Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: Coming up in this episode, Lorraine Chisholm speaks with Veronique Sioufi about the historic unionizing success for Amazon workers in Delta and Uber workers in Victoria.
Speaker: This past summer, Uber drivers in Victoria joined UFCW 1518 to become the first platform workers in Canada to formally unionize. An Amazon warehouse workers in Delta won union certification with Unifor Local 114, becoming the second Amazon facility in Canada to unionize and only the third in North America.
Speaker: These two breakthrough union certifications in BC are something to celebrate, but also we should look at what enabled these organizing victories and what barriers this kind of worker organizing faces.
Speaker: I'm joined by Veronique Sioufi. Veronique is the racial equity researcher and policy analyst at the BC Society for Policy Solutions. Hello, Veronique. Hello.
Speaker: So great to talk with you again. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show again. Now, these are historic organizing wins in areas that have long been considered unorganizable.
Speaker: Let's start with what happened with Uber drivers in Victoria. what What did that organizing effort look like on the ground and and what difficulties were there reaching the drivers who worked for Uber?
Speaker: Yeah, platform work is a very difficult industry to organize because there's no shop floor. you know There's not like one workplace that you can kind of enter and know who all the workers are The workers don't necessarily know who the other Uber drivers are.
Speaker: you know You might know a few of your co-workers, so to speak, but it's a very, you know what we say academically, atomized workforce. Very separated, individually isolated workers.
Speaker: So that makes it very difficult for union organizing that kind of relies on workers knowing each other, workers having like a shared break room, someplace where they can ah trade notes about their experiences of work and what it's like and why they might want to organize in the first place.
Speaker: And so that, you know, right off the bat makes it very difficult to organize. And then as an employer, Uber definitely doesn't make it any easier. You know, there's no built-in tools for drivers to contact each other. So, you know, they like to keep the workers separated, but then they also make it very difficult for unions to know how many workers there are to organize in the first place. So as this organizing drive in Victoria got off the ground,
Speaker: Uber made different claims at different times about how many workers there really were because part of organizing a workforce is reaching a certain threshold of workers that sign union cards.
Speaker: For those of us who have followed efforts to unionize Amazon workers, the win for warehouse workers in Delta was stunning. the What did the battle to organize look like there?
Speaker: Yeah, similar to what Uber did, at Amazon did the same thing of you know Uber claimed to have a lot more drivers than they did, which made it difficult for the union to say, hey, we reached that 55% threshold of workers that signed the union card.
Speaker: Amazon did a a similar thing. and you know You'd think it'd be easier because they're in a warehouse. They do have that you know uniform workplace that they all go to. They know who each other are. And what Amazon did um once workers started to sign union cards and talk to a union was do a hiring blitz.
Speaker: So, you know, where the union thought maybe they have 55% of the workforce of signed union cards, which is that threshold they need to meet. Amazon was like, no, actually, we have this many more workers than you really thought, suddenly hiring a bunch more workers. And the board decided that that was a clear union busting effort and that they didn't really need those workers at that time, that that was specifically a hiring blitz designed to make that union drive invalid.
Speaker: So, Veronique, one of the recent provincial labor policy reforms that helped these two unionizing drives to succeed was single-step union certification or card check. How does that help workers to organize?
Speaker: Yeah, that means that's that 55% I keep talking about where you need to get at least 55% of the workers at any given work site to sign union membership cards, which means you know the the worker is saying, I do want representation by a union. you know I want to democratize my workplace and I think this will benefit me.
Speaker: And so you need to reach that 55% threshold. What we had for a while was a two-step certification, which means... After that whole union drive, which as we saw with both Uber and Amazon is already so difficult in the first place, it made a second step where after that initial step, you know there's like a period of time where then you have to again get a secret ballot vote where all the workers get to vote on whether they want to do a union or not, ah sign on to a union or not. But of course, what that does is give an extra period of time for the employer to apply new union busting tactics. you know This is where now that they know that the workers are trying to organize, they get to intervene and you know scare the workers with all the consequences that might happen if they try to unionize. Maybe we'll close this workplace. Maybe we'll lay you all off or you know your your work conditions will worsen. You're
Speaker: pay will worsen, you know, all all these kind of disinformation campaign and threats to scare workers off of unionizing. And so it made a job that's already very difficult for workers to get union representation, it made it that much harder. So it's great that we, as of 2022, have single check back.
