It’s a grim time in Canadian labour history. Unemployment is chronically high, currently at 7.2 per cent. The country lost 39,000 jobs in July. For 15-to-24-year-olds it’s even worse: as of June, 13.8 per cent of young adults were out of work and looking.
The problems don’t stop once you’ve found a job, though. Minimum wages across the country are painfully low compared to what a proper living wage would be, and entry-level retail jobs are fast becoming the only way for many university grads to scrape together a living. Those same retail jobs were, until very recently, seen as a way for students to make some extra cash. They tend to pay poorly and offer little room for advancement to the hordes of not-so-young workers looking for money and security.
It’s probably because of the above conditions, and the sluggish economic recovery that has redistributed wealth upwards rather than down, that young adults in cafes and retail jobs are looking to unions for solutions.
Just in time for this renewed interest, two of Canada’s largest labour unions announced they will merge to create a new, 300,000-member union.
The Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada will become Unifor in September and will represent workers from across some of the largest industries, including, according to the Globe and Mail, “manufacturing and autos, telecommunications, health care, cab drivers, pipelines, aerospace and newspapers.”
Union leaders hope the merger will empower both current members and other workers to stand up for their rights. This is a laudable goal and the time is ripe for a renewed push for workers’ rights: job prospects and wages for all but the elite and super-rich don’t show any signs of improving any time soon. Also, unpaid internships are de rigeur in many industries, essentially restricting entrance to these sectors to those who are already wealthy enough to work for free.
If they want to fight for and empower workers, Unifor’s leaders should start with retail and service employees. Many people are trying to cobble together a near-respectable income by working two or more jobs with little security and often no health benefits.
As we’ve already seen in Halifax, young people entering the depressed workforce and settling into disappointing jobs are open to union messages about worker solidarity and fighting for benefits. Occupy Wall Street may have largely disappeared, but it succeeded in at least one important way: it made the public more aware of how connected our problems are.
Struggling to pay down your house? Is your 27-year-old child working part-time at three restaurants instead of putting their bachelor’s degree to better use? Are you all drowning in credit card debt? These are all problems that the wealthiest corporations and people in our society benefit from directly, and they are all problems that you probably have in common with your neighbours, your coworkers, your friends.
Young adults, people working in retail and the ever-increasing intersection of these two groups are clearly open to finding solutions for the above problems and Unifor can capitalize on that if it shifts its focus from traditionally unionized industries to new ones. Unifor seems to have the same idea, too: 10 per cent of its resources will be directed at recruiting new members and organizing workplaces. They will also work on ” hammering out a mechanism that will allow students, retirees, the unemployed and others to join,” which is a novel idea that would allow people who desperately need economic representation to access it.
[Globe and Mail] [featured image via peoplesworld/Flickr]