What's behind the summer of strikes in Canada and the U.S.

The Current19:22The rise of a more empowered labour movement

Read Transcribed Audio

From grocery employees in Toronto to writers and actors in Hollywood, it's been a summer of striking workers across North America.

Labour expert Barry Eidlin says a slow degradation of workplace quality, highlighted by the pandemic, all while wages have failed to match inflation, has created a summer of strikes. 

The Metro strike includes 3,000 workers from 27 supermarket locations across the Greater Toronto Area. Some workers say they are living paycheque to paycheque, and need to use foodbanks in order to feed their families. 

They've joined a growing list of organizations across Canada and the United States whose employees have hit the picket line this summer.

In B.C., port workers are deep in a job dispute, while Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries has closed locations as it deals with a labour dispute of its own. And across the border in the United States, actors and writers in Hollywood continue to strike. 

Eidlin is an associate professor at McGill University and an expert in labour and social movements. He spoke with The Current guest host Catherine Cullen about the Metro strike, and what he's seeing across the country and beyond. Here's part of their conversation.

Let's start with … how this could affect prices, maybe job losses. What do you think? 

Yeah, I go back to the blockbuster earnings reports that these grocery companies are making and the multimillion dollar salaries that they're paying their CEOs and wonder whether if they might be able to find some money there to share with these workers who are not even able to shop in their own grocery stores. 

So I think that these companies have enjoyed record growth. Yes, it's true … that it is a low-margin industry, but they seem to be using those low margins to rake in very large profits for their shareholders. 

And it would seem that they could be able to share some of that with their workers as well. 

But why should we believe that they would do that? I mean, there is pressure to deliver for shareholders. If wages increase significantly, aren't they just going to either pass that along to shoppers or let some folks go?

I think it's a question of power. And I think that's why you have collective bargaining, because there's a structural imbalance between the power of management [and] the power of workers to negotiate. And so they negotiate together, collectively. 

So I think that that's what we've seen over the past several decades, is an erosion of that bargaining power. And so we've seen, as a consequence, growing inequality and skyrocketing, you know, wages for CEOs and wage stagnation for most Canadians. 

WATCH | Metro worker says living paycheque to paycheque is an 'understatement' 

Toronto Metro worker says living paycheque to paycheque is an 'understatement'

1 year ago

Duration 1:40

Meat manager Austin Coyle is among more than 3,000 front-line grocery store workers on strike. He said he worked seven days a week nearly the entire month of July but still worries about affording rent for his two-bedroom apartment in Scarborough.

And so I think that what we're seeing now is an effort to sort of play catch-up, if you will. So I think that we have to remember that these companies have been operating by keeping wages flat for several decades. 

And so there's a large portion where we can catch up to where we were in the past, essentially where ... the business was somehow able to work on that model. 

Do you think that this is something that is being watched by other grocery stores, that this could have an impact on potential strikes?

Yeah, I think at a very basic level, this is an initial negotiation that is supposed to set a pattern for other grocery negotiations throughout the province. So there's that.

But then more broadly, certainly I think workers and employers alike are looking at [the] growing incidents of strikes that we're seeing across North America, really. And I think that that might be giving some pause to employers. And I think that that might be giving some confidence to workers. 

Talk about why we're seeing this moment of strikes across sectors. 

I see it as a confluence of three different factors. So on a long term scale, there's been these long term trends in the labour market regarding stagnating pay, regarding schedule and predictability, access to full-time jobs or not enough work, or too much work, forced overtime, harassment, technological change, surveillance.

And all these things have been sort of creating problems slowly over the past several decades in the workplace.

And then number two, the pandemic really sort of crystallized a lot of these ongoing trends and sort of really pushed them to the forefront. And I think this contradiction between workers like these grocery workers being seen as essential on the one hand, while being treated as disposable, really sort of put the problem into sharp relief. 

And then number three, this sort of structural fact that we're looking at a very tight labour market now that makes workers a bit harder to replace than they would be otherwise, sort of gives that extra push, a little structural bargaining power for workers.

 So I think that the combination of those three things has created a mix that that has led to some of the unrest that we're seeing now. 

What do we know about the public perception of labour action right now? 

Well, of labour action specifically, I haven't seen any recent polling data. I think a lot of it is strike specific. What I can say is that we do see in the polling data that approval of unions in general is at a high.

And then what I also would say is that, because these strikes are about issues that affect not just the workers but are broadly resonant with large swaths of the Canadian population, that would lead me to think that there would be much more sympathy for them. 

It's hard to portray this as sort of these greedy workers out for themselves when we're dealing with a population that is literally going to food banks to try to feed their families.

I think one of the surprising things, too, is that we've seen offers rejected, which is not something we're used to seeing. 

That is a big, big difference that we've seen recently. And that suggests to me that there is this sort of grassroots energy amongst workers that is sort of a necessary precondition to have a broader labour upsurge of the type that we saw, in the 1930s and 40s or the 1960s and 70s, for example. 

The fact that these strikes are really worker driven. And that the unions are negotiating these agreements which they think are good enough.

But now it turns out we're in a different period. And workers are saying, actually, no, that's not good. That's not going to cut it anymore.