The 350 members of Teamsters Local 213 were into the third month of their strike-lockout at Richmond’s Ikea store last month when they unanimously rejected the employer’s latest offer to settle.
Far from wilting under the economic pressure, the Ikea workers showed every sign of carrying on their job action indefinitely.
Their determination is just one sign of many that suggest a resurgence of militancy in the labour movement’s beleaguered private sector unions.
Caught between stagnating wages and rising living costs and unable to move into better-paid full-time work, service sector workers are beginning to take a stand for better pay.
Coming off a five-year agreement that ended in 2012, the Richmond workers were no doubt expecting a new agreement to reflect the bright prospects that inspired Ikea to invest $100 million in their store as part of a three-year, 25-store national expansion program.
But aggressive company demands that tied wages to sales gains – and a bargaining strategy that reduced the offer the longer the talks lasted – triggered an angry reaction from the workers, who included many women and recent immigrants.
Picket lines went up and talks broke down, despite the efforts of a mediator. The Ikea dispute is just one example of a burst of union activism this year in Canada’s retail sector that has counterparts in other countries.
From Nova Scotia, where baristas unionized a Nova Scotia coffee house chain, to Toronto and Brampton, where sales associates signed union cards at H&M and Sirens clothing stores, retail workers are responding to appeals from a number of unions looking to organize.
In New York City, meanwhile, thousands of fast-food workers are in the 10th month of a campaign to unionize McDonald’s, where workers can hold a job for years without winning a raise above $8 an hour.
McDonald’s is also under fire in the United Kingdom for “zero hours” contracts, which require workers to remain on call but deny them any minimum call-out pay. Unlike manufacturing jobs, retail jobs pretty much stay put. Increasingly, the employees in them realize that what started as a part-time income earner is looking like a career. Better wages and benefits become a priority. Enter the union movement.
Is the private-sector union movement rising from its deathbed?
Gutted by the loss of manufacturing jobs during the past 15 years, Canada’s private-sector unions saw their share of the workforce slump to barely 15% while public-sector unions maintained membership. (B.C.’s figures roughly tracked the national numbers.)
But Sylvain Schetage, chief economist with the Canadian Labour Congress, says that decline appears to have slowed and stopped. Overall unionization in the Canadian workforce dropped to about 31% in 2008 from nearly 34% 10 years earlier, then levelled out and even moved up to 31.5% in 2012.
That means Canada’s unions are adding new members, he points out, even faster than the workforce is growing. Perhaps more significant is the fact that union density among young workers has risen to 16% from 13% in the same period that the overall unionization rate was declining.
For the moment, these disparate developments hardly constitute a trend. Union organizing in B.C. is at an all-time low, with BC Nurses’ Union raids of other unions dominating Labour Relations Board hearings.
But recent local elections in a number of B.C. unions, both private and public sector, have produced some stunning upsets and at least two hotly contested outcomes that required intervention by the national union.
New leaders are coming up out of the ranks. What direction will they take? The Ikea dispute suggests they won’t be interested in rollbacks. •
