Godard Chapter 5
Modern unions in Canada were created to replace the destructive
conflict of the early and mid 20th 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
McWANE: DEATH ON THE JOB
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 SHORTTERM 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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Jury is out on the success of this approach.
High performance practices seem to work well to discourage
creation of unions where none existed. 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.
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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