The Canadian labour movement has had a rough year.
The New Democrats went from 24 to seven MPs in the federal election. Unions — especially outside the public sector — struggle to reverse a long decline in membership.
And the federal government has shown a new willingness to end strikes, angering labour leaders.
But Lucy Everett is optimistic. Everett has worked for three B.C. unions organizing workplaces and represented workers in newly certified bargaining units who were just starting to negotiate a first agreement.
Now she works as a labour relations officer at a third union, handling grievances and arbitration between the union and employer.
The Tyee agreed not to reveal her current employer as she is not authorized to speak on behalf of her union. She emphasized that the opinions are her own, and not the union’s position.
Just before Labour Day, I sat down with Everett in the shade of a Mount Pleasant community garden.
“Labour is growing,” she said. “There is really a push forward — especially from young people.”
Young people have scored huge labour wins over the past five years. A group of largely school-aged workers at a Kamloops A&W earned a first collective agreement this year in a notoriously difficult-to-organize industry. Meanwhile, a 20-year-old unionized a Vancouver Starbucks store — which later closed.
They aren’t alone. Everett said she’s witnessed a groundswell in interest in unions from young workers through her work. And as gen Z enters the workforce, she said, the labour movement is getting stronger.
“The thing that excites me most is that the labour movement is shifting towards solidarity,” she said.
We spoke about a wide range of labour topics, including the nitty-gritty of union work, playing devil’s advocate in defence of employers and how labour is changing.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: You work for a union as a labour relations officer. Let’s start off by explaining what that means — how would you explain what you do?
Lucy Everett: A collective agreement is useless if there’s no enforcement of it. Just because the employer agrees to something in bargaining does not mean that they’re going to uphold that after the bargaining is done.
My job is to hold the employer accountable for the commitments that they’ve made at the bargaining table.
What’s equally as important is engagement of the membership in their union.
I think a lot of people kind of see unions as just some people who negotiate their collective agreements. What I’m really trying to help people see is that I am not the union. You are the union. I’m just here to help advocate for you, but the workers are the ones that actually have the power here to make the changes in their work sites. So I try getting people engaged in the process.
When you’re first entering a workplace, how are you received by workers?
Every work site is different. Every site has its own history, a unique relationship between the employer and the union, and its own context and its own set of issues that it’s dealing with.
Take for example the service industry, in which relationships are so key. It creates another layer of what it means for a work site to unionize, because those relationships really change.
What about employers?
When a work site unionizes, if it was done well, it usually catches the employer off guard. They usually are surprised, and they’re never happy.
Especially in the private sector, the union is really viewed as the enemy.
In the public sector, the relationship with the employer is a little bit easier, because it’s just a given that public sector workers are unionized.
Whereas in the private sector, as soon as you unionize, you are viewed by the employer as the enemy, because you represent a direct impediment to them being able to make as much profit off of their workers as they possibly can.
It would be naive to say that once you unionize, all the power shifts back to the workers. There’s still a lot of restrictions on what workers can and can’t do legally under the labour code. But even just that little bit of shift in power, it really throws the employer off.
How do you manage that relationship?
It’s gentle parenting. We try to go in respectfully and say, “You’re gonna have to deal with me, so we might as well try to set up a working relationship.”
We’re going to disagree on some stuff. There’s going to be contention, but if we can keep this relationship amicable and respectful, at the very least, then this is going to be a lot easier for all sides. Whether or not the employer is willing to do that totally depends.
There are employers that are not willing to accept that their workers have unionized. And when they maintain that really adversarial attitude from the get-go, then my strategy is going to have to change.
If workers are hesitant to unite against an adversarial employer, how do you shift attitudes? What kinds of tactics do you use?
It’s really about helping people understand that they are the union. They are the ones with the power here. It’s almost a given for a lot of people that the employer is the one with all the power, who gets to make all the decisions.
But the employer couldn’t operate if workers didn’t show up to work every single day. That is where the power comes from, is the fact that employees are the ones that are actually running this ship.
In terms of tactics, here’s one of my favourite examples: One of the units that I used to represent, we made them buttons — you’re allowed to wear union buttons at work if you’re a union member. So we made these workers buttons that said, “Great service deserves livable wages.”
