Is banning replacement workers in strikes a good thing? (Taking sides)

The NDP and the Bloc Quebecois are pushing bills that would ban the use of replacement workers during strikes.

Yes. It preserves the integrity of collective bargaining

By Jack Layton


Canada’s NDP has a plan to deliver results for ordinary families in this minority parliament. That plan includes ensuring fair protections for workers exercising their legitimate right to bargain collectively.

NDP MP Catherine Bell has tabled a private member’s bill amending the Canada Labour Code to outlaw replacement workers in strikes or lockouts. Bill C-295 would prohibit employers from bringing strikebreakers into federally-regulated workplaces, introducing fines for specific offenses. The Bloc Quebecois has also introduced a similar bill.

No one likes to see strikes and lockouts. It’s best when employers and workers can achieve solutions at the bargaining table. But occasional work stoppages are part of modern labour relations.

The legal strike is a union’s last-resort tool to back its bargaining position. When workers strike, they confirm they’re ready to pay a personal price to achieve a fair settlement — while imposing a corresponding cost on the employer.

It’s a reminder that powerful employers cannot roll over unionized workers. Routinely, the possibility of a strike or lockout helps motivate both sides to continue bargaining in good faith.

However, if the right to strike is integral to modern labour relations, the use of replacement workers is not.

Is it fair that legally striking workers can have their rights nullified overnight by replacement workers? It is legitimate for employers to have this special trump card available at all times, no matter how poorly they play their hand? We say no.

Labour negotiations need to be balanced. Replacement workers distort that balance. If employers can back away from the table at any time, and resort without penalty to replacements, there is no fairness. With this trump card in hand, where’s the incentive for employers to bargain in good faith?

Bill C-295 aims to maintain the balance in labour relations by protecting workers’ right to enforce their demands by striking. Employers that blatantly disregard the law will be penalized.

Opponents of these protections, like John Mortimer, appeal to individual workers’ “right to dissent.” Mortimer objects to laws that would impede workers from crossing their own picket line — that is, from rejecting their own union’s collective decisions. To agree is to reject the very foundation of solidarity-based collective bargaining. Mortimer’s argument perversely affirms our own — that replacement workers undercut bargaining rights.

Time after time, anti-scab laws have helped create environments of labour stability, better bargaining, fewer strikes and less disruption in the community.

Quebec has had an anti-scab law since 1977, and figures from Human Resources and Social Development Canada show it’s working. For work sites covered under Quebec’s labour code, the average number of working days lost to strikes has dropped to around 15 annually, down from 39 in 1976.

British Columbia passed similar legislation in 1993 with similar results. A federal report shows the number of work stoppages dropped by 50 per cent the year after the introduction of that law, which remains in effect today.

In Ontario, an NDP government outlawed replacement workers in 1992. Federal figures show that work stoppages dropped by 45 per cent the following year. However, Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservatives overturned the bill.

Some continue to argue that anti-scab legislation isn’t necessary, that workers don’t need the protection. We know this isn’t the case. In fact, a Canada Industrial Relations Board report documents a six-per-cent rise in complaints over replacement workers in federally regulated workplaces since 1999.

Busing in strikebreakers is a dangerous game that too often has prolonged strikes for months or even years.

Look to the Videotron experience in Quebec. Because the telecommunications company falls under federal jurisdiction, its workers had no protection when management dug its trenches and brought in replacements. Videotron’s 2,200 workers remained on the picket lines for 10 bitter months in 2002 and 2003, at the cost of 350,000 days of work.

Keeping balance in the workplace is important, but this is also about protecting families and communities. If lockouts and strikes are awful, replacement workers can turn them tragic by making them longer and more intense. Brazenly undermining collective bargaining rights stokes frustration and confrontation. We need to bring balance to these situations, and this legislation is a key step.

And what of the rights of replacement workers? Very often, these are underpaid workers who are highly vulnerable. Just like the men and women on the picket lines, they are just trying to put food on the table. Once in the workplace, they have no protections. They are sometimes not told they’re being hired as scabs. It’s just fundamentally wrong and demoralizing to pit worker against worker.

Ultimately, it makes good economic sense for bargaining units and management to meet on equal footing. And it makes good business sense to keep labour stoppages short and prevent the circumstances that stoke conflict and bitterness. As more equal partners, unions and employers can better join forces to build a prosperous and equitable 21st-century economy.

