The Québec Case: Is There a Secret?

2006

Just Labour

successful campaign to organize printing industry workers in the U.S. used innovative strategies that may be useful and instructive for Canadian unions. The campaign was initiated in 2002 by the Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU) 1 at Quebecor World, a Canadian company, and one of the world's largest commercial printing companies. Quebecor, which began as a small Quebec-based newspaper publisher, operates 150 commercial printing facilities in 16 counties and has revenues of over $6 billion. The Graphic Communications International Union has since merged with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in the United States and the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) in Canada. At the time of the campaign, GCIU had approximately 80,000 members in the US and Canada, almost all of them in the printing, publishing or packaging industries. GCIU used a comprehensive campaign strategy of rank and file organizing, membership mobilization, corporate leverage and global solidarity to win a neutrality and fair election process agreement with Quebecor World and brought union representation to hundreds of printing industry workers. BACKGROUND-THE U.S. LABOUR MOVEMENT Since the 1970's U.S. unions have suffered a precipitous decline in membership. The reasons for this decline have been extensively debated, dissected and documented elsewhere (Chaison and Rose 1991; Riddell and Riddell 2001). While political and economic factors, such as weak labour laws, globalization, the decline of manufacturing. the rise of a contingent workforce and the increasing anti-union behaviour of U.S. corporations have played a major part in the decline, many observers, including many union activists began, in the late 1980's, to argue that unions themselves have been responsible, at least partially, for the decline in union density.

Socio-Economic Review, 2005

For the first twenty-five years after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted, it appeared that it would have little impact on Canadian labour laws. The Supreme Court of Canada took the view that the guarantee of freedom of association in the Charter did not include a right to strike and did not provide protection for collective bargaining. Common law rules regulating picketing did not come within the scope of the Charter’s rules on freedom of expression. Academic commentators were divided on whether this was a good or a bad thing, some espousing the hope that the Charter could be applied in pursuit of greater justice in the workplace while others were thankful that the courts were not interfering with legislative formulation of collective bargaining law and policy. Slowly, however, the courts have come to a different view of the Charter, finding that its values serve to provide protection for picketing, and in a sweeping revision of former jurisprudence in 2007 holding that the guarantee of freedom of association does provide protection for collective bargaining. This article describes the changing judicial views of the Charter through three distinct periods, each roughly a decade long: the formative period, the period of consolidation, and the period of re-assessment. It also traces some of the academic reaction to these developments. It concludes by an assessment of how trade unions are attempting to harness the changing view of the Charter to pursue a variety of challenges to the existing legislated collective bargaining schemes in Canada. In doing so, the paper uses the metaphor of the Charter as a cathedral, with the judges and academic commentators as artists painting a variety of views of the Cathedral. It is only through assessing the multiplicity of views that one can hope to achieve even a partial understanding of the Charter’s role in Canadian labour law. Pendant les vingt-cinq premières années qui ont suivi l’adoption de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, il a semblé qu’elle n’aurait que peu d’incidences sur les lois canadiennes sur le travail. La Cour suprême du Canada estimait que la garantie de liberté d’association prévue dans la Charte ne couvrait pas le droit de faire la grève et n’offrait pas de protection pour la négociation collective. Les règles de common law en matière de piquetage n’étaient pas visées par les dispositions de la Charte sur la liberté d’expression. Les observateurs du milieu universitaire étaient partagés sur la question de savoir s’il s’agissait d’une bonne ou d’une mauvaise chose; certains exprimaient l’espoir que la Charte puisse être appliquée dans la poursuite d’une meilleure justice en milieu de travail, d’autres étaient simplement reconnaissants que les tribunaux ne s’immiscent pas dans la formulation par le pouvoir législatif des lois et des politiques en matière de négociation collective. Les tribunaux en sont toutefois lentement venus à adopter une opinion différente de la Charte et ont conclu que ses valeurs servent à offrir une protection pour le piquetage, et en 2007, s’écartant remarquablement de la jurisprudence existante, ils ont conclu que la garantie de liberté d’association confère une protection pour la négociation collective.Cet article décrit l’évolution de la jurisprudence en ce qui a trait à la Charte pendant trois périodes, chacune étant à peu près d’une décennie : la période formative, la période de consolidation et la période de réévaluation. Il y est aussi question de la réaction de certains auteurs et observateurs à ces développements. L’article conclut sur une évaluation de la façon dont les syndicats tentent de profiter du changement de point de vue sur la Charte pour poursuivre diverses contestations des régimes de négociation collective qui existent actuellement au Canada. Ce faisant, l’article considère métaphoriquement la Charte comme une cathédrale, les juges et les observateurs du milieu universitaire étant des artistes qui en peignent chacun une vue différente. Ce n’est qu’en procédant à un examen de la multiplicité de vues que l’on peut espérer comprendre, ne fût-ce que partiellement, le rôle de la Charte en droit canadien du travail.

2012

As a result of the transformations taking place in the world of work, unionism is increasingly moving away from its traditional basis in the North American context (one firm, one employer, employees forming a union within a defined regulatory framework). Although subscribing to the thesis of the crisis of unionism, we believe that union action is being revived in other forms, in alliance with other actors, according to various logics and levels of action which are not taken into account by traditional frameworks of analysis. In this article, we analyze the experiences of two different groups of workers in the Quebec childcare services sector (employees and self-employed workers) as examples of emerging forms of unionism. We also propose that a new framework, based on a broader definition of actors, the analysis of their logics and levels of action, and their goals and the rules they try to modify or construct, will be useful to grasp the contemporary forms of workers’ collective act...