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Temporary help agency employment is a peculiar and often precarious employment form that has become increasingly salient in Canada in recent decades. This article examines the effects of the expansion of this employment form upon labour unions, as well as union responses to this phenomenon. Using a qualitative exploratory method, various effects upon union organizing and representation activities are outlined, as are a range of union responses to the phenomenon.
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It is fair to say that the first two decades of labour's experience with Charter litigation raised a note of caution concerning its utility as a strategy for labour empowerment. The early refusal of the Supreme Court of Canada, in its widely known "labour trilogy" cases.' to find space within s. 2(d) of the Charter for protection of the right to engage in collective bargaining and the right to strike lett many within the labour movement and the academic community doubtful about labour's prospects in the realm of Charter litigation; such observers suggested that labour must, at a minimum, proceed with caution. There also remained liberal "romantics," who were convinced of the Charter's progressive potential for labour.2 Others associated the proliferation of Charter litigation with the rise of a so- called "Court Party," a complex network of social actors and activists with an increasingly privileged status in Canadian society.'
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In the mid-1990s, the province of Ontario instituted a new model of “managed competition” to govern a significant portion of home care services delivery. The new model, based on competitive bidding for the delivery of home care services, deepened reliance on private and increasingly for-profit “service provider organizations.” In time, the outcomes of the transition to managed competition – particularly increased employment precarity and turnover – grew increasingly salient and became captured in prior literature. However, a series of subsequent responses to these outcomes also began to emerge, ostensibly aimed at improving work and employment conditions in this sector. This article provides a historical analysis of various responses to the heightened employment precarity wrought by the managed competition regime in Ontario home care, with a focus on personal support workers (psws) insofar as they have historically tended to experience the most precarious conditions among the primary home care occupations. The analysis suggests that the core institutional arrangement of fissured work and organizational relations, coupled with a hyperdecentralized bargaining structure, was a key constraint and mediating factor. The most dramatic policy measure aimed at employment precarity, the 2014 psw Wage Enhancement Initiative, constituted a major, ad hoc overriding of this structure that had until then delivered wage restraint so successfully that it challenged the government’s own health human resources objectives. This reliance on such an extraordinary ad hoc instrument, without addressing the core institutional structure, severely restricts the degree of improvement in psw employment outcomes capable of being produced by collective bargaining in Ontario home care.
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This paper provides the first analysis of aggregate raiding activity in Ontario by isolating raid applications from available certification data. Raiding in Ontario generally decreased over the 1975 to 2003 period save for the huge increases in 2000 and 2001 involving the CAW and SEIU. Bargaining units are significantly larger in raids, and legislative changes had little effect on aggregate raiding levels. Over most of the period raiding activity has been quite modest. Thus analyses of union organizing and its effect on union density are unlikely to be affected by leaving raids in the organizing data. An important exception occurs in 2000 and 2001, where the certification data seriously overstate new organizing. Corrected measures show that new (non-raid) union organizing continues to decline in Ontario. The decline in new organizing has been greater than the decline in raiding, resulting in an increased proportion of organizing due to raids in recent years.
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