Speaker: single step card check back Yeah, quite a ah major difference there. Now, with the Uber drivers, a key reform that you cite is the reclassification of ride-hailing gig workers in the food delivery area that happened in 2023 here in BC. Remind us what Bill 48 did to guarantee some of the benefits of being an employee under the ESA, the ah the Employment Standards Act.
Speaker: Right. I mean, the the big thing that it did is, first of all, if you want to unionize, you have to be a worker. And Uber drivers were not considered workers by the platform.
Speaker: They were classified as independent contractors. So a big thing that Bill 48 did was define these workers, including food delivery workers, ride hail drivers, platform workers, in other words,
Speaker: as employees and the platforms as employers. So you know that means that the Employment Standards Act gets to apply to them. course, exceptions were made, which i was disappointed by. So not all of the rights under the Employment Standards Act apply to these workers, but they did get things like a minimum pay floor. It doesn't match minimum wage exactly. They got 120% of minimum wage just for the hours that they're engaged. So you know if you look at my research online, you'll see my complaints that this doesn't really add up to a minimum wage necessarily because workers spend a lot of time driving around ah waiting for a job.
Speaker: But a few other protections with some exceptions, you know they don't have sick days, they don't have vacation pay, no overtime, none of those kind of protections. But At the very least, they got considered and defined as employees.
Speaker: How does what happened in BC with Uber drivers compare with other jurisdictions like California and New York City? Yeah, that was why Bill 48 was such an important step is that we saw already, you know ahead of Bill 48 coming through in 2023 here in BC, we saw how much money the platform companies poured into what's called Prop 22, which was to kind of lock in that contractor status for Uber drivers, for food delivery workers, for all sorts of workers actually.
Speaker: Uber put $200 million dollars at least into Prop 22. And you know this means that those workers you know might find other ways to push for legislative protections, but they cannot collectively bargain. They can't unionize. They're not workers They're considered independent contractors. And the same things happened in New York City.
Speaker: Ride-hail drivers like Uber drivers have some regulatory protections that they fought for, but they don't have somebody representing them. They don't have that democratic workplace representation ah because they remain classified as independent contractors under the law. So that you know prevents them having access to collective bargaining rights.
Speaker: Then Anik, what sectoral bargaining and how could it change the playing field here? Yeah, what we argue for at BC Policy Solutions is for an opening up of the ways in which workers are allowed to organize. So we have what's called the Labor Relations Code, and this is essentially a set of regulations that a set of limitations of the conditions under which workers are allowed to unionize. That's not any worker can unionize under any circumstance. it's actually a very limited set of rules.
Speaker: And these rules are supposed to be to keep the balance between employers and workers and keep the peace and keep the public interest. So it's not kind of chaos out there with employers taking too much advantage of workers and ah workers you know rebelling and striking willy-nilly, let's say. So this sets limits on when workers can strike, how workers can organize.
Speaker: It's very limited because it was designed for a different era of work. Work has just changed so much since we set out the limitations on how workers organize, which is ah a kind of worksite by worksite. It's called the enterprise model. It's a worksite by worksite approach where For back in the day when most people may have worked, let's say, on a factory floor where you have hundreds of employees under one employer, very clear set of workplace relationship, employee-employer relationship, and workers had contact with each other and you know could organize
Speaker: by talking to each other on their lunch breaks. Maybe they even live in the same neighborhood. And it's just not what workplaces look like anymore. We've had decades of you know what employers call flexibilization, which is making work temporary and contract-based and having you know restructuring companies. So there's franchises and ah these long chains of subcontracting. So it's almost difficult to know who exactly is the central overarching employer here.
Speaker: And this makes it very difficult for workplaces to organize, either because they're platform workers, you know, that may not have contact with each other, but we can think of other forms of work that are like that, like domestic care workers, right? They're individuals working in individual separate homes, and it's difficult for them to have contact with each other and be able to organize.
