(WPO1a) Critical Perspectives on Employment Relations

This session explores critical perspectives on employment relations within occupations and organizations. Work and workplaces are increasingly characterized by more complex and challenging employment relations whereby both public- and private-sector employers, often with the support of the state, seek to gain ever greater control over the organization and conditions of work, while workers struggle to determine, defend, and assert their rights and improve their conditions of employment. Papers in this session address issues such as: the role of the state and shifts in state strategies in intervening in, and shaping, public-sector collective bargaining, sometimes to advance their own interests as employers; the experiences of educators as they strive to find meaning in their work in the context of an education paradigm that emphasizes efficiency and imposes increasing control over the work of teachers; and, gig economy workers’ identity as either (or both) employees or contractors, and the impact of their identity and the structure of their work on their experience of strain and precarity. Overall, these papers point to the hegemony of neo-liberalism and the deeply entrenched power structures that pervade employment and employment relations, all the while highlighting the importance of workers’ agency in managing employment realities. Tags: Work And Professions

Organizers: Vivian Shalla, University of Guelph, Tracey L. Adams, University of Western Ontario, Karen Hughes, University of Alberta; Chair: Vivian Shalla, University of Guelph

Presentations

Susan Cake, Athabasca University

Negotiating Change: State Interventions in Public-Sector Collective Bargaining

This study examines state interventions into public-sector collective bargaining, unraveling both the historical trends and the contemporary shifts in government strategies. For decades, governments have intervened in public-sector bargaining to shape the final outcomes. Legislation restricting public-sector workers’ right to strike, ending labour disruptions, limiting the scope of negotiations, and imposing contract provisions have been common across jurisdictions and across political party lines in Canada. In recent years, the Supreme Court of Canada, in a series of decisions, extended Charter of Rights and Freedoms protection to collective bargaining and striking. In theory, these court decisions reduce governments’ ability to interfere with public-sector bargaining. In practice, however, the impact of these decisions has been both complex and limited. An analysis of government legislation finds the rate of government interference has increased markedly since 2000, despite Supreme Court decisions seemingly restricting the scope for such intervention. Surprisingly, the rate of interventions has almost tripled. Further, the analysis shows strategic adaptations by governments in response to the Supreme Court decisions such as altering the type and form of legislative interference they employ. The first stage of this research includes a comprehensive analysis of the frequency of state interventions into public-sector bargaining in Canada since 2000, shedding light on a notable increase in the rate of legislative interventions. This analysis looks at two types of state legislative interventions, dividing them into episodic and persistent interventions. Episodic interventions are generally single legislative events that only impact a select group of workers or a specific issue. Persistent interventions attempt to change the legislative landscape of public-sector bargaining. Examples of episodic interventions include back-to-work legislation or specific contract provisions that are legislated. Persistent interventions include essential services legislation, legislation impacting the right to strike as well as legislation impacting union governance. These different types of legislative interventions are then divided according to different periods marked by key Supreme Court of Canada decisions: pre- Health Services (2000-2007), post- Health Services (2008-2015) and post- Saskatchewan Federation of Labour ( SFL ) (2016-2022). The findings from this analysis demonstrate that the rate of state intervention after Health Services and again after SFL escalated. As well, governments seem to prefer to intervene in public-sector collective bargaining through episodic interventions, particularly back to work legislation, rather than persistent interventions. These observations suggest “permanent exceptionalism” as coined by Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, continues to be a feature of public-sector bargaining. Overall, the data suggests expanding Charter protections has not reduced the rate of government interference in public-sector collective bargaining. In fact, the rate of interference has increased. However, the true evolution lies in how governments have adapted their intervention tactics to mitigate legal risks in response to Charter jurisprudence. The shift in the kinds of interventions used suggests that governments have shifted their approach to legislating contracts since Health Services , moving away from imposing settlements and focusing on creating the conditions that help them obtained their desired settlements instead. These findings suggest that Canadian governments are committed to using their legislative power to advance their interests as employers, actively responding to and attempting to head off court decisions. Consequently, workers and their unions ought not to overly rely upon Charter challenges to protect their interests.