Jack Layton is the leader of the federal NDP. He can be reached at [email protected].




No. It’s just one more way unions deny employee rights

By John Mortimer

Canada’s labour leaders and their NDP/Bloc Quebecois political operatives oppose real employee choice by pushing “replacement worker” bans through Parliament,

Bills C-257 (Bloc) and C-295 (NDP) are due for second reading this fall. If successful, they would ban replacement workers. They would also undermine workplace democracy and hurt the rights of unionized employees. But that fact is lost in the misleading spin of the NDP, Bloc and union leaders.

The proposed bills would prevent existing unionized employees from crossing a picket line to do their jobs. With the exception of Quebec and, in part, British Columbia, that runs contrary to the laws of the world’s major economies and all other Canadian provinces.

Yet labour leaders appear determined to focus on external replacement workers while keeping their members in the dark about their loss of charter rights.

B.C.’s law bans employers from hiring new workers to replace strikers, but its abrogation of unionized employee rights is limited to newly hired union members. Unionized employees hired prior to bargaining can cross the picket line. In contrast, the Quebec law totally strips away a unionized employee’s right to dissent.

The primary concern is that unionized employees have the freedom to work and to express themselves, given the imbalance of power between big, multimillion-dollar unions and individual unionized employees.

A key issue is union strike votes. NDP leader Jack Layton rests his case on the great shibboleth of “union’s collective decisions” (strike votes) as a basis for removing a unionized employee’s right to cross picket lines.

But I receive calls from union members who experienced the “bait and switch” tactic. Union leaders seek support for strikes by claiming that it’s only “a negotiating tactic” and that they will again solicit members before ordering strike action. Funny, they never seem to get to that “promised” vote. Others relay stories of shop stewards not picking up ballots from members suspected of voting “no.”

In many countries, independent third parties, not unions, must supervise strike votes. This protection is clearly needed in Canada. In the 2005 Telus strike, unionized employees were ordered to walk out with no opportunity to vote on any new company offer. (The last strike vote was in January 2004 and the new Telus offers occurred afterwards.)

One Telecommunications Workers Union (TWU) member wrote in a July 2005 letter to the Edmonton Journal: “I gave my contact information to two shop stewards on two separate occasions. I made it very clear that I required notification of any upcoming vote or decision…I was not informed of a strike vote.”

This is another example of why the right to cross picket lines should not be revoked. During the Telus strike, at least 3,100 unionized Alberta employees crossed the line. Another 3,000 in Ontario and Quebec effectively crossed.

NDP MP Catherine Bell, sponsor of Bill C-295, appears to have misled Parliament in September when she claimed the Ekati diamond mine in the Northwest Territories used external replacement workers in a recent strike. Almost 50 per cent of Ekati’s unionized employees crossed the picket line to work. No external replacement workers were hired.

The above examples demonstrate why these bills must be stopped. If unions sometimes lie about their strike mandate, refuse to pass on employer offers to workers and mislead members, then the last thing Parliament should do is strip away a union member’s right to dissent from such leadership.

In support of these bills, Layton cites, for example, reductions in strikes and days lost in Quebec. But he simply picks two individual years and fails to put them in any proper context. In the last 13 years, Quebec’s annual average days lost has been rising.

In 2005, Canada lost 4.1 million days to strikes and lockouts while England lost 157,000. That’s 26 times as many days, even though England’s larger economy has 50 per cent more unionized employees. Quebec’s 24 per cent of Canada’s workforce accounted for 55 per cent of its strikes and 34 per cent of lost workdays — 1.2 million.

From 1993 to 2005, Canada lost an annual average of nearly 2.5 million days, compared to 562,462 for England which has no bans on replacement workers.

Beyond employee rights, economics dictates that such bans should be denied. According to John Budd, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Industrial Relations Centre, years of data indicates that reduced economic growth and associated employment growth is linked to banning workers from crossing picket lines. A Quebec economist, Norma Kozahaya of the Montreal Economic Institute, estimates that replacement worker bans have cost 30,000 jobs in Quebec and 15,800 in B.C.

The right to dissent is one of the few mechanisms union member have to demonstrate dissatisfaction with a union hierarchy and create real accountability pressure from within their union. Parliament should strengthen, not revoke, that right. Unions should obtain picket line solidarity without the help of Parliament.

John Mortimer is president of the Canadian LabourWatch Association. For more information, visit www.labourwatch.com or email [email protected].

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