Amid pandemic, workers give unions a second look
Health care, retail among sectors that saw bubbling union drives as staff seek safety
We are in the depths of it right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted and locked down our lives. But as a vaccination effort continues across Canada, there is hope that, in the months ahead, things will get better, and that, eventually, we will emerge from this crisis. With an eye to that light at the end of our tunnel, the Star is beginning a new series — The Long Road Back. We will look at different parts of our world, our society and our lives, and consider how they may emerge from this ordeal forever changed. Because we have, in some ways, already started our long road back to whatever our new normal will be.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, workers at the Woodbridge Indigo bookstore suddenly found their jobs becoming a lot more difficult — and dangerous.
From increased cleaning to dealing with customers through the constant worry of exposing themselves to the virus, employees were now considered “front-line workers,” and yet not much else had changed about their job.
They had issues with their employer for years before the pandemic, said Greg Saxler, who has worked at the store for more than 10 years. These included a lack of oversight and perceived unfairness stemming from the systems used to rate workers’ performance and discipline them.
During the pandemic, “it just became less acceptable,” said Saxler, and workers’ frustration reached a “breaking point.” (Indigo did not respond to requests for comment.)
Meanwhile, Indigo employees at Square One in Mississauga voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada union in September 2020. That emboldened workers at the
Woodbridge location to do the same, said employee Sabrina Querubin. In early January, they too voted to unionize with UFCW.
The pandemic accelerated what was already happening, said Querubin: “We’re just asking that we be treated fairly. That’s it.”
Canada’s union density rate — the percentage of employed Canadians that is unionized — rose amid the global pandemic, as non-unionized employees lost their jobs at a higher rate than others. With a host of labour issues bubbling to the surface, a number of high-profile union drives took place in health care, retail and other sectors.
Though it’s unclear whether new union organizing rose significantly in 2020, many in the labour movement say the pandemic has spurred interest in organizing from the kind of workplaces that don’t usually unionize.
Ripley’s Aquarium, a Starbucks store in Victoria, and multiple Indigo locations are just some of the businesses where workers have joined up in the past year.
UFCW has organized three Indigo locations so far: Square One, Woodbridge and another in British Columbia, said Debora De Angelis, its Ontario regional director.
De Angelis said these union drives in the retail sector represent the frustration of workers who were suddenly “frontline” workers, but without any tangible recognition of the risk they were put in.
“Their health and safety concerns fell on deaf ears,” she said.
UFCW is seeing an uptick in interest, she said: “We’ve never been busier.”
Her union isn’t the only one — unions representing longterm-care aides, nurses and others say they’re getting more calls about unionization.
By the numbers
The union density rate in 2020 was 31.3 per cent, according to Statistics Canada, up from 30.2 per cent in 2019, which is around where it’s been since 2014. It peaked last April at 33.6 per cent, dipped in the summer, then rose and remained steady over the fall and winter, ending the year at 31.5.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean a significant rise in new unionization. Here’s why.
University of Waterloo economist Mikal Skuterud said the data primarily illustrates where job losses were, not new unionization efforts.
Workers were far less likely to lose their jobs if they were unionized, and the sectors that saw large amounts of job loss — such as retail and restaurants — aren’t highly unionized. Skuterud notes that union density peaked around the time Canada saw its highest unemployment levels.
Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work and former Unifor economist, takes a slightly more optimistic view.
While he agrees that the initial rise in union density was likely due to the loss of non-unionized jobs, he notes that after the summer, union density went up again even as employment also rose. (Union density went from 30.2 per cent in August to 31.6 in September, and stayed above 31 until the end of the year. Meanwhile, unemployment went from 10.2 per cent in August to 8.6 per cent in December.)
Stanford attributes this in part to new hires in unionized workplaces — for example, the education sector likely brought on more employees in the fall. But he also thinks it could indicate a growth in unionization.
He said the pandemic has shown the benefits of unions during a crisis, noting that members were less than half as likely to lose their jobs in the initial downturn.
Stanford said certain sectors saw their density rate rise more than others, in particular education, health care, and public administration and safety. Overall, the rise in union density was much stronger in the public sector, he said.
