JANUARY 2016
We are a network of workers and labour activists that fight for workplace justice, increased wages, and better conditions for retail and service workers.
Join Retail Action for "Working Class Wednesday" on February 10th! Everyone is welcome. If you work in retail, hospitality, or food service, then come on down for free food, free entertainment, and cheap drinks. There will be organizers to answer any questions you may have about workplace issues. This event will be held at the Victoria Event Centre in Lkwungen Territory. Check out our Facebook event for more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/1494169850885849/
Did You Know?
Flying Squad is the term used to describe a group of people that confront employers by disrupting the normal operations of their companies, much like during a strike. Flying squads take the strike tactic beyond their own workplaces, challenging the effects of capitalism and its various forms of oppression anywhere in their community. Supporting striking workers, as well as unorganized, unemployed, and unpaid workers, and mobilizing for mass protests are some of the activities that flying squads in Canada have engaged in.Year in Review
written by Natalia Sudeyko
2015 brought both challenges and encouragement for workers and labour organizers in Canada.The bad:
- The gender pay gap still hasn't significantly narrowed. The World Economic Forum released a report on gender pay disparities worldwide, and found that in Canada, the average man earns over 40,000 per year, while the average woman earns only about 32,000.
- In BC, the minimum wage was raised 20 cents, to 10.45/hour. Despite the increase, the minimum wage remains significantly lower than the cost of living, especially in urban centres like Victoria and Vancouver. Futhermore, a single person working full-time earning minimum wage will still be living below the poverty line.
The good:
- A Saskatchewan court held that employees have a reasonable right to privacy in personal emails stored on work computers, regardless of the employer's policies to the contrary.
- Justin Trudeau spoke at a conference of the Canadian Labour Congress - the first time a Prime Minister has done so in fifty years. He also pledged to repeal two Conservative bills which have been heavily criticized by unions.
- Ontario has initiated a review of their employment standards legislation, which will hopefully address some concerns about temporary and involuntary part-time work.
The Construction of Precarious Work
written by Kaitlyn Matulewicz
A couple of weeks before my fifteenth birthday, I got a job in a restaurant working as a hostess. It was my first experience of paid work. During my training I learned how to greet and seat customers (or “guests” as I had been told many times to call them), polish and roll cutlery, take take-out orders, take reservations, and take a waiting list on a busy Friday night. Along with being taught the duties of a hostess I was also taught, informally, how the workplace operated. The rules for the way things just seemed to be appeared to me over time. Workers in the restaurant industry will be all too familiar with these workplace norms: working an eight-hour shift without a break, being on call without getting paid, waiting until Sunday night for management to post the schedule for the upcoming week, getting sent home from work because it’s “not busy enough” (without pay of course), and the far-from-transparent tip-pooling practices of management. At the age of fourteen, like millions of other workers, I was being socialized into the world of precarious work.
Precarious work is a term used to describe work involving low wages, little job security, little or no collective representation, and limited benefits, such as sick pay, a pension, and health insurance. These jobs are not precarious by chance. Rather, they are structured to be precarious. Precarious work is often found in sectors with little union representation. In the absence of a collective agreement regulating the terms and conditions of work, workers in these jobs often have to rely on employment standards legislation—laws that are supposed to provide workers with a floor of minimum labour rights by regulating aspects of work including minimum wage, hours of work, and vacation pay. The minimum standard of basic rights provided by the BC Employment Standards Act (BCESA) is too low and poorly enforced. For instance, under the BCESA the minimum wage is just $10.45/hr. and $9.20/hr. for those who serve liquor. Meanwhile, the living wage rate for greater Victoria is $20.05/hr.
Knowing how work is structured to be precarious is the first step towards change.The Retail Action Network is here to support workers fight back against precarious working conditions. Contact us to start organizing.
Sports, Spectacle, and Suffering: workers' rights and international athletics
written by Natalia Sudeyko
2016 is going to be a big year for sports fans, with the Summer Olympics taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August, and the 2016 UEFA Euro Cup taking place in France in June and July. Brazil also hosted the most recent FIFA World Cup, in 2014.These mega sporting events are watched and celebrated all over the world and are undeniably exciting (I'll be the first to admit that I wait impatiently for every World Cup), but they have a definite dark side. Many people will already be familiar with FIFA's less-than-stellar reputation for respecting human rights in host countries, and with banned FIFA president / cartoon villain Sepp Blatter's numerous bribery, corruption, and bid-rigging scandals.
