Godard Chapter 5
Modern unions in Canada were created to replace the destructive conflict of the early and mid 20 th
Century. The theory of the new legislated regime was worker/employer partnership. That ideal has never really been realized, largely because employers consistently refuse to bargain on workplace organization issues. While there is a statutory duty to bargain in good faith provincial labour relations boards do not consider employers’ failure to agree on such matters to be bargaining in bad faith. Accordingly, most collective agreements tend to focus on wages and benefits, not strategic business policy or organization of work.
The video “Working Lean” produced by the Canadian Auto
Workers Union address the impact of workplace organization on workers. It raises questions about the appropriate, or even the possible role, of the union in the modern era.
Workplace authority structures differ. There are three paradigms.
Autocratic: Superordinates personally allocate, direct, monitor, evaluate work and determine rewards and discipline. Small firms, in retail, fast food franchises are often autocratic.
Bureaucratic: Employees are subject to a lower degree of direct authority than those in autocratic workplaces but are constrained by the technical design of work and by established rules and procedures. Conformity with such rules and procedures is normally the basis on which employees are monitored, rewarded, and disciplined. Larger firms with production lines such as automobile assembly plants are an example of such paradigm.
Autonomic: Workers have a high degree of autonomy, and performance forms the primary basis
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of monitoring, reward, and discipline. The CAMI worksite appeared to be an attempt to establish this paradigm. Professional workplaces tend to operate thus, such as registered nurses, faculty members, school teachers etc. However, the bureaucratic paradigm also influences the structure management of such workers.
Managerial orientation
This refers to the values and objectives underlying and reflected in the exercise of managerial authority. Godard identifies three paradigms.
Exploitative: Managerial interest is exclusively in getting from workers as much work as possible for as little pay. It has no interest in workers’ needs or the interests of broader society.
Arguably such managers display the qualities of psychopaths.
Accommodative: Managers recognize employees have needs and concerns, and attempt to accommodate them as far as they
(managers) deem reasonable.
Consociative: Managers appear to have concern for workers’ needs and concerns, and adopt programs to meet them and to foster workers’ loyalty to the organization and its objectives, as defined by management.
Godard provides a diagram on page 111 identifying the nine combinations of the structural and orientation paradigms ranging from “autocratic/ exploitative” through “bureaucratic/ accommodative” to
“autonomic/consociative”.
While no employer will ever reflect exactly one of the paradigms the approach does help to explain the different nature of unions in
Canada. Essentially unions respond to employers’ policies and
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practices and these depend on the employers’ structures and orientations.
Note that public legislation and policy can affect the structures and orientation s of management.
See the relative difficulty of unionization in Alberta. This makes it difficult to organize the unorganized. If legislation is not enforced workers can be exploited due to lack of remedy.
See also the impact of government policy in the public sector. This can collide with Craft or professional values which unions address at the workplace level and the provincial and even national levels.
Autocratic/exploitative
Examples are McJobs/sweatshops
See McWane
When the New York Times is bad, it can be very bad. But when it is good, it can be very good. Earlier this year, it was very good.
It was very good when it ran a three-part series by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman that exposed the egregious safety record of
McWane Inc., a large, privately held Alabama-based sewer and water pipe manufacturer.
Nine McWane employees have lost their lives in workplace accidents since 1995. More than 4,600 injuries were recorded among the company’s 5,000 employees. According to the series, one man died when an industrial oven exploded after he was directed to use it to
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incinerate highly combustible paint. Another was crushed by a conveyor belt that lacked a required protective guard.
Three of McWane’s nine deaths were the result of deliberate violations of safety standards. In five others, safety lapses were a contributing factor.
According to the Times, McWane pulled the wool over the eyes of investigators by stalling them at the factory gates, and then hiding defective equipment. Accident sites were altered before investigators could inspect them, in violation of federal rules. One former plant manager told of submitting phony water samples to environmental investigators, the Times reported.
When government enforcement officials did find serious violations,
“the punishment meted out by the federal government was so minimal that McWane could treat it as simply a cost of doing business.”
“After a worker was crushed to death by a forklift that apparently had faulty brakes, an Occupational Safety and Health
Administration investigation found defects in all 14 of the plant’s forklifts, including the one involved in the death,” the Times reported. The fine was just $10,500. Employers are further protected by the workers’ compensation system, which can make it hard for victims to sue.”
