in plotting strategy in the company. Frequently, senior executives have diminished autonomy in fields ranging from finance to marketing to employment relations. Sometimes these subsidiaries are simply folded back into the parent company. The net result of all this is that the autonomy of the Canadian business community is considerably diminished. The survivors tend to be smaller Canadian-based companies which, if they are successful, are then absorbed into the multinationals. There are a few sectors, like the banks, however, where public policy has indeed preserved Canadian companies.

Let me try to explain these developments in an industrial relations sense. A lawyer is sitting in his office in Toronto and gets a phone call, not from Hamilton or Brockville or some other Canadian centre where the IR people used to be but from Arkansas or Arizona or somewhere in the States, saying ‘we’ve got an organizing campaign in our plant in Hamilton, please go out and break their kneecaps.’ And the Canadian lawyer says, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not the law here and that’s not the way we do things here.’ ‘Thank you so much; we’ll get ourselves another lawyer!’ How long does it take the lawyer to learn that instead of reasonable compliance with Canadian legislation, litigate every point? Instead of working through the legislative framework, learn how to bypass the legislative framework so you produce the results the client wants. Why does the client want them? Because the client comes from a different industrial relations culture.

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I fear that Walmart's recent behaviour in Quebec demonstrates precisely the sort of contempt for traditional Canadian labour laws and practices that the UFCW is relying on in its current campaign. And if Walmart can get away with it, then so too can Starbucks and McDonalds and Sodexho Marriot.

So what can workers and unions do?

This is the tough question. Despite my concerns about the Walmart campaign's viability, the fact is that it is at least better than doing nothing, which is what the UFCW was doing before. I think that the idea of targeting "market leaders" in various industries is a necessary step towards changing conditions in those industries. Walmart is clearly the market leader in retail/grocery. Sodexho Marriot is a leader in hospitality services. Cintas is a leader in industrial laundries. We need the relevant unions in those sectors to start going after these companies.

That also means we need to change the hot shops / general unionism practices that currently dominate in the labor movement. If unions are going to focus their efforts on the major companies that define the various industries, they are going to need cooperation and support from other unions, not competition. This is the essential basis of the SEIU's Unite to Win proposal which the SEIU has been circulating for the U.S. labor movement, and I have linked elsewhere on this site. I don't know how much attention these proposals have garnered in Canada, or whether, if adopted, they will even be applied to the U.S. unions' Canadian affiliates. In my opinion, though, I think the Unite to Win ideas do have relevance to Canada and should be looked at very carefully by Canadian unionists, notwithstanding the differences in our countries' labour movement cultures, the considerable autonomy that U.S. unions' Canadian branches currently have, and indeed the large number of "national" unions in Canada who aren't a part of the U.S. debate at all. As the Arthurs article emphasizes, although we do have very different histories and different political situations currently as well, we are increasingly facing the same adversaries.

By itself, even restructuring and rededicated organizing efforts will not be enough, though. Simply put, the 1930s-era legal tools for union organizing, and the general practice of union organizing based around those tools, is just not going to be enough for the ascendant form of globalized capital we now face.

It is not enough for unions to run more expensive, more sophisticated, better targeted organizing campaigns. No matter how high-tech, these sorts of campaigns are still fundamentally based around organizing and securing benefits for specific jobs. What we need is not a union movement that is not centered around union jobs, rather, we need a union movement based on conscious, active, mobilized union workers. This sort of framework is the necessary basis for unions to become again a true labour movement, not just, as one poster noted on another thread, labour "institutions."

The SEIU's ongoing Justice for Janitors campaign, in my opinion, began to nibble at the edges of this sort of "movement" consciousness. Justice for Janitors was based not just on organizing one building or cleaning contractor, but rather was based on organizing whole janitorial labour markets. And the Justice for Janitors campaigners argued their case not just in the form of discrete benefits for specific workers, but rather, it adopted the broader rhetoric of Latino and Black worker liberation.

Still, J4J remained ultimately just one particular campaign under the broader umbrella of traditional, mainstream unionism. J4J still followed the traditional mode of mobilizing workers to win a collective agreement, and then once such a legal and bureaucratic framework was in place, demobilizing workers and channelling their struggle into the formal processes of contract administration and arbitration. Also, after a transcendant breakthrough in L.A., the SEIU central office began to exercise tighter control over future campaigns. Employers, meanwhile, who got caught by surprise in the first campaigns, learned how to better fight back, and J4J campaigns in later cities, while still achieving significant successes, were less dramatic than the first.

