Share
Good afternoon to the honourable members of the Senate and my fellow panelists.
My name is Lana Payne. I am Unifor’s National President representing 320,000 workers across this country, including 70,000 in federally regulated private sectors such as air, road, rail and marine, as well as telecommunications and media.
Today, I am joining you from Nova Scotia, Atlantic Canada where 200 Unifor local leaders have gathered for annual meeting.
Today, they thanked our 230 members who work at Autoport, a subsidiary of the very powerful and profitable CN Rail. They were thanked for their courage.
Courage because for 5 weeks while on strike, these workers faced an employer who used scabs, replacement workers, to break their spirit, to demoralize them, to prevent them from getting a fair contract during an affordability crisis.
CN did this as Bill C-58 was being debated and supported by your colleagues in the House of Commons.
Imagine how difficult it was for their workers to go on strike to begin with – against an employer like CN – one that makes billions in profits, who pays their CEO $13 million a year.
It is never an easy decision to withdraw your labour, to risk it all, to go without a pay cheque, in order to fix workplace injustices and improve working conditions.
Bill C-58 is crucial to protecting the rights and dignity of Canadian workers. The basic rights to collectively bargain and to strike when necessary have been fought for by workers over generations, protected in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and affirmed by the Supreme Court.
This law is also necessary to modernize our system of labour relations to reflect the current social and economic context of this country and our world where increased corporate power and wealth require an effective counterbalance.
In the view of our union, C-58 is about restoring balance in bargaining between workers and employers. It’s about levelling the playing field and upholding the principles of fairness and justice in labour relations.
It is not often that legislation important to workers passes with the full support of the House of Commons, as C-58 just recently did.
This broad support tells us that the advocacy by workers for our own rights over many decades has paid off.
However, the push-back on expanding laws to cover those rights also shows that we must continue to work to ensure workers are able to make progress for themselves.
The very purpose of a strike – to apply economic pressure on the employer to reach a fair agreement – is fundamentally undermined when employers deploy scabs, or as is often the case, threaten to use them while we sit across from them at a bargaining table.
The use of replacement workers makes labour disputes more acrimonious and extends the length of those disputes—up to six times longer.
Canada’s business lobby organizations—the Chamber of Commerce, FETCO, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, and the CFIB—have aggressively fought this new law.
But I must highlight that there are numerous Canadian examples of employers who are prepared to violate workers’ rights to bargain collectively and use replacement workers. Which is why I’m before you today to stress once more how necessary this law really is.
I’ve learned over many years: replacement workers don’t help parties get to a negotiated deal. They never have and never will. Scabs are part of an employer strategy to starve workers out, to render them helpless, to demoralize them and accept less.
Opponents have continued to argue for exemptions to the bill in order to protect our “economic security” or even so-called “national interests.”
I want to be clear. The issue we face is not that some employees have too much economic power—a ridiculous notion under the economic system we live in.
It is that employers have too much economic power and have not invested in building the resilient supply chains and infrastructure they are supposedly responsible for.
Strikes are not the dire situations employers make them out to be and the decision to strike is not taken without great risk and sacrifice to workers.
Strikes are disruptions of limited length with known solutions, often known timelines, and can be prepared for accordingly through re-direction away from the disputed parts of the system.
There are other issues, such as climate change, global conflict, health, and economic disasters, that prove a much greater threat to our supply chains. I will stress their impact is not immediately known or predictable.
Peaceful labour relations in Canada – and indeed all over the world – rely on the principles of free and fair collective bargaining. Principles that improve living and working conditions for Canadian workers.
Anti-scab legislation has been implemented successfully in other jurisdictions, both nationally and internationally. Quebec and BC have anti-scab laws in place, and others are starting to follow suit.
We call on Senators to uphold the broad-based political and democratic consensus that has been built and speedily move C-58 through the Senate.
Thank you for this opportunity today and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.