Companies who cause the death of workers on the job rarely face the full force of the criminal law. Manslaughter and negligence prosecutions in workplace death cases have been declining for years
— as the dead worker bodies steadily pile up.
According to the Times, in one McWane oven explosion that killed an employee, Frank Wagner, McWane “hired a well-connected lobbyist to lean on Dennis Vacco, then New York State’s attorney general, and ended up with a settlement in which it did not admit
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responsibility for the death.” The experts who looked at the case determined that the explosion that killed him was the result of reckless criminal actions by McWane, which was operating a castiron foundry in Elmira, New York, where Wagner worked.
“The evidence compels us to act,” the prosecution team wrote in a confidential memorandum to Vacco in 1996. The team urged him to ask a grand jury to indict McWane and its managers on manslaughter and other charges. A grand jury inquiry, senior investigators believed, could have taken them up the corporate ladder, the Times reported. But Vacco never sought an indictment against McWane for any crime.
Only after an unusual intervention by the United States attorney in
Buffalo, who threatened federal charges, did McWane agree to plead guilty to a state felony and pay $500,000.
“But as the company and Mr. Wagner’s widow are quick to note, that charge, a hazardous-waste violation, specifically did not hold
McWane accountable for Mr. Wagner’s death,” the Times reported.
“It was a reckless act on the part of certain individuals in that company that caused the death of that person. I’ll believe that till the day I die,” says Donald Snell, who supervised the state environmental agency’s investigation. “The ends of justice were not met.”
As the Times series showed, in plant after plant, year after year,
“McWane workers have been maimed, burned, sickened and killed by the same safety and health failures.” The Times documented more than 400 safety violations and 450 environmental violations since 1995 alone.
“Yet regulators and law enforcement officials have never joined forces to piece this record together, never taken a coordinated approach to end patterns of transgression,” the Times reported.
“Their responses, piecemeal and disjointed, bring into sharp relief
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weaknesses in government’s ability to take on corporations with operations spread far and wide.”
McWane says it is changing — and it’s certainly paying more attention to PR after the Times series. “Over the last several years, our Company has embarked on significant changes that are focused on setting the industry standard in employee safety, health and environmental programs,” asserts a May 2004 report from the company on health and safety. “We have challenged ourselves to go beyond compliance in the development of a state-of the-art safety, health and environmental management system to create a comprehensive program designed to exemplify excellence in environmental, health and safety performance, integrity, service and quality.”
“McWane and its subsidiaries actively promote a safe workplace,” the company asserts. “We have positive and ongoing working relationships with federal, state and local authorities to continuously improve our safety training, workplace technologies, and overall safety programs.”
That doesn’t exactly jibe with what company managers call
“ the
McWane way” — what federal and state regulators characterized to the Times as a “lawless” and “rogue” operation that ruthlessly sought profits with disregard for worker safety and well-being.
Now, consider this: McWane is responsible for nine worker deaths and countless injuries. Scott Peterson was responsible for the death of his wife and unborn child. Which one did the mass television media focus on? Who got the death penalty? And why?
Source http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/122004/mokhiber.html
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WESTRAY
MAY 9, 1992
Frequent violations of health and safety regulations. Funding from provincial and federal governments. CEO Frame charged with manslaughter but never came to trial. The case did stir action by the
Federal government at the urging of unions such as the United
Steelworkers of America. The following describes recent changes in
Canada’s Criminal Code inspired by Westray. And an attempt to rein in exploitative employers.
Attributing Criminal Liability to Organizations – Bill C-45
Clause 2 of Bill C-45 amended Part I of the Criminal Code of
Canada to add new provisions setting out the rules for attributing
criminal liability to organizations for the acts of their representatives. These attribution rules represent a codification of an aspect of criminal law that has hitherto been left to the common law. However, the organizational liability rules proposed in new sections 22.1 through 22.3 also reflect a modification of the corporate criminal liability rules developed under the common law.
Essentially, the modifications seek to broaden the range of individuals whose actions and intentions can trigger the criminal liability of the
organizations they represent.
New section 22.1 of the Criminal Code defines two overlapping groups of individuals whose conduct could form the basis of a criminal offence attributable to an organization. A “representative” includes virtually everyone who works for, or is affiliated with, an organization: directors and partners; also any employee or member, or even an agent or contractor.
