Strength in numbers: Union, management join forces on training

Competitive business climate requires co-operation for survival.

By working together to provide training, labour and management are realizing they can sometimes play on the same team and get results.

It’s been happening in the Canadian steel industry for more than 15 years.

The United Steelmakers of America and industry representatives, with financial assistance from Ottawa, converged in the late 1980s to form the now-named Canadian Steel Trade and Employment Congress (CSTEC) to deal with a trade crisis. And they’ve been going strong ever since.

When the Canadian steel industry lost one-third of its workforce due to a massive downturn, union and management representatives sat down together to deal with the problem.

That’s when “Employment” was added to the congress’ name, said George Nakitsas, executive director of CSTEC.

Faced with massive layoffs and workers with few outside skills, CSTEC developed the worker adjustment program that includes peer counselling, career development and other training. The program has been successful, with a re-employment rate of 90 per cent within the first six months of a job loss.

“It was a shared responsibility between government, labour and management to place people who had lost their jobs,” said Nakitsas. “It couldn’t have been done and it wouldn’t have been done without that co-operation. There is no other way to do it.”

Starting out always requires a little trust.

“You have to have good will and a leap of faith to form these strategic alliances,” said Nakitsas.

What began as outplacement services now encompasses a wide range of training, including, entry-level services and pre-employment training. In the next five to 10 years, one-third of the industry’s workforce will have to be replaced, making recruitment another area where it will be vital for labour and management to converge, said Nakitsas.

Working co-operatively to provide training has advantages, especially when it comes to basic and pre-employment training. In terms of basic or “common” training, working co-operatively across the industry reduces duplication and with it the cost of delivering training. It’s finding those common goals without arguing about them that can make the process a little difficult, said Nakitsas.

“We recognize that there are different needs and instead of deciding whose needs are more important we put them all in a basket and we innovate.”

Things have changed a lot. Fifteen years ago labour and management did very little together except to negotiate collective agreements, said Nakitsas. That relationship is a lot different today.

“Our modus operandi is dealing with common issues, challenges and threats together. It’s becoming more second nature in our industry for management and labour to do this in specific areas.”

The Canadian Steel Trade and Employment Congress has been able to get results and at the end of the day it is results that will determine the quality of the co-operation and future collaborative efforts.

Economic conditions have surely brought labour and management together on certain issues, said Derrick Hynes, research associate at the Conference Board of Canada and author of Industrial Relations Outlook, a report that suggests employers are looking for more collaborative relations with unions.

“What we are seeing now is the recognition for greater need for collaboration in training. They have different reasons, but they are coming together.”

The turf war has temporarily ceased and the inherently conflictual relations have been sedated for a more co-operative approach to training and other issues. That calm has been brought on partly due to changing economic climates and partly due to an overall healthy change in labour relations. And, in a tight labour market, unions and management are learning that there is strength in numbers.

Employers can’t keep up with the pace of change if their employees aren’t trained to do the work; they can’t meet business marks if they can’t hire people with the right skills; and, current apprenticeship and skills-development programs aren’t producing what is needed to fill these gaps.

Unions and management are learning to leverage their resources to fill those gaps and by doing so, fulfilling their own self-interested needs: the union’s to save jobs and management’s to save money.

“What’s evolved is more of a business approach to labour management relations; to more understanding of the business needs and at the same time, it has also evolved out of (economic) necessity,” said Hynes.

By all indications, this season of co-operation is likely to continue, said Hynes. Last year, 67 per cent of all Canadian collective agreements contained at least one joint union-management committee (compared to 50 per cent in the U.S.) and in 1998, about 78 per cent of unionized workers received training.

“There will be more examples of union-management collaboration in the next five years,” Hynes said.

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