In addition to being costly and controversial, huge sporting events like the World Cup and the Olympics are also rife with labour abuses. Various NGO watchdogs have raised concerns about construction workers for Brazil's Olympic venues being forced to live in rat-infested, substandard housing, and the Brazilian Ministry of Labour has itself acknowledged that many workers have not been given the legally required 11 hours of consecutive rest between shifts or provided with the requisite safety equipment by their employers. And just two weeks ago, the International Trade Union Confederation released an estimate that 7,000 migrant workers would die while working on construction projects for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
So what can the average labour-minded sports fan do about these important problems? Well, we can start by learning more about the issues. Check out the recent report of the World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee of Rio de Janiero, a grassroots civil organization currently researching and documenting the effects of the Cup and the Games on Brazil's most marginalized populations: http://www.childrenwin.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/DossieComiteRio2015_ENG_web_ok_low.pdf No long-winded academic journals full of statistics are needed for the working class to know that the economic landscape of today is vastly different from what is was decades ago. Where once the workers were grouped closely together in large workplaces of manufacturing (where it was both obvious that they were a community of exploited, and that united they had power to fight their bosses for positive change), now workers find themselves for the most part disconnected from each other toiling at precarious jobs which pay starvation-wages to tiny groups of employees (thus limiting the workers’ ability to take part in their class community and their collective strength). Today in advanced capitalist nations such as Canada we workers do more selling than creating, we are torn apart from each other into small bunches and told to fight against each other for slightly less exploitative positions in the precarious jobs we exhaust ourselves at to make ends meet. This being the case, we must adapt how we organise ourselves and struggle. The trade unions of decades ago can offer invaluable lessons for today, but their structures and tactics cannot be merely copied for organising the majority of workers now isolated in precarious jobs. Nothing stays the same forever, everything is in motion, from the landscape of our exploitation and oppression to the structure and tactics of our struggle. The first step to adapting our way of working class struggle for success is to recognise reality. A revolutionary resolution worth keeping every new year to come.
A Revolutionary Resolution: Recognise Reality
written by Robyn Karina
No long-winded academic journals full of statistics are needed for the working class to know that the economic landscape of today is vastly different from what is was decades ago. Where once the workers were grouped closely together in large workplaces of manufacturing (where it was both obvious that they were a community of exploited, and that united they had power to fight their bosses for positive change), now workers find themselves for the most part disconnected from each other toiling at precarious jobs which pay starvation-wages to tiny groups of employees (thus limiting the workers’ ability to take part in their class community and their collective strength). Today in advanced capitalist nations such as Canada we workers do more selling than creating, we are torn apart from each other into small bunches and told to fight against each other for slightly less exploitative positions in the precarious jobs we exhaust ourselves at to make ends meet. This being the case, we must adapt how we organise ourselves and struggle. The trade unions of decades ago can offer invaluable lessons for today, but their structures and tactics cannot be merely copied for organising the majority of workers now isolated in precarious jobs. Nothing stays the same forever, everything is in motion, from the landscape of our exploitation and oppression to the structure and tactics of our struggle. The first step to adapting our way of working class struggle for success is to recognise reality. A revolutionary resolution worth keeping every new year to come.
Wage Workers Survey
Retail Action Network is working along with Employment Standards Legal Advocacy Project (ESLAP), Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG), and the Community Social Planning Council of Greater Victoria on this research project to better show what workers in Victoria are experiencing in their various workplaces. The simple survey is available online, so please help by sharing your experiences. TAKE THE SURVEY HERE >>UPCOMING EVENTSWednesday, Jan. 27th
Organizer's Meeting
Monday, Feb. 1st
Flying Squad Training and Orientation
Wednesday, Feb. 10th
The first-ever Working Class Wednesday
RSVP in advance, space is limited
Sunday, May 1st
May Day
Special thanks to Natalia, Robyn, Meghan, Rebecca, Kaitlyn, and all of the other volunteers that contributed to the production of this month's newsletter.
2016 Retail Action NetworkRetail Action Network · 1415 Broad Street · Lkwungen Territory · Victoria, Bc V8W 2B2 · Canada
