From BC comes this article about a first contract between the UFCW and a local Shoppers Drug Mart store. The first line is very telling:

UNIONIZED WORKERS at the Lakelse Ave. Shoppers Drug Mart have overwhelmingly accepted a first contract their negotiators recommended they reject. 

It seems that after 10 months of labour negotiations the union was able to achieve “Wage parity with union members at other Shoppers Drug Mart stores represented by UFCW Local 1518″. Wow…

Two points come to mind:

1. What the heck took the union 10 months to negotiate something the company was likely to offer at the outset of collective bargaining?

2. Could the company have avoided a union by proactively offering conditions similar to its other unionized stores. There is no greater way to avoid a union in your business than to make a union irrelevant to your employees.

Recently the Ontario Court of Appeal gave agricultural workers in Ontario the right to unionize. I won’t argue  whether this is a good or bad thing, but this will put both large agribusinesses and small family farms in the sights of union organizers.

Interestingly, the Elmira Independant came down on the side of unionization.

While this decision may cause farmers concern, it is long overdue.

This is particularly true for migrant farm workers, who come to Canada each year for seasonal labour — doing the jobs that Canadians do not want to do.

When they come to Canada on a temporary visa, they are restricted to working on the farm indicated on their documents — which means that any migrant worker who is facing harsh, unreasonable working conditions is essentially stuck in the job until they return home.

While many migrant workers are treated fairly and equitably by their employers, there are many who are not.

Witness the case that led to this historic decision.

Xin Yuan Liu, one of three former mushroom plant workers who joined forces with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to challenge the law, found working conditions at his plant so harsh that he sought to form a union — at which point his working life was made a “misery,” according to published reports.

Note to farmers: union avoidance is easy! Treat your workers with respect. Treat then as YOU would like to be treated. If you don’t have a union in your workplace and you give your workers an excuse to organize they will. Keeing union free begins BEFORE a union organizing campaign. Any fighting you do after that point – while it may be temporarily successful – will be like closing the gate after the cow has escaped.