Adversarial Labour Relations and the Rationality of Striking to Win and Voting No
by Michael Skinner

Some CUPE 3903 members question the adversarial concept of labour relations articulated by the most outspoken proponents of the strike as well as the relative costs compared to the potential benefits of this strike. I address these issues from an admittedly biased perspective based on experience as a long-time labour and human rights activist, as an education facilitator for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers Union Education Programme since 1997, and as a current TA for the course “Labour Relations in Canada” SOSC2210 at York University. Moreover, my Ph.D. research, which examines the role of Canadian foreign policy and international intervention in the wars in Central America, the Balkans, and Afghanistan informs my perspective that labour relations in general and indeed individual labour conflicts are tied to broader global economic interests and geopolitical strategy.

By offering below what for many CUPE 3903 members are rudimentary observations on economics and labour relations, I do not intend to condescend toward anyone; instead, I want to offer some basic observations to the many members who have no experience in either the practice or academic study of labour relations.

Those of you who believe labour relations are not adversarial and that we can use a simple economic benefit and loss calculus to measure the outcome of a strike, please take a few minutes to read on.

Those of you who couldn’t care less, but just want to get this strike over with can skip to the last paragraph if you want to save time.

Regarding the first issue of the adversarial nature of labour relations, whether we like it or not and as much as we might wish it to be otherwise, an adversarial relationship between employers and workers inherently exists within a capitalist economic system. Employers and workers compete for economic resources in a capitalist market; otherwise it is not a capitalist system by the very definition of capitalism. Our basic economic interests are diametrically opposed – as workers, we seek to increase our own welfare; whereas, employers seek to increase their own welfare by increasing economic efficiency and in capitalist enterprises to increase profits for shareholders. We can pretend this adversarial system does not exist; in fact, employers go to great lengths and spend large sums of money to promote such obfuscation in order to pacify workers. Nonetheless, the reality remains that workers and employers are adversaries in a capitalist economic system. How this economic conflict is legally, politically, socially, culturally, psychologically, and often times violently manifest is a primary subject of the study of labour relations.

How workers have collectively adapted to adversarial competition with employers in a capitalist system is at one extreme exemplified by the International Workers of the World conceptual slogan that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common”. At the opposite extreme, company and state organised unions are designed with the intent of harmonising the interests of workers and employers. The academic revolution of Human Resources Management (HRM) proposes the harmonisation of interests and has very successfully convinced many people that the interests of workers and employers are the same. HRM could be argued to have established a more enduring culture of corporatism than either fascism or socialism did. However, accepting the HRM perspective without intellectual critique blinds one’s “sociological imagination” to preclude developing a broader understanding of how a capitalist economic system actually functions.

In Canada, complex systems of collective bargaining and grievance-arbitration have evolved historically. Theoretically, in this labour relations system, the “common ground” that some people might believe naturally exists between workers and employers is only reached by negotiating a collective agreement. A collective agreement, decided by the negotiating parties, legally defines for a set period of time the specific parameters of what is considered common ground and how this common ground will be managed by both the workers and the employer.

As imperfect as this adversarial system of negotiating a collective agreement is, and as imbalanced in favour of the employer the process tends to be, we work as members of a labour union within this legal system. One might fail to recognise, or to deliberately obfuscate the fact that this system is adversarial, but while it is compelling to imagine a system in which the interests of employers and workers are the same, it is foolhardy and dangerous for anyone not to recognise how the adversarial capitalist system we live within actually works. This is not to imply that this system cannot be radically reformed or completely sublimated by an alternative system, but only that we currently live within an adversarial capitalist system.

Historically, an imperfect system of labour relations law has evolved in Canada, since the 19th century, to temper the class conflict between workers and employers for the purpose of aggregating and channelling productive forces while also avoiding violent class warfare. Canadian labour law never approached the corporatist labour relations of some states where the interests of employers and workers are presumed to be the same. The imperfect collective bargaining system we are part of evolved from the dialectically opposing actions of workers, employers, and federal and provincial governments. While Canadian labour relations have tempered class conflict to lessen the likelihood of violence, employers retain a wide latitude to inflict the economic violence of disciplinary measures and unemployment with near complete impunity (Read some grievance-arbitration case law if you do not believe how easily an employer can discipline or fire a worker with impunity).

Since the 19th century, workers in Europe and the Americas progressively gained ground through collective actions, which in many cases were violently suppressed by employers and state forces. The relative gains of organised labour accelerated after World War II, but by the late 1960s and early 1970s reactionary academics such as the influential political scientist Samuel Huntington, the political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, and the economist Milton Friedman complained that the conditions of too much democracy, too much freedom, and too much prosperity for workers relative to employers that resulted from collective actions and the mixed economy of the postwar Keynesian social contract threatened the continued existence of the capitalist system.