A “senior officer” means any representative who plays an important role in organizational policy-making or is responsible for managing
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an important aspect of the organization’s activities. In the case of a corporation, it is specified that the “senior officer” category includes, at the very least, a director, the chief executive officer, and the chief financial officer.
Under the new rules of organizational liability contained in new sections 22.2 and 22.3, liability for a crime will be attributed to an organization, either on the basis that one or more “senior officers” actually participated in the offence, or on the basis of a combination of the actions of one or more “representatives” and the intent or negligence of one or more “senior officers.”
It should be noted that both “representative” and “senior officer” cover broader categories of personnel than the “directing mind” concept developed under the common law, which limited corporate liability to the conduct of senior corporate officials with policymaking authority. The new rules also modify the common law by permitting the physical and mental elements of an offence attributable to an organization to be derived from different individuals.
New section 22.2 deals with criminal offences where the requisite
“intent” is negligence, namely, criminal negligence causing bodily harm or death. For these offences, an organization will be guilty where:
1.
a) a representative, acting within the scope of his or her
authority, is a party to the offence; or
b) the aggregated conduct of two or more representatives
would, if done by one of them, make him or her a party
to the offence; and
2.
the senior officer responsible, or all senior officers
collectively, show a marked departure from the
reasonably expected standard of care in failing
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to prevent a representative from being a party
to the offence.
Unlike the former law on corporate criminal liability, section 22.2 will permit the aggregation of the acts and omissions and the state of mind of the organization’s representatives and senior officers in fixing organizational liability. In this way, an organization may be guilty of an offence even if no individual within the organization has committed an offence.
Criminal offences requiring intent or recklessness (which is most of those in the Criminal Code), however, will not be attributable to organizations through an aggregation of the conduct of their personnel. New section 22.3 will require that a senior officer, at least partially with the intent to benefit the organization: a) acts within the scope of his or her authority and is a party to the offence; b) acting within the scope of his or her authority, and while having the necessary intent to commit the offence, directs the work of other representatives so that they do the act or make the omission forming the basis of the offence; or c) knowing that a representative is, or is about to be, a party to the offence, does not take reasonable measures to stop the representative from being party to the offence.
The foregoing differs from the former common law rules by allowing for organizational liability (in scenario c, at least) without a senior officer necessarily being a party to the offence.
Clause 6 of Bill C-45 repealed section 391 of the Criminal Code, which provides that, for offences under sections 388 (misleading receipts), 389 (fraudulent disposal of goods), and 390 (fraudulent bank receipts), the fact that a person committing such an offence acts in the name of a corporation, firm, or partnership, does not
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necessarily extend criminal liability to that entity. Since new sections 22.1 through 22.3 provide a complete code for determining the criminal liability of organizations, former section 391 became unnecessary and was excluded.
As the amendments to the Criminal Code have been in effect for only a few years, it is unclear as yet whether the new legislation has reduced exploitative employers’ breaches of workplace regulations.
Sweatshops and their impact on society
Sweat shops are workplaces which routinely break minimum standards of work. They pay wages below subsistence, provide hours of work that are either excessive or insufficient to earn a subsistence income. Work is at a level of excessive intensity causing sickness and injury to workers.
In Canada, the effects of poverty and ill health impact taxpayers through higher taxes or premiums to fund healthcare. Social services, police, courts, and jails are all publicly funded and must deal with some of the consequences of poverty and homelessness.
One of the key causes of poverty, homelessness, crime, ill health etc. is exploitation in the workplace. It is a cost to society that is externalized by corporations to governments and taxpayers of the local communities, provinces, and country in which they operate.
Sometimes such exploitative employers are already subsidized by taxpayers. Should public money be used to support exploitation by such companies? While it is true that it is costly to society to monitor and enforce such laws, can such costs be recovered by the reduced costs of poverty, crime, ill-health etc. that may arise due to reduced exploitation?
In addition to the pragmatic reasons for reducing exploitation of employees, there are surely ethical considerations that justify
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reducing exploitation in the workplace. Often the victims of exploitation are children, either directly as exploited workers, or indirectly because their parents find it difficult to parent because of their own ill-health, poverty, etc. In Canadian society, child pornography is rightly abhorrent because of its exploitation and degradation of children. Yet the degradation of children due to workplace exploitation, poverty etc. is rarely viewed as abhorrent.
Why?
Accommodative employers
HIGH PERFORMANCE PRACTICES IN THEORY
See p. 128 of Godard.
Some companies are not exploitative but rather accommodative.
They seek to improve working conditions and avoid exploitation of workers by improving working conditions and workplace efficiency.
This different PARADIGM involves the following.
1.
Job design reforms
2.
Participatory reforms
3.
High commitment employment practices
1. Job design
Teams – self-directed and autonomous. Enlargement, rotation, enrichment of jobs. This can improve workplace health and safety
In the broadest sense. However TECHNOLOGY IS A MATTER
OF MANAGEMENT RIGHTS. If new technology is cheaper for the company, if it allows one to reduce the number of workers, to pay lower wages for lower skilled workers, there is a challenge for employers to sacrifice higher profits for more contented, healthier workers.
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2. Participatory reforms
Quality circles, problem solving groups, labour management committees. e.g. Health and safety joint advisory committees.
This can lead to more worker involvement in their work.
It can involve information sharing through meetings, briefings, surveys, suggestion boxes etc. Nevertheless, the workers’ ideas remain advisory. They have no legal right to manage.
3. High Commitment Employment Practices
A necessity of high commitment is job security for employees with lay-offs only a last resort.
Employers provide high levels of training and development of workers.
Employers provide contingent performance-based pay, ESOPs, and profit sharing.
While these can be successful, employers’ problems can arise from matters beyond company control – such as the stock exchange, changes in the product market, changes in government trade policy etc. In such cases workers’ security has to be sacrificed, in spite of employers’ good intentions.
4. Selection and socialization
This emphasizes workers’ loyalty to company. There is substantial orientation of employees to instill their loyalty to the company’s culture and values. If workers are conditioned to loyalty to “the firm” they are less likely to consider unionization. Such measures were first invoked by managerialists in the 1920s. See e.g. the IBM
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Songbook.
5. Symbolic reduction of status
This symbolizes teamwork and egalitarianism. Fewer middlemanagers are needed with high performance systems where workers assume some management roles. However such workers are still constrained by the goals and policies of higher management in the board rooms.
6. Reduced job classifications – pay for knowledge systems
Unions see such systems as ATTEMPTS TO PREVENT UNIONS
HOWEVER A UNION CAN ENHANCE SUCH SYSTEMS BY
ENGENDERING MORE WORKER TRUST OF MANAGEMENT
AND KEEPING MANAGEMENT FROM FOLLOWING SHORT-
TERM POLICIES. IN THEORY THIS MAY REDUCE THE
ADVERSARIAL MODEL OF WORKPLACE MANAGEMENT.
THAT SAID SUCH HIGH PERFORMANCE MODELS HAVE
NOT BEEN WIDELY ADOPTED IN SPITE OF PROMISE OF
COOPERATION. RATHER (ACCORDING TO GODARD) THEY
HAVE BEEN MAINLY USED TO AUGMENT AND SUPPORT
TRADITIONAL FORMS OF WORK NOT TRANSFORM THE
WAY IT IS DONE.
EVIDENCE
The evidence is mixed as regards success in performance enhancement. Recent studies (p. 140 of Godard) suggest weak association between such employer measures and performance. There seems to be little effect in most employers but success in some.
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The jury is out on the success of high performance systems. An appropriate question is why high performance systems aren’t more frequently undertaken. Jon Pierce in Canadian Industrial Relations identifies two barriers. One is that such systems are costly and eat into short term profits. Secondly, such systems require powersharing by employers with workers, something most managers are unwilling to do.
High performance practices seem to work well to discourage creation of unions where none exist. However, where a union already exists, support of the union for such high performance practices seems generally to be neutral. There is no evidence that existing unions subvert such high performance practices introduced by employers. In fact, the presence of a union that supports such practices sometimes increases the trust of employees.
Unions can also be useful in checking the impact of peer pressure on workers. That is they may prevent exploitation of workers by employers who use teams to exert peer pressure on workers to accept harder conditions imposed by management through use of peer pressure by workers. This is ethically questionable and may be costly to employers if it reduces employees’ trust.
One may consider that unions per se do not determine the success or failure of high performance systems.
As we shall see there are as many differences between and among unions as institutions and organizations as there are between and among employers.
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