I personally received two cease-and-desist orders from the company, threatening legal action against me if I didn’t get the workers to take the buttons off. I wanted to frame them.
We didn’t take them off initially. We thought about taking it to the labour board, but the buttons were supposed to be a tactic going into bargaining, and the board takes months to reach resolutions.
With these workers, we decided that our efforts were better focused on actually organizing the unit for bargaining rather than fighting over the right to wear these buttons.
But it had made a statement. It showed the employer that people were united going into bargaining.
It’s funny, employers freaking out over employees wearing buttons has happened multiple times. I don’t know the extent to which they just don’t know that that’s something that workers are allowed to do.
Let’s play devil’s advocate. I’ve spoken to small-business owners who have felt really threatened by unions — these are pretty normal folk who say they don’t have the same resources as a big union. How would you respond to that?
I have no power without the workers. The workers are the ones with the power. Unions just organize them.
I think with a lot of these smaller employers, they’re not super-profitable businesses. Maybe they’re worried about going under if they have to start paying higher wages.
But if the business can’t afford to pay people a livable wage, then maybe it shouldn’t exist.
I don’t actually want these little shops and small businesses to close up. But wanting to operate a business does not take precedent over workers being paid enough to survive.
Let’s zoom out a little. You’ve worked in labour coming out of the pandemic — what’s changed in the Canadian labour movement over the past five years?
At a lot of the new work sites that are unionizing, it’s overwhelmingly young workers who are pushing for it.
Young people are under no illusion that the economy is working for them. I’m 26, and to people my age, it’s very clear that the economy is completely broken for us.
Everyone is struggling to get by. No one can afford to pay their bills properly. No one can afford to own a home.
We’re kind of working in these jobs that aren’t high paying, don’t have good benefits, and there’s just been this concentration of wealth at the top. Young people are looking at this situation and going, “This is never going to work for us.”
So I think it’s really cool that a lot of the big push towards organizing is coming from young people, and I’m really hopeful about what that means for the decades to come.
How do you see these changes playing out now?
It’s been really interesting to start to see the labour movement try to have a coordinated response to the federal government’s use of Section 107. That’s still a big work in progress.
In Canada, you’re only allowed to go on strike when your collective agreement has expired. What that has done is prohibited a general strike from ever happening legally — because for a general strike to happen legally, every single collective agreement would need to expire at the exact same time.
That has really restricted the scope of what the labour movement can accomplish, because it’s limited collective bargaining to the very immediate terms of your collective agreement, like wages and benefits.
Those things are very important, but organized labour could have power to accomplish so much more, through something like a general strike.
And so with the government being so willing to use Section 107, I think that labour is realizing that something like a general strike might be required to push back. We’re only starting to see the beginning of the entire labour movement being organized to fight against Section 107, which effectively takes away the right to strike.
That’s an interesting shift that I think is only at the very beginning, and curious to see how that plays out.
What can readers do to make their lives a little better?
Unionize.
That’s really the first step to being able to make changes. It’s not just about you and your co-workers and whatever you’re dealing with at work. It’s also about building a foundation for a strong economy for generations to come.
If you have children in your life, what kind of jobs do you want to be available to them when they are older? And do you want them to be able to make a livable wage? Do you want your loved ones to be able to have good health benefits?
The actual minutiae of any given collective agreement, it’s not always an immediate fix. It’s all subject to the bargaining process, but it’s only through the collective power and organized labour that these sorts of things can become the standard.
Paid parental leave in Canada, that came from unions. Weekends came from unions. The ban on child labour, an eight-hour work day, all of these things we take for granted now come from unions fighting for them.
So it’s not just about your individual work sites. It’s about being part of the labour movement as a whole, and what the labour movement as a whole can accomplish when we’re united behind certain goals.
If you’re already part of a unionized workplace, get more involved. Talk to your co-workers about what’s going on. It’s only through talking to each other that we can realize we’re all dealing with the same struggles, and then fixing that becomes a priority.
But those conversations have to be happening to be able to figure out where those points of unity are.
