Low unemployment could boost trend of union organizing in retail, service: experts

With Canada’s unemployment fee holding close to file lows, specialists say an elevated curiosity in unions amongst retail and repair employees that started in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic will proceed — at the same time as employees face an uphill battle towards giant, highly effective employers.

The pandemic was a catalyst for a lot of frontline employees, who union organizers say have been spurred to struggle for higher pay and dealing situations in sectors the place unionization is rare.

“When we look at the overall landscape of how things have evolved in the retail and service sector over the last few years, it’s been an extremely challenging time for workers,” stated Kim Novak, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1518, the place a Sephora retailer unionized final 12 months.

Since 2020, there have been union drives at main retailers together with Starbucks, Cineplex, Indigo, Sephora and PetSmart.

When there aren’t as many would-be employees sitting on the sidelines, corporations have fewer hiring selections. That tends to be good for unionization efforts because it places employees in a greater bargaining place, stated Nicole Denier, an affiliate professor of sociology on the University of Alberta who researches work and labour markets in North America.

It makes employees much less fearful about being fired for union exercise, as a result of they will discover one other job comparatively rapidly, stated economist and labour knowledgeable Jim Stanford in an e-mail.

“And once they form a union and start collective bargaining, a lower unemployment rate gives them a bit more bargaining power,” he stated.

But Stanford stated the deck remains to be stacked in favour of employers.

“It would be wishful thinking to imagine that a relatively tight labour market alone will somehow cause a sea change in union organizing trends,” he stated.

Union organizers together with Novak say they’re getting extra curiosity from employees in sectors that for many years have seen low charges of unionization, together with retail, meals service and warehousing. Scott Lunny, Western Canadian director for the United Steelworkers, stated there have been extra union purposes in 2022 than 2021 in B.C.

But the rise in union curiosity described by organizers is just not mirrored in Statistics Canada knowledge. Just 12.47 per cent of employees in retail have been unionized in February 2023, not a lot modified from 5 years earlier. Even fewer employees are unionized in lodging and meals providers, at lower than six per cent, once more virtually the identical as 5 years earlier.

Stanford stated in an interview that it may take time for brand spanking new union drives to indicate up in Statistics Canada numbers as a result of knowledge on unionized workplaces is mostly primarily based on collective agreements, which may take a big period of time to be cemented after a profitable union drive.

This lag additionally provides corporations time to try to weaken union help, stated Stanford.

But it isn’t the one barrier employees are dealing with, he stated.

Currently, the unionized places of those chain shops are vastly outnumbered by their non-unionized friends. For instance, Starbucks had virtually 950 company-operated shops open in Canada as of Oct 2, 2022, whereas Indigo had 173 shops as of April 2, 2022.

Because unionization is often one bodily office at a time, staff of chains are at an obstacle, Lunny stated, although some shops have been capable of cut price as a unit with others in the identical geographical space.

Stanford stated one change that might make a giant distinction can be if employees may cut price in bigger teams, just like how building employees are unionized by commerce and geography as an alternative of by particular person workplaces.

Some change has already been underway. For instance, in B.C. final 12 months a single-step certification course of was launched that makes it simpler and quicker for workplaces to unionize, and the B.C. Labour Board in its annual report credit this variation with an uptick in certification purposes. In February, a fourth Starbucks retailer in B.C. joined the USW beneath this new course of.

Novak thinks employees have garnered sufficient momentum to make a change over the long term.

“This is the slow burn of how workers stand together,” she stated. “It starts with these campaigns that don’t necessarily show a difference in the national percentages of unionization.”

She stated she’s assured that as extra workplaces unionize and employees throughout the nation watch carefully to see what comes of collective settlement, “we will see those percentages start to increase.”

And within the meantime, even a single collective settlement may find yourself benefiting employees throughout the nation.

That’s what occurred with the one unionized Sephora in North America, in Kamloops, B.C., the place employees achieved a coverage of their collective settlement that the retailer enacted nationwide.

Lunny believes there’s been a shift in how employees view their very own worth.

“They hear a lot of rhetoric and don’t see a lot of action,” he stated.

This report by The Canadian Press was first printed March 31, 2023.