One of the reasons I am excited about the workers centre model of organizing I have linked to above, is because I think this sort of model could plant more seeds for the sort of class-based "social movement" I believe is necessary. The workers centre model reaches out to all workers in a city or industry, not just workers at a "targeted" retailer or white tablecloth restaurant. The basis of the worker center model is education and empowerment of the worker herself. Where we go from there, of course, is still very much up in the air. It could be a citywide union organizing campaign like the one tried in Montpelier, Vermont. It could be a political campaign for higher minimum employment standards, like the living wage campaigns. Maybe it could be something else, too.

Some people have posed the "Unite To Win" model of unionism and the workers centre model as opposing concepts. "Unite to Win"-style restructuring, those people say, is "top-down" unionism, whereas workers centres are "bottom-up." I don't agree with that, I think its a false choice to say you can only have one or the other. I think restructuring currently existing unions to be more industry-focused (like they used to be in the CIO days) only makes sense. I think it will only make these unions, as labour institutions, stronger. However, the other thing we have to remember is that, even restructured, such unions would remain merely institutions. They would be particular legal and political constructs that serve a particular worker-representation function. They would not be the labour movement. At best, they would be merely an arm of the movement. Another arm could be a political party, in Canada probably the NDP, in the United States either the Democrats or preferably a new third party. Workers centers could be yet another arm of the movement, as a form of "free schools" for self-directed worker education, or as legal advocacy clinics, or as something else. But the base of the movement has to be the workers themselves, as individuals and as a conscious, mobilized class.

The service and hospitality sectors are among the fastest growing industries today. The workers in these industries are also among the most exploited. Yet with few exceptions, the typical employer threats to relocate work overseas in response to demands for higher wages has no meaning. If you live in Vancouver, you can't buy your groceries in Mexico. In my opinion, if we are going to build a new, revitalized labour movement, I can't think of a better place to start than here.

[ 28 February 2005: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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robbie_dee: The basis of the worker center model is education and empowerment of the worker herself. Where we go from there, of course, is still very much up in the air. It could be a citywide union organizing campaign like the one tried in Montpelier, Vermont. It could be a political campaign for higher minimum employment standards, like the living wage campaigns. Maybe it could be something else, too.

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What about a campaign for compulsory unionization in workplaces bigger than a certain size? All employers would be required to have some, basic, enforceable collective agreement in place.

It would be premised on a level playing field. It would give no advantage to any particular employer. So they couldn't whine about how "hard done by" they are, being singled out, etc.. It would address the issue of union "density". (It could even be done industry by industry. )It would create employment in the labour movement. These are usually pretty good jobs if you can get them.

Of course, initially, such collective agreements would simply codify the existing working conditions and make no improvements. But with such a beachhead the labour movement might acquire the purchase that is so badly needed. A Normandy landing of the left.

Compulsory unionization existed, on paper, in the old Soviet Union. Hence the McDonalds in Moscow was the first "unionized" Big Mac dispenser in the world. How much better it would be if the form was filled up with real content; how much better if they had had real unions with collective agreements and decent grievance procedures.

[ 26 February 2005: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

More attention needs to be paid to the European style of unionism including organizing of sectors and their legislative frameworks - and even the nature of their no strike clauses - not as all encompassing as ours and sympathy strikes are fairly frequent although diminishing. Part of the reason they have better union density relates to better worker consciousness, but a lot of it does relate to the overall framework.

Canada's entire industrial/labour relations legislative regime is based on shop by shop organizing and has inherent pitfalls. In addition, the federated nature of Canada and the fact that labour law is largely a provincial jurisidiction means that workers will never be able to generate any sort of mass movement relating to labour conditions or organizing. In BC, some would say we came the closest that we had ever come to a General Strike last year, yet even if it had been successful, it could never have included any serious revolutionary / paradigmatic shifts in Canada because the rest of the provinces could not have joined in without the entire country breaking the law. Injunctions, etc. would have flown freely even if workers in other jurisictions had even begun to talk freely about a possible sympathy strike.

Think about it - could you ever imagine a pan-Canadian general strike - maybe if a wholesale assault on workers rights occurred - but never to produce something like a 30-35 hour work week or serious democratic control of the economy.

There are Union locals which employ full-time organizers to respond to 'hot shop' campaigns and to stoke the fires of worker discontent elsewhere. There is yet to be a signficiant organizational resource shift from the major unions towards organizing and accompanying allocation of resources.