Speaker: You can think of ah franchisees where it's, you know, it's not clear for a McDonald's worker, you know, is McDonald's my employer? Is the franchise owner my employer? And you organize one location, it might get closed down. And so um all of these things make it very difficult for workers to to organize and you know our modern day kind of work. And so what we push for is for a modernization of the labor code to reflect what the working relationship looks like now, which is very flexible. So if work is flexible, then we need our organizing models to also be flexible.
Speaker: And one approach to that, one um approach that seems to work in other jurisdictions is sectoral bargaining. And this is where you know workers can come together across a whole sector, get representation across a whole sector and set standards at a sectoral level.
Speaker: So you can think you know this might be all of platform work rather than each municipality having to organize ah you know just Uber and then what about Lyft drivers? ok you know It gives us an approach that can cover whole sector, all domestic workers in a particular region.
Speaker: And this allows us to set ah minimum standards and wage floor that employers can't go below. you know and Employers in that sector will negotiate with the representatives in that sector and set a floor.
Speaker: And it has all sorts of knock-on benefits. you know That means that employers in a sector can't compete with each other on the basis of lowering wages, which is what they love to do. you know Easiest way to increase your profit margin is to lower the amount that you share with employees for all the value that they give you.
Speaker: And so this this kind of takes that out of the equation. And then employers have to compete on another basis, offering a better service, innovating on the product. And so that benefits customers too.
Speaker: And it also reduces the inequality that we see between workers. It reduces the gender wage gap. It reduces the racial wage gap. It puts more money in Lower income earners hands, which is great for the local economy, right? That is a great stimulation for the local economy that tends to be where lower income folks spend their money, unlike when we give that money to employer profit, which ends up leaving our our neighborhoods. And so, you know, for all sorts of ways, we see that jurisdictions that have higher collective agreement coverage, kind collective bargaining coverage, you know, which tends to be because of sectoral bargaining, they have much more stable economies. And so, you know, we just want to mimic those stable economies and those more equal economies and have access to those kind of flexible ways of organizing here.
Speaker: What needs to happen in BC to truly develop worker-friendly framework to raise up all workers in the in the bargaining process? Yeah, we need to see a change in our labor relations code. And so every five years, there's a labor relations code review.
Speaker: ah This happened in May of 2024, that there was consultations and and a whole review process once every five years. and A lot of folks in public interest groups and groups representing workers, labor organizations, all pitched for the labor code to be opened up to other models of organizing like sectoral bargaining.
Speaker: And, you know, we didn't even propose a specific model. We just said at the very least, we need a single issue panel to look at this, to look at all of the different sectoral bargaining models, the most successful ones in other jurisdictions, and choose one that would give the most workers in BC the opportunity to organize, the possibility of organizing, particularly for industries that are the least organized, like service sectors.
Speaker: And you know they they haven't done that. Folks have been proposing this since the 90s. They came very close in the 90s introducing sectoral bargaining, and it it wasn't introduced. In the 2018 review, Labour Relations Code review panel recommended that there be single-issue panel that look at this issue and try and come up with a proposal, and that single-issue panel never got put together. And then this time around, the review panel...
Speaker: has not even made that recommendation that this needs to really be looked at. They've kind of punted this to the Employment Standards Act or to to other forms of legislation, which we really think is a mistake. And so we have one more little window of opportunity right now to respond to the Labor Relations Code Review panel's report and hope that the provincial government takes this opportunity to look more seriously into how sectoral bargaining could benefit our economy.
Speaker: Well, it's really great to dive into this with you, Veronique. My ears really perked up when I heard about Uber and Amazon, and sounds like we've got a lot more work to do, but there is a way forward. Oh, yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Thanks so much. I've been speaking with Veronique Sioufi. She is the Racial Equity Researcher and Policy Analyst at BC Policy Solutions, and you can find her article on this at bcpolicy.ca.
Speaker: dot c a You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker: It helps other people to find us. Also, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or telling someone about our podcast. To keep up with the show, you can subscribe to Red Eye wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Speaker: And you can follow us on Blue Sky at Red Eye Radio. I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
