Ikea Canada’s Richmond store has returned to normal operations following a 17-month strike and more than a month of retraining approximately 260 workers. The company announced December 10 that the store will hire an additional 60 workers.
Spurring the end of the strike as well as renewed enthusiasm among the company’s Richmond workers is Ikea Canada’s new president, Stefan Sjöstrand, who started his new post September 2.
“For us, it’s important for us to be interdependent and to have leaders who take responsibility,” Sjöstrand explained to Business in Vancouver in a December 9 interview.
He replaced former Ikea Canada president Kerri Molinaro, who he said did a "fantastic" job.
“I’m more into coaching than managing. That’s my management style,” he said.
Sjöstrand added that his focus, as soon as he was in the job, was on how to end the Richmond strike.
He went to the store and spoke with workers on the picket line. He also agreed to involve veteran mediator Vince Ready and to binding arbitration.
“I put a lot of personal energy into resolving the strike,” he said. “I was very happy to sign to have binding arbitration and two days later the union did the same thing. That was a bit of a risk.”
Some of the key things that Sjöstrand wanted in a new collective agreement was to have wages comparable to that in other stores and to have the flexibility to move both managers and employees from one department to another as needed.
In the Richmond store’s previous collective agreement, Ikea Canada was unable to move employees from the bedroom department to the kitchen department if the store was having an event in that area, he said.
Sjöstrand also wanted to make sure that the 35 workers, who crossed the picket line and worked at the store when it operated under reduced hours and was partially closed, were able to keep their jobs.
All those things are part of the store’s new 10-year collective agreement with the Teamsters Union Local 213 – an agreement struck October 22 that also includes wage hikes and a new health spending account
“The mood is fantastic,” Sjöstrand said. “There is no bad feeling there [between the workers who were striking and the workers who crossed the picket line].”
Regardless, the store’s employees have their job cut out for them.
Sjöstrand told BIV that, before the strike, the Richmond Ikea was one of the three least productive stores among the global chain’s 342 stores worldwide. He believes that the increased flexibility of moving workers around will help boost productivity.
The company’s $1.7 billion in Canadian sales from 12 stores and online amount to about 6% of the Swedish company’s total revenue, Sjöstrand said.
“We had 5% [revenue] growth in Canada last year and so far this year we are up 6%,” he said. “Cyber Monday was amazing. It was superbig –bigger than Black Friday.”
