ENG1131 Research Assignment: Sectoral Bargaining

ENG1131
Prepared for
The Honourable Kathleen Wynne
Premier of Ontario
Prepared By: (Student Name)
Senior Consultant
Lamplighters Corp Consulting
February 25, 2018
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
LAMPLIGHTERS CORP CONSULTING
139 Sparks Street, Ottawa K1P 5B5
Phone 613-563-1509
Website:  HYPERLINK "" 
February 25, 2018
The Honourable Kathleen Wynne
Premier of OntarioLegislative Building Queen’s Park Toronto
Dear Ms. Kathleen
The attached is the report which you requested advising you on “Yes or No? in advance of Ontario’s expected June 2018 provincial election, should you propose new provincial legislation that would allow ‘broader-based bargaining’ or ‘sectoral bargaining?’
The report has been combined based on the research conducted by the firm on all stakeholders involved in the program and the recommendations highlighted herein.
Sincerely
(Student Name)
Senior Research Consultant
THE TABLE OF CONTENTS
 TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582949" Executive Summary  PAGEREF _Toc507582949 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582950" Introduction  PAGEREF _Toc507582950 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582951" Purpose of the Report  PAGEREF _Toc507582951 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582952" Background  PAGEREF _Toc507582952 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582953" The Scope  PAGEREF _Toc507582953 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582954" Methods of Investigation  PAGEREF _Toc507582954 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582955" Discussion of Findings  PAGEREF _Toc507582955 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582956" The Statements of Controversy  PAGEREF _Toc507582956 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582957" The “Yes” Arguments  PAGEREF _Toc507582957 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582958" The “No” Arguments  PAGEREF _Toc507582958 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582959" Recommendations  PAGEREF _Toc507582959 \h
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 HYPERLINK \l "_Toc507582960" References  PAGEREF _Toc507582960 \h
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Executive Summary
The problem that led to the development of this report was to provide a comprehensive overview on whether to introduce a new legislation in order to give room for sectoral bargaining in the run-up to the June 2018 provincial elections. After examining the controversy surrounding the new regulation, the yes arguments and the no argument, this report finds an interesting debate on the issue with some arguments supporting the legislations while others presenting contrary opinions.
Upon careful analysis, this report finally recommends that the introduction of a new regulation was unsustainable and should instead be stopped. The recommendation of the report takes effect immediately upon the approval.
Introduction
Purpose of the Report
The purpose of this report is to advice Honourable Kathleen Wynne, the Premier of Ontario on whether the new regulation should proceed or not with regards to the introduction of the new legislation on sectoral bargaining in the run-up for the Ontario’s expected June 2018 provincial election.
Background
In the recent past, there has been widespread developments in the contemporary workplaces, characterized by small workplaces, nonstandard employment, and diversity in employment. Issues have been raised on the labour relations to accommodate concerns of individuals in these types of workplaces including a proposal to include broader-based bargaining legislation in the forthcoming provincial elections. There has been a rising debate on the proposal whether the introduction of the new regulation is sustainable bearing in mind the prevailing labour markets in Ontario where there has been increased low labor wages.
The Scope
We widened the scope of our investigation to include all stakeholders involved in the subject matter. These were labour union members, employers and employees in the franchising industry, as well as policy makers in the labour industry. The entire labour market in the entire Ontario forms part of the geographical scope. Bringing sanity in labour market also forms part of this scope by ensuring that there are mutual relationships between the employers and the employees in the franchising labour market.
Methods of Investigation
Our investigation relied primarily on the literature and other publication relating to franchising lobour industry in Ontario. Quantitative investigations were also conducted so as to get insight of the stakeholders’ opinion on whether introducing sectoral bargaining legislation was sustainable unlike the current legislation.
Discussion of Findings
The Statements of Controversy
The proposed legislation has raised controversy in the public domain. Some of the controversies are related to the increased number of small workplaces in the past 25 years. From the statistics, there were 1.17 million enterprises within Canada as of December 2015. Of these numbers, 97.9% were small enterprises, 1.8% medium sized and 0.3% large businesses. In the same year, over 85% workplaces had less than 20 workers and about 30% of the employees in Ontario were working in these workplaces ( HYPERLINK "/en/team/jason-hanson" Jasonet et al, 2016). Interestingly, the workplaces had employees on temporary basis not being able to get access to pension benefits. Low wages forms part of the features of the lobour markets in Ontario (Preibisch, 2012). In fact, according to Choudry and Thomas (2013), the recent number of immigrants, minorities and women are often not considered in any union representation. However, there has been increase in minimum wage rates in the franchising lobour market.
According to Table talk (2017), the current Ontario’s industrial approach is based on the Wagner Act approach pertaining collective bargaining. This approach encourages that the entire collective bargaining techniques takes place between one employer and one union at a single location (Creighton & Forsyth, 2012). In the recent decades, this system was more efficient for people working in large organizations, within a single location. However this approach has exceedingly lost synch with the dynamic labour market during the post-1980s (Ravenswood & Markey, 2011). Therefore people started to rethink on whether they should introduce a new approach that accommodates everyone.
According to Heron (2012), the Canada’s labour legislation requires the labour unions to be on workplace-workplace basis. This technique has perfected in larger workplaces having workers mostly based on fulltime and permanent terms. This is because the unions could attain better bargaining power by having bigger bargaining units in place. Unfortunately, this approach has the tendency of fragmenting the individuals bargaining power. Indeed, Kelly (2012) contends that dynamism in workplaces in the recent past has led to more individuals working in small workplaces and making it prevalent for precarious work. According to Brookes (2013), the acts of contracting out, privatization, and other strategies carried by the employers have resulted in difficulties for employers to unionize within the existing laws. Indeed, about 70% of employees in the sector are unionized; some of them have had difficulties in getting themselves organized since they work in small workplaces or in jobs that are precarious. In most occasions, most individuals who are overrepresented in this kind of vulnerable positions hail from equity seeking categories. Individuals working in small workplaces are rarely represented in the unions with statistics indicating only 15% of the employees being represented in the union (Fuller & Unwin, 2011).
Stone and Arthurs (2013) argues that considering the economic sectors where there is prevalence in small workplaces characterized with prevailing nontraditional work places, the current approach does not work effectively. This is the reason why the discussion of having broader bargaining comes in.
For franchise enterprises, it was suggested that there could be no problem if a specific location with a direct corporate owned or rather a franchise to be integrated in the sectoral bargaining agreement. Technically, a franchise enterprise comprises multi-employers (Tait, 2016). These employers are supposed to be subjected to similar operation rules during bargaining agreement. According to Noack and Vosko (2011), franchising businesses are regarded as simply one form of chain store operations which can use “a corporate owned model” for every given location or may still use “a franchise model” or combine the two approaches. In the final report, Cooke (2011) argues that there is almost no union representation within the developing economic sectors with deep roots of franchise. The present labour relations do not deal elaborately with franchising businesses, the reason being is that they are not yet a major factor to the economy. All these arguments bring a lot of controversy on whether a sectoral bargaining approach should be implemented or not.
The “Yes” Arguments
The interim report on whether to include sectoral bargaining approaches in labour relations raises concerns especially with competitions in the market that should force implementation of broad based bargaining approach. The competitors in the market may carry out their operations either on a franchise or corporate model or even a combination of the two. There is therefore no reason why they should be treated differently. Selling two or more competing business brands in the market should not imply that particular one should be subjected to unionization within set rules which does not apply to the oth...