One of my favourite clients is the child of a well-known union activist. He grew up on bedtime stories which all began: “Once upon a time and a half…”
Elder Advice has not given much thought to unions over the decades. Back in the day he was a Teamster. Loading boxcars every summer. Listening attentively with the other university students as the union steward bluntly instructed us to slow down. Because he did not want to end up being found like Jimmy Hoffa. Or rather, not being found … like Jimmy Hoffa. The instruction made some sense. After all, we were just there for the summer and made a game of loading trains in record times to stave off boredom, impress management and better ensure our hire-back the following year. The old timers went about their work staring at 20 or 30 more years of the tedium, likely with a lumbar disc herniation somewhere along the line. The downside of increasing management expectations about productivity was a constant concern.
I remember thinking that there had to be a better way of managing labour relations.
Since then, like many self-employed Canadians, Elder Advice has had little patience with periodic job actions and other union antics, especially those involving people already well compensated for the nature and quantity of their work - public sector employees being only a single example. Already overburdened Canadian taxpayers were forced last year to watch the spectacle of Ottawa capitulating to federal government workers yet again. Adding another $1.3 billion annually to the cost of running things, with a 13% pay increase over 3 years to some of the highest paid, best pensioned workers in the country and, in the same settlement, essentially ensuring their entitlement to continue providing virtual substandard service. By which Elder Advice means providing substandard service, from home. And do not get Elder Advice started on the never ending disruptions resulting from labour’s stranglehold on Canadian ports. The Port of Montreal has had annual strikes since 2020, with each work stoppage unsettling supply chains, increasing the cost of goods and unreasonably adding to the unreasonable financial hardships faced by Canadians.
For the past five weeks however, the attention of Elder Advice has been captured by the strike of the Canadian Media Guild - 70 journalists and producers at TVOntario. Disclosure: Elder Advice’s shoe leather journalist father was a founding member of The (Toronto) Newspaper Guild Local 87, which signed its first contract with the Toronto Star in 1949. A contract which provided reporters and photographers with 5 years of experience a minimum salary of $80 a week, a five-day, 40-hour work week and time and a half in cash for overtime work of editorial employees. Full disclosure: Elder Advice’s eldest is a producer/journalist on The Agenda, TVO’s flagship program. Really full disclosure: Elder Advice has had a lifetime of appreciation for the work of reporters who seek only knowledgeable sources, who believe in science, who adhere to codes of journalistic ethics, who fact check relentlessly and who draft and redraft. Professional journalists who want to tell you about the world as it is, not the world as you or they might wish it to be. The pursuit and presentation of facts is hard work. And it is worth both your time and your money to support those who engage in it.
The facts in this instance are simple and few.
(1) TVO is funded 70% by taxpayers and 30% by donations.
(2) With inflation, Canadian Media Guild workers at TVO make 15% less than they did in 2012. TVO’s managers, meanwhile, have received massive annual increases and have salaries now ranging from $170,000 to over $300,000. Not including bonuses they pay themselves.
(3) While rattling on about their need to “be respectful of the public and donor dollars TVO manages” those managers have squandered taxpayer and donor money for years on all manner of misguided initiatives which have failed to increase viewership. And which obviously have not included payment of fair wages for professional staff.
(4) Against that history, the wage increases sought by TVO workers, in this first strike in the network’s history, are modest. Only 5%, 4.25% and 4% over three years. Increases that will amount to $300,000 annually. Less than the salary of Jeffery L. Orridge, TVO’s current, overpaid CEO.
(5) TVO management is deliberately dragging out the strike, now in its 5th week, with the obvious intention of using the money saved to pay any meagre settlement it proposes. Elder Advice’s understanding that TVO workers will be paying for their own salary increases clearly shows he does not have the irony deficiency his doctor is always going on about.
(6) Ontario’s provincial government has failed to step in and instruct TVO management to play and pay fair, and end the strike or submit to binding arbitration.
And while TVO management avoids both discussions and fairness, its disingenuous and faintly nauseating public statements continue: “TVO Media Education Group remains committed to continuing discussions with CMG and finding a resolution” ;“We are committed to reaching a fair agreement that respects the professionalism of the (Canadian Media Guild) team we have…” .
It’s enough to make Elder Advice learn all the verses to Solidarity Forever.
And it has been distressing, and too close to home, for Elder Advice to watch young, competent and dedicated professionals worn down as this strike wears on. The disillusion and the bitterness toward TVO management - who, with each passing day, seem more like people who would manspread on a life raft - is destined to linger long after this job action is over.
Elder Advice? There has to be a better way of managing labour relations. Because, contrary to what every social media platform would have you believe, real people do not live in a world of endless discussion over intersectionality, bitcoin and political philosophies. They live in a world of concerns that there is enough money to make the rent, that dinner will be on the table tonight, that their children are getting a meaningful education, and that whatever they eat, drink or breathe doesn’t kill them.
The industrial system of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world and the 19th century birthplace of workers’ rights, provides at least a partial answer. The breakdown of labour/management relations we see in the TVO strike, and in other labour action in this “summer of strikes”, is virtually unknown in Germany. And so are the rampant earnings inequality, the disappearance of high quality jobs, the rise of precarious employment and the other undesirable consequences of Canada’s adversarial employment model. On every measure, from the percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements, to low unemployment and annual work hours, to smaller reductions in manufacturing employment (even with higher robot penetration rates), the German system is superior. It features centralized “social partnerships” between employer associations and unions at the industry-region level, but with flexibility to permit direct negotiations between individual firms and unions, which allows companies the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Most important however, in the unerringly correct view of Elder Advice, is the fact that employees are integrated into corporate decision-making through membership on company boards and “works councils,” leading to ongoing, cooperative dialogue among corporate shareholders, managers and workers. And employees invested in their company’s success.
At the end of the day - the working day - is it not better to be an employer whose employees say : “I wish I was a Siamese twin. Then we could both work for him"?
Elder Advice is just asking.
Well done except for the last quote. Conjoined twins is the correct terminology.