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Non-presenting authors: Jason Foster, Athabasca University; Bob Barnetson, Athabasca University

Noemi Rosario Martinez, Simon Fraser University

Punishing and Privatizing Public Educators

Many teachers are drawn to education because they find the work important and meaningful. This paper examines how this plays out in practice–how teachers find and make meaning on a day to day basis. In the growing moral panic around education, teachers are being deemed “groomers” corrupting students through “woke indoctrination,”; new legislation in Florida limits teaching around racism, gender, and sexuality. However, even before this, many teachers struggled to grapple with the meaning of their work in the era of “accountability,” a neoliberal education paradigm that focuses on efficiency enforced through metrics like high-stakes standardized testing and school grades. Now, testing begins as early as kindergarten and spans across most subjects. These factors that structure education are factors around which teachers struggle to make sense of their work, finding more or less meaning through compliance or defiance. But regardless of how teachers feel about them, these metrics are used to evaluate both students and teachers. This research is inspired by Labour Process Theory in that it centers the qualitative experience of work as a valuable source of insight, partially demonstrated by control over and knowledge of the labour process (Braverman 1974, Jaros 2010). It also draws on a Marxist conception of alienation, David Graeber’s analysis in Bullshit Jobs, and James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak to make sense of the work experiences of educators. My research was conducted in Florida, where I attended School Board meetings and School Advisory Council meetings, and interviewed twelve educators (including one principal and one school board official) in order to answer the question of  how the relationship between teachers’ autonomy and management control of the labour process has been changing. Interviews elucidated the forms of both everyday and organized resistance that teachers use to protect what is meaningful about their work (which is different for each teacher) and reduce what is seen as meaningless or harmful, without risking discipline. While discussions of the labour process often focus on the degradation of skills, these findings emphasize that the problems teachers have with work are not, or not just, about skill, but also about whether or how teachers are able to find meaning in their work. The struggles that educators engage in can’t be made sense of just through the lens of pay–nor can the harms that they’re experiencing be reduced to that–they also emphasized their efforts to do good work, even when that differed from or went beyond what the state demanded. This paper argues that some educators experience increasing alienation because neoliberal and right wing policies deprive them of meaningful work and that meaningful work is so important that educators are doing what they can to push back against its restriction, largely through forms of everyday resistance. Since meaningfulness of the labour process is a central point of contention for teachers it thus, tentatively, may be an element that pushes workers out of public schools and into more loosely regulated charter schools. This then serves to contribute, to some degree, to taking the management of education out of public hands and into private ones. More broadly, this may have implications for conceptions of good work overall, beyond the education sector.

Nicole Jokinen-Hurl, Trent University

Contractors, or Employees? A deep-dive into the Identity and Structure of Gig Economy Workers

In December 2023, Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey revealed that “135,000 Canadians between the ages of 16 and 69 provided ride-sharing services in 2023, an increase of 48.1 per cent compared to 2022. Meanwhile, the number of people who provided delivery services through apps climbed 19.2 per cent from the previous year to 272,000 people.” (2024). With increasing evidence that gig economy jobs such as rideshare and food delivery services are rapidly spreading through the Canadian labour market, it is important to explore these workers’ experiences and identities, and examine the legal challenges they face in asserting their workplace rights. This paper will present the results of my Undergraduate Honors Thesis project, which explores the experiences of food delivery and ride-share workers in Peterborough, Ontario. Participants were recruited digitally, via the online platforms Facebook, Reddit, and Quora, as well as in person, through the community of Peterborough. Through nine open-ended interviews conducted with anonymous participants working in food delivery and rideshare jobs through apps such as UberEats and YDrive in Peterborough, I explore the question of gig workers’ identity, that is, how they see themselves within the context of the dispute over whether they are independent contractors or employees. According to the research that has occurred, approximately 66.7% of participants believe that they are contractors, while 22.2% believe they are employees, 11.1% believing they are a combination of the two. The results of this research provides a localised insight into just how heavily affected individuals are by the state of these gig jobs, departing from bigger cities’ perspectives through the eyes of more ‘geographically tethered’ workers. They are argued within this paper to be under the strain and precarity of lack of available benefits, as well as constant surveillance through consumerism. The lack of awareness and identity of these workers is believed to also contribute to this strain. Although all of the interviews have occurred as of January 28th, 2024, this research writing is still in progress, expected to be fully completed before May 2024. This paper is believed to be extremely vital for discussion and review regarding the “(WPO2) Gig economy, labour movements and platform capitalism in the Global South and Global North” session occurring this June, as the gig economy continues to grow and gain more awareness to Canadians.