In summary, there is hope yet I think it's important to realize just how screwed overall we've become as a result of our federated structure, proximity to the U.S., and labour legislative framework. It's not to say that it's all bad and Canadian labour has a lot to be proud of but these macro factors are serious impediments.

Hmm, perhaps other threads on this would be useful.

What would be needed for a Canadian general strike?

Its not that well known but for probably half a century or more the City of Toronto has had a "fair wage policy" where those bidding on municipal contracts have to pay roughly the same wages as exist in unionized workplaces. I know that there had been a number of "assaults" by the right-wing against this policy that have failed.

In any case I don't there's any such thing as "the" way to organize. This is a multi-headed beast that I think is going to need to be approached from a whole bunch of angles.

Some campaigns are best done through the "hot shops" approach, some through "targetting" certain employers, sometimes broadbased sectoral campaigns, and at othertimes through legislative campaigns.

In each organizing campaign we learn some things about what works well and what doesn't.

For example, I understand that during the Toronto taxi organizing campaign alot of the organizing was done through the various ethno-cultural communities. There'd be a couple of Ethiopian organizers who'd sign up other Ethiopian drivers, the Sikhs would sign up other Sikhs, Pakistanis would sign-up other Pakistanis etc.

Use the multi-cultural nature of the workforce as a source of strength in organizing rather than as a so-called "barrier".

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There are a number of factors that mitigate against employees in the service sector wanting to unionize. One major mitigating factor not brought up yet is that many service sector employees are only working in the service sector until they get training that allows them to get a better job outside of the service sector. So a lot of people working in service sector jobs such as short order cook, waiter/waitress, cashier, ect. are going to be out of these jobs in four years or less. For these workers, an organizing drive that takes 6 months to a year seems like too much of a commitment for the short term benefits.

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That's the perception of many folks in low-paid service sector jobs. Unfortunately alot of the time folks are staying in these kinds of jobs for alot longer than they planned. Or else they're hopping from one crummy "McJob" to another.

You're right, that's one of the things that makes organizing service sector jobs difficult.

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"What is this union shit?" exclaimed a long-time friend when he received his first pay cheque from a unionized Safe-Way in Alberta. His cheque was for thirty-some dollars. The United Food and Commerical Workers Union (UFCW) had taken twelve for dues. My friend was never welcomed to the union by a shop steward.

I mentioned my friend's experience to a UFCW organizer when we were sharing a panel at a conference in Toronto last year. ... "We know wages in many of our grocery stores aren't better than non-union stores, but what can we do?"

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If so, you're not much of a CUPE member and certainly no reformer.

Nobody can expect every union local everywhere to be operating at 100 per cent efficiency every time.

It's sad to hear that the guy was never welcomed into the union by a steward. And it's sad that one particular UFCW rep has such a non-innovative approach to dealing with lousy working conditions.

These negative incidents are far more than minimized by the courage and successes of workers in this sector who try to organize and gain recognition, often against some of the most tyrannical corporate bosses you can find in this country.

I think it's amazing the courage and vision shown by so many people working for Wal-Mart in spite of that firm's totalitarian bosses and their brutal tactics (including shutting stores down). The fact is, it's only a matter of time before Wal-Mart bosses will have to choose between recognizing unions, and with that cleaning up a whole whack of their rotten business practices, or start losing market share.

And once Wal-Mart gets more civilized, the other retail empires will be under that much more pressure to do the same.

Check out this article on Wal-Mart's failing PR campaigns:

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So, CUPE Reformer, are you preaching defeatism here to discourage people from organizing in the retail service sector?

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No. The IWW seems to have been successful in organizing workers in the service sector.

[ 18 September 2006: Message edited by: CUPE_Reformer ]

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The IWW seems to have been successful in organizing in the service sector.

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Good to see the Wobblies are still at it! I was a member for 12 years and did some organizing with them (and played a bunch of music too).

There are, if memory serves, about 15 Starbucks outlets workers )they are called “partners”) in BC that are now union. They are with the CAW, and I have heard that there about another 13 that are inside Safeway stores that are with the UFCW (who are also the Safeway workers).

And I dreamed
I saw all workers
Throughout this mighty land
All coming together
In one Industrial Union grand

Then we'll own those banks of marble
And we'll open every door
And we'll share those vaults of silver
That we all have sweated for

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After about four years of attempting to organize staff at the Fleetwood facility, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has successfully certified 175 staff at the recreation centre.

The new union is under a sub-local titled CUPE 402.02, and Larsen is currently working with the employer to have the group wrapped up in the main union local.

The new union employees entered into a four-year contract, with wage increases of one per cent per year.

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