Some CUPE 3903 members have complained about using the term “neoliberal” on the grounds it is an ideological epithet. However, neoliberalism is a useful albeit fuzzily-defined academic term developed by Latin American scholars in their attempt to describe the very real events they observed happening around them as employers and the governments they supported reacted to the growing power of workers. The neoliberal revolution, beginning with the military coup in Chile in 1979, which spread throughout Latin America and the political coups of the Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney governments in the Anglophone world, in the 1980s, instigated a number of yet unresolved debates. Key among these debates is whether not-for-profit public services should continue to exist, or whether all services including education should be operated as capitalist profit-seeking enterprises.

Critiquing neoliberalism in general or specifically the neoliberal agenda of the York administrators is not an idle academic or ideological pursuit for CUPE 3903 members. Neoliberalism impacts on our daily lives by affecting how we teach, how we conduct our research, and how we can live out our personal lives. We teach and research within a quasi-public institution that is both publicly and privately funded and which is continuously being restructured to emulate a profit-seeking corporate model. The inherently conflictual relationship of workers and employer in a not-for-profit public service are compounded as this public service is chipped away by creeping privatisation and emulation of profit-seeking enterprises.

One means by which educational institutions emulate profit-seeking enterprises is by employing workers on casual contracts versus permanent full or part time contracts. Universities have a legitimate need for a limited number of casual contract faculty to fill vacancies due to leaves of absence for sabbatical, parental leave, sick leave, and other leaves of absence. However, the current situation endemic to universities on a global scale, in which a large percentage of teaching is done by casual contract labour, is purposefully designed to increase flexibility for the employer and increase control over the subordinated worker who recognises the precariousness of her or his casual position.

Another means by which educational institutions emulate profit-seeking enterprises is by instituting user-pay systems. Post-secondary education is portrayed as a consumer industry in which students pay for a service rendered that will purportedly lead them to a more profitable or at least more fulfilling job. However, this perspective obscures the reality of the far broader benefits to both individuals and society when the entire population can pursue education without economic constraints.

However, even if we accept the paradigm of a user-pay system for undergraduate students, it hardly applies in the same way to graduate students. Graduate students are not “students” in the same way undergraduate or high school students are “students”. Those students consume knowledge; whereas, graduate students work fulltime during their academic career to produce knowledge. Graduate students at York University are bound by contract to produce knowledge by teaching and researching full-time. The knowledge-driven economy, which every person living in Canada benefits from, rests on the products of the fulltime work of graduate students. However, Teaching Assistants and Graduate Assistants are paid far less than poverty wages for work performed on a fulltime basis.

Through our uncompensated work, graduate students and contract faculty subsidise not only York University, but also the broader socioeconomic system that benefits from our work as teachers and researchers.

The casualisation of labour, the imposition of user-pay systems, the indoctrination of a concept of education as a privileged commodity, and the avoidance of paying a living wage for necessary work are all part of the neoliberal agenda.

The priorities set by CUPE 3903 members to reverse the casualisation of labour and to set out on the road toward establishing a living wage for graduate students are issues that extend beyond our immediate individual concerns; these issues reach beyond the walls of York University and even beyond state borders and are not going to be resolved by one strike at one institution in one state.

This brings me to the second issue, which is that winning or losing this strike cannot be measured by only calculating immediate economic gains and losses. In the context of resisting neoliberalism, winning or losing our own strike will reverberate far beyond the walls of York University, which is why both sides of this conflict are fighting on a battlegro und that stretches beyond immediate economic rationality. The broader community of labour organisations supporting the members of CUPE 3903 and the provincial government, business leaders, and corporate media conglomerates supporting York University clearly recognise the broader issues at stake in this labour conflict.

York University has consistently avoided negotiating with the membership of CUPE 3903, because of the political enormity of the issues at stake, more so than the economic differences between the parties – differences which could have been negotiated if university administrators had ever agreed to bargain in good faith with CUPE 3903 negotiators.

Nonetheless, even if you do not believe a word I wrote and perceive this entire essay as polemic cattle dung, even if you have opposed the strike from the outset, or even if you are vehemently opposed to the concept of labour unions, it remains in your best interest to vote no in the upcoming supervised ratification vote. A resounding no vote will give York University no choice, beyond the unlikelihood of appealing to the government for back-to-work legislation, other than to return to negotiations with a better offer and the imperative of negotiating a collective agreement as quickly as possible.

Michael Skinner © 2009 Permission for redistribution is granted under the provisions of copyleft.