Success in bargaining requires political strength

Representing the unorganized means forging alliances — Deena Ladd.

by Ish Theilheimer, video by Samantha Bayard, transcripton by Susan Huebert

[Deena Ladd, Co-ordinator of the Workers’ Action Centre, spoke to the CUPE bargaining  conference in Ottawa on Feb 6, 2013. Ladd works to improve wages and working conditions for workers of colour, low-wage workers and immigrant workers, who are often the most marginalized and vulnerable. Before joining the Centre, she was an organizer with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (now known as UNITE HERE) working with garment workers, home-based workers, and social service, retail and manufacturing workers. She has developed and taught courses, workshops and training sessions for rank and file unionized women, young workers and workers of colour for trade unions and federations. Deena Ladd serves on the advisory committees of several organizations including foundations addressing poverty and the Coalition for Change: Caregivers and Migrant Temporary Workers. Straight Goods News interviewed her after she spoke to the conference.]

Deena Ladd:
The Workers’ Action Centre is an organization based in Toronto, but we have provincial scope. We work with many workers who are not part of the trade union movement, who are working through temp. agencies, who are contract workers, who are in low-waged, precarious types of employment. We operate a hotline where workers can phone in around their questions at work, but then they also come to the centre to fight for their wages. Say, someone hasn’t been paid overtime or hasn’t even been paid minimum wage. We work with them to challenge their employer to get money, but also to file claims. We do a lot of education in the community. We reach about two thousand workers across the Greater Toronto Area, providing workers’ rights training, information, support.

We also provide a lot of labour information across the province at settlement agencies, at places where people are looking for a job — libraries, everywhere that somebody might be going to try and connect with the resources. We try and make sure people are getting access to information, potentially in their first language, but also information that recognizes that if a lot of people speak up, they’ll lose their jobs. And so, what do you do in that situation, right? If you tell your employer, “Oh, I’m looking at my paycheque, and you haven’t paid me overtime.” Well, you’re going to be out of a job, right? So, what do you do in that situation? How do you fight back? How do you fight for yourselves and also build a relationship with the communities that you’re from and help them fight back, too?

So, part of what we do is also through people coming to our organization with a problem at work. We try to work with that person and then do that political education, say, you know that it’s not just you that has been paid minimum wage. Did you know that there are thousands of workers who are filing claims at the Ministry of Labour, thousands of workers who are really struggling to survive? Is that right? Do you think that’s right? Do you think that’s fair, what’s happened to you in your job? Do you want to do something about it? Then we try to get them involved in the centre. People become members. They start to get involved in campaign planning, in organizing, doing outreach to their communities, and start to become politically involved.

Deena Ladd says the organized workers she helps are key to developing new political alliances.

 

Straight Goods News:
How does that relate to the subject of the CUPE conference at which you’re speaking, which is about bargaining and public sector workers?

Deena Ladd:
Well, I think there are so many different connections. I think one connection for sure is that to be successful in bargaining, you need to have political strength and you need to have a base that will fight for what you want at the bargaining table. As we’ve seen,

It means reaching out to community; it means building a broad base of support. It means political alliances to try to win improvements, not just to react against the cutbacks and the concessions being asked for or demanded by employers.

And so, I think that there are strategies that community organizations, organizations like ours use to build that power, build that strength in communities where we don’t have a union base, and I think it’s sharing those strategies with CUPE. It’s also looking at the fact that many of the struggles that the Workers’ Action Centre is doing, like fighting for an increased minimum wage, fighting for a stronger floor of protection, fighting for better immigration policies, stronger social assistance, are very much connected to the issues that CUPE members are dealing with in their work, in the community, but also in their own families, their own neighbourhoods. People are struggling with that, too, and so it’s about building those community/union alliances on shared and joint struggles.

Straight Goods News:
How does the austerity agenda affect the unorganized workers who you work with through the Workers’ Action Centre?

Deena Ladd:
Well, I think it’s had a huge impact. I think the social safety net was already eroded quite a bit before the recession hit. I think many of our members who may have previously have gotten access a little bit to employment insurance now are being completely pushed onto social assistance, which is a really devastating, brutal welfare system, where people are being asked to survive on $600 a month. And so what that does to people in terms of the indignity, the degradation of poverty is brutal, right? And so I also think the austerity agenda has had a huge impact in terms of the quality of work out there. People are afraid. They’re fearful of speaking up if there is a violation of rights on their jobs, because they know that another job is very difficult to get. And we know that the Ministry of Labour does not have the resources that it needs in Ontario to enforce basic labour protections.

So again, here is a connection with public service. The public service jobs have been gutted over the last twenty years in terms of enforcement of rights. The impact is­ people aren’t getting those rights. So we need to be rebuilding all of the kinds of regulation of the labour market by having more workers work in those jobs, and also by ensuring that those rights are expanded and protected for people in precarious employment.

© Copyright 2013 Ish Theilheimer, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca