Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

Public Service Alliance executive Patty Ducharme believes that unions are still relevant to workers, and plans to march at the annual Labour Day parade in Toronto

Doug Ward, Vancouver Sun, Saturday, September 02, 2006

Patty Ducharme is talking about her smile. The one that pushed her into the labour movement. The one that makes her convinced that unions are still relevant today.

Ducharme recognizes that Labour Day for most Canadians is just another holiday — not the celebration of workers and unionism that marked the day’s beginnings in the late 19th century.

But that doesn’t mean unions are outmoded, says the Vancouver woman who was recently elected national executive vice-president for the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

Which brings us back to Ducharme’s story about her smile.

When she started working as a federal customs officer in 1983, she had little interest in unions. She figured she was smart enough to look after herself.

Ducharme’s attitude changed when she sat down with her boss for a performance review after completing her first year on the job. “My superintendent told me that I smiled too much and was too vivacious in dealing with the public,” recalled Ducharme.

“I was a happy 22-year-old woman and I thought this is weird: Nobody told me that I was not suppose to smile on the job.”

So Ducharme consulted with her PSAC shop steward and filed her first grievance, “which, not surprisingly, I won.”

This set Ducharme, now 45, off on a career of union activism that culminated with her election in May as national executive vice-president of PSAC, a national union with 163,000 members, mostly federal and territorial government workers.

The smile anecdote, said Ducharme, explains why 30 per cent of Canadian workers — about 4.1 million people — belong to unions. And why millions of others in non-union workplaces would like to join one.

“I didn’t feel that criticism of my smile was an appropriate remark to be on my file.

“It made me realize that there was a power imbalance in the workplace and that the union’s role was to provide some balance.”

Labour Day celebrations in Canada today are mostly attended by the hard core: Union activists and staff members, brothers and sisters who know the words — some of them, anyway — to traditional labour songs like Union Maid, Solidarity Forever and Joe Hill.

On Monday, Ducharme plans to march at the annual Labour Day Parade in Toronto, which regularly attracts tens of thousands of people. Her take on Labour Day is that most people relate to it the way they do Remembrance Day.

“There is small percentage of the population that really observes Remembrance Day and the historical significance of the day. And it’s the same with Labour Day,” said Ducharme.

“Hey, it’s a day off from work. Yahoo, right? I think that attitude is unfortunate, but I wouldn’t read a huge amount into it. God knows, there have been many years when I thought: Yahoo, it’s a day off.

“But it doesn’t mean unions are irrelevant. When I look around the world, I know that there are people literally dying to join trade unions.”

Not all union members want to be active in their bargaining unit. Union meetings can be tedious affairs. Standing up to bosses, despite security provisions, can be intimidating and often thankless. And internal union politics can be rough.

But others take to it with enthusiasm. Ducharme is one of them. She relishes her role as an advocate for workers. “I’m shy. But I will step up to the plate if I feel things are going sideways.”

Ducharme grew up in Mission. Her mom was an NDP-voting nurse, her dad a Liberal-voting teacher. Politics was often discussed over dinner. Ducharme’s instinct for confronting authority was apparent at an early age.

“Most of my teachers didn’t appreciate critical analysis or having someone in their room who would challenge them and say: I disagree with you,” recalled Ducharme.

“I wasn’t a difficult child. But I think my parents were probably wishing that all they needed to do was buy me a nice dress and I would behave.”

Ducharme attended the University of B.C. and then took a full-time job at Canada Customs.

Not that her shift into union work was automatic after she joined customs. She was a young woman working in a federal civil service which, in the early 1980s, was very male-dominated.But she became increasingly involved, first in a PSAC women’s committee and then later as a shop steward and a union officer handling grievance presentations, staffing appeals, harassment cases and contract negotiations.

Ducharme was among protesters at the now infamous 1998 “riot at the Hyatt” where then-prime minister Jean Chretien was speaking. She was struck by a baton and sued the Vancouver Police Department. She reached a settlement with the VPD but declined to disclose any details, except to say: ” I was smiling again that night.”

Ducharme enjoyed advocacy so much — “I’m a . . . disturber. I like to challenge authority” — that she decided to work part-time at customs and get a law degree at UBC. She worked briefly as an in-house lawyer for the Canadian Union of Public Employees but eventually returned to PSAC and won the union’s top regional position.

“I went to law school so I could advocate for workers. But I had also been seriously bitten by the political bug,” said Ducharme, who now holds PSAC’s second-highest position.

“I found that my skills set was more suited to a union political environment than to just practising labour law.”

Ducharme, who has moved from Vancouver to her new job in Ottawa, won’t rule out a run for her union’s top job of national president.

In many ways Ducharme is the face of the new labour movement: a woman leading a public sector union with a large female membership. Not so long ago, private sector unions like the International Woodworkers of America, the Steelworkers and the building trades ruled labour. People like IWA leader Jack Munro were household names. It was very male-oriented.

These days private sector unions are less dominant in the “house of labour” as traditional blue-collar industries become increasingly capital intensive or lose market share to global competition.

The IWA, faced with a huge decline in membership over the past 20 years, merged in 2004 with the Steelworkers. Steve Hunt, 52, is director of the Steelworkers’ District Three, the union’s top job in Western Canada.

He doesn’t agree with talk about unions no longer being needed in an increasingly post-industrial economy.

Hunt, 52, says unions are still required to force employers — often multinational giants — to provide decent wages, benefits and pensions.

Hunt, the son of a military officer, grew up on military bases across the country and finished high school in Sardis in the Fraser Valley.

“Generally, if you grow up in a military family you’re pretty right-wing. But I guess I flew a little left and supported not only the labour movement, but other action that helped people who needed help more than I.”

After high school, Hunt began working for Island Copper near Port Hardy and gradually became an active Steelworker. “In the workforce you have the option of participating in the union or not. But I just felt that if I’m going to be a union member then I’d get involved.”

Hunt said that health and safety in mining was the issue that turned him into a union activist.

Hunt recalled workers he knew who were run over by trucks, crushed in equipment or pulled onto a conveyor belt.

“We lost a worker about every six months. It became part of life that people died or became seriously injured. It seemed unacceptable and I thought there must be a better way.”

Hunt said that, as a health and safety representative for the Steelworkers, he often had to talk to grieving families and participate in inquests. “Every time you do one of those inquests, a piece of you dies with that person.”

Hunt eventually became a union staff member, serving Steelworkers in many of B.C.’s major mines through the ’80s and ’90s. One of his mentors in the Steelworkers was Vince Ready, who went on to become one of B.C.’s most prominent mediator/arbitrators.

Eventually, Hunt was appointed and then elected Steelworkers’ district director — a position that also gave him responsibility for thousands of forestry workers because of the Steelworkers-IWA merger.

Hunt quickly made his mark there by pushing for a review of forest safety issues because of the mounting death toll in the woods.

“We didn’t see a lot of Steelworkers dying but we saw a lot of people in the forest industry dying and nobody wanted to take responsibility,” recalled Hunt.

“These deaths were called by some B.C.’s dirty little secret. Well, we exposed the secret.”

In 2005, 43 forest workers, most of them non-union, died in B.C. Hunt spearheaded a lobbying effort which resulted in the provincial government appointing B.C.’s first forest safety ombudsman.

Job losses in the resource industries have been difficult for private sector unions like the Steelworkers, said Hunt. But the Steelworkers, like many other large unions, responded by merging with weaker unions or organizing beyond its traditional turf.

“When I first started, a Steelworker worked in mining or steel manufacturing. But now there are no clear-cut jurisdictions. We organize in health care, rail workers, courier companies, trucking. It doesn’t really matter anymore — the walls are coming down and the weaker unions are disappearing.”

Despite the challenges facing unions, the labour movement remains a powerful force in B.C. — especially in larger workplaces.

Unions represent about 33 per cent of the province’s overall workforce, said B.C. Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair.

But that figure rises to 70 per cent in workplaces with over 500 employees, he added.

“Our size in real numbers continues to grow every year,” said federation president Sinclair. “But what we struggle with is that the workforce is growing faster than we are.”

The challenge facing unions is how to organize small businesses, which are the fastest-growing sector of the economy: “How do we make it so that man over there serving coffee begins to see his job as a sustainable career?”

Unions also have to be creative in appealing to younger workers who see themselves as independent professionals.

Employees become more interested in unions as they get older, said Sinclair.

“When you are 19, you think differently about the world than when you are older, have a family, pay for day care and have to be home by 5 p.m. to pick up the kids,” said Sinclair.

The B.C. Federation of Labour head said that union organizing has also been hamstrung by the return to secret-ballot certification under the B.C. Liberal government.

The NDP brought in rules that make it possible to unionize a workplace whenever 55 per cent of workers signed cards and joined a union. The NDP and unions argue that secret-ballot certification gives employers an unfair opportunity to intimidate or coerce employees not to join a union.

Fraser Institute labour relations expert Jason Clemens said that B.C. remains one of the most union-friendly jurisdictions in North America despite the secret-ballot certification.

B.C. still has a ban on replacement workers — a prohibition Clemens thinks Premier Gordon Campbell should have jettisoned early in his first term, at a politically safe time.

Clemens said that unions are strong in Canada — especially in comparison with the U.S. — but that labour’s power will wane with economic change. Traditional union industries, such as manufacturing and resource extraction, are employing fewer people, said Clemens, while the white-collar, non-union private sector is booming in urban Canada.

“We are in a much more dynamic economy,” said Clemens. Workers no longer expect to spend a career with one employer, he added.

Clemens said that many employees no longer accept the traditional union versus management antagonism. “Workers increasingly understand that, if the firm is profitable then they are profitable.

“And they understand that, if their company is in economic danger due to strikes or uneconomic wage demands, that it’s the workers who will ultimately pay the price.”

Ultimately, the future of unions may depend as much on employers as it does on new union leaders, like PSAC’s Ducharme or the Steelworkers’ Hunt.

As B.C. Fed President Sinclair put it: “The best union organizer in the world has always been a bad boss.

“Show me a workforce that is treated fairly, that has good benefits and where employees know they can be heard by their boss — that’s not a workforce that is running to the union hall saying, ‘Jim, come down and organize.’ ”

source: Vancouver Sun