The Globe and Mail had an article this morning on the labour relations climate for this year in Canada. A report by the Conference Board of Canada said:

The board, in its annual outlook on industrial relations, said more than half of the employers it surveyed expect a co-operative climate in bargaining.

“Labour peace will reign in the overwhelming majority of negotiations in Canada this year,” the report said, suggesting that recent strikes at OC Transpo in Ottawa and York University in Toronto are exceptions to the broader trend.

This is truly exciting to hear. The only way companies and unions are going to move through this troubled economy is by collaborative collective bargaining. Unlike the articles suggestion of 2.9% increases in the private sector my experience is that contracts are rolling over status quo with little or no changes. Tough to be sure but if the company isn’t making money then there’s no money to give for increases.

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The Globe and Mail had an interesting article on the collective bargaining climate for 2009. I’m finding that the smaller manufacturing industry is having an especially hard time this year. The Canadian dollar is relatively high and the economy is what the economy is. Not great. Fortunately or unfortunately the pain is spread equally between labour and management:

Both unions and employers have lost power, Mr. Benimadhu said. “Companies have lost customers, sales and the ability to get credit from the banks. That’s not a powerful position to be in.”

The truth is that if the companies are having problems then, by default, labour is having problems. The company must exist for the workers to have a job.

The average wage increases in unionized environments seems to be slowing down and in some cases stopping. There have been wage concessions but a more pro-active choice is to hold the status quo and ride out the storm.

“I’m anticipating a very difficult year of bargaining,” said Ken Lewenza, president of the Canadian Auto Workers. “Employers will try to extract as much as they can from workers during this time of a recession. So it’s going to be a challenging time for the labour movement.”

Perhaps its not the employers trying to extract from the workers but rather the employers realistically trying to save the jobs of the workers.

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.

The Financial Post has a disappointing story about striking employees at Mercury Graphics in Saskatoon. About 85 employees who have been on strike for about three months will lose their jobs.

The company says:

“All options are being pursued to maximize the value of our assets,” he said. “That means we’re looking at all options from an outright sale of the assets to perhaps moving the production facility.”

The union says:

“Just when you think the employer has done just about everything they can, they continue to just poke away at people…”

Could this have been helped by effective collective bargaining? Perhaps. Unfortunately both sides seem to be negotiating in media sound bites and not earnestly trying to reach a win-win union contract.

The real losers are the 85 unemployed people.

The Financial Post has an excellent article which touches on collective bargaining during this economic downturn. I’m finding that while union negotiations are still starting with excessive bargaining positions, they’re quickly becoming realistic. I’m sure that conciliators are earning working hard for their pay these days.

One of the best quotes I’ve seen lately comes from Toronto employment lawyer Stewart Saxe who said in this article:

 ”these are unique times. The real issue is about preserving a job, not worrying about getting a 2% wage increase.”

This should be framed and put on the bargaining table at all small to medium employers hoping to have positive labour negotiations.

According to the St. Thomas Times Journal the Canadian Auto Workers local representing employees at Brass Craft voted 88% in favour of extenting their contract to 2011 BEFORE its expiry date in 2009. Truly proactive and a good show of management and union cooperation in these tough times. Kudos to both parties!

The folks at Pacific Pallet in BC found out the hard way that their collective bargaining strategy needed some work when they told their union that they could’t afford to give a raise. The BC Labour Board basically told them to open their finances to the union and prove it!

The duty to bargain in good faith requires an employer to disclose relevant financial information if it rejects a union’s wage proposal based on its inability to pay, says the BC Labour Relations Board.

According to the LRB, USW Local 1-3567 was entitled to access the employer’s financial records in order to verify the employer’s claim that it could not afford the union’s wage proposal: “Where an employer has claimed that its financial situation affects its ability to pay, the Board has ruled that the employer has an obligation to provide the financial information to the union to allow it an opportunity to adopt an informed position in response.”

The finances of publicly traded companies are fair game. However, it can be upsetting to think that you could be compelled to reveal the finances of your family’s business. You can read a union’s version of the story HERE.

Bottom line: Plan well for what you’ll say at the bargaining table.