Stanford said the increase in union density during 2020 was also bigger for women than men, and attributed that to the higher concentration of women in the public sector, which has much higher rates of unionization.
COVID-19 safety concerns prompt union drives
At any rate, many unions report seeing more interest during the pandemic. Chris Macdonald, assistant to the Unifor national president, said the union is hearing from workers whose industries have been most affected by the pandemic, such as retail and grocery.
“The growth in our union in the retail sector has been significant during the pandemic,” he said. There’s no question that the union is getting interest from sectors it wouldn’t have without the pandemic, said Macdonald. But it is also seeing a drop in interest from industries it was focusing on before the pandemic, such as hospitality and gaming, thanks to closings and layoffs in those sectors.
“We’ve definitely had to readjust our targets.”
Since the pandemic began, The Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU) in British Columbia has organized nine longterm-care homes, said spokesperson Mike Old. One of these workplaces was the Lynn Valley Care Centre, the site of the first COVID-19 death in Canada.
The union has seen a lot of interest, especially from longterm-care workers who are “anxious and afraid,” Old said.
HEU organized around 1,500 workers in 2020, Old said, about 1,000 in long-term care. By comparison, the union organized around 1,000 workers in 2019. Marie Pantelis, the organizing team lead for HEU, predicts interest in unionizing will continue to rise in the sector.
The Ontario Nurses’ Association, too, has seen more interest since the pandemic began, said provincial president Vicki McKenna. For his part, Hugh Pouliot, spokesperson for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said in an email the union’s organizing efforts in 2020 were consistent with previous years, but this was despite the challenges of organizing during the pandemic, adding “there is definitely heightened interest in unionizing right now.”
However, more interest doesn’t always mean successful unionization.
‘The jury is out’
Stanford said the pandemic has highlighted health and safety issues that existed before but became more dangerous with the virus at large. “I think there’s a number of fault lines in our labour market, and in our workplaces, that were staring us in the face long before we ever heard of coronavirus,” he said.
Deena Ladd, executive director of the Workers’ Action Centre and a former union organizer, said the biggest driver for unionization has always been, broadly speaking, fairness, which has been “of paramount concern” for workers during the pandemic, alongside health and safety. The minimum employment standards afforded by the law “aren’t cutting it” for many workers, said Ladd. She believes the pandemic has shone a light on the inequities in the labour market. Though it’s difficult to predict what will happen next, Ladd hopes that a rise in unionization will be “just one of the many benefits to come out of the pandemic.”
However, Skuterud doesn’t think union membership will keep rising significantly, adding that the majority of new jobs created as Canada begins to recover economically likely won’t be unionized, which will bring the union density rate back down again.
Demand for unions is likely to rise in the short term, said Skuterud, because unions protect workers during difficult times and workers will turn to unions for those protections, but he doesn’t predict a long-term rise in the density rate.
Stanford says “the jury is out” on whether unionization will see a significant rise over the longer term, and said he’s cautious about interpreting 2020 data as proof of lasting resurgence. However, he thinks interest in unions will be “enhanced” thanks to the protections unionized workers were afforded during the pandemic.
“I think that the interest is there and the opportunity is there,” said Stanford. “Whether it translates into sustained increases in unionization depends to a large extent on the attitudes of employers and governments.”
Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, said while unions can certainly help individual workplaces, significant labour law changes need to happen to level the playing field for workers.
For instance, she said laws need to better include gig workers, who are often not classified as employees at all. Things like a higher minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick days would also benefit workers who aren’t unionized, she said.
As well, the most vulnerable sectors are often the hardest to organize, she said — or, in the case of agricultural workers, not allowed to organize at all.
“Both unionization and better laws take power away from the powerful,” said Yalnizyan, adding that unions themselves can be a big part of the push to change legislation. Stanford is optimistic that some of the biggest labour issues exposed by the pandemic will be addressed, noting the federal government has already promised permanent changes to child care and Employment Insurance.
He also thinks that the public sector has become more important during the pandemic, and he predicts the economy will continue to lean more heavily on the public sector for the next few years, which could mean more hiring in a much more commonly unionized sector.
“I think there’s a strong likelihood that we’ll see a permanent increase in the size of the public sector in our economy and in our labour market,” Stanford said.