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At the end of June, a recording leaked of a Microsoft Teams meeting between the managers of Renaud-Bray's 62 retail locations. In it, the bookstore managers equate their struggle against their unionizing employees to the righteous fight between Batman and the Joker.
The North Star spoke to Hélène Tougas, President of the Syndicat des employées et employés professionnels et de bureau (SEPB-574).
The union, which is affiliated to the FTQ, is in the midst of an organizing campaign which started in May of this year. Twelve branches are currently unionized and more could soon join. The workers' demands are quite reasonable: respect for labour standards, their schedules, and work that isn't so precarious.
In response, the employers went on the offensive, organizing a meeting with some fifty branch managers at the end of May. The aim of the meeting, promoting “good practices to prevent unionization,” was to encourage managers to manipulate employees to prevent the signing of cards, to spread photos of union delegates and to discuss a laundry list of anti-union tactics.
But Mélanie Dufour-Poirier, associate professor at the School of Industrial Relations at Université de Montréal, asserts in an interview with Radio-Canada that “if there were good [management] practices, there would be no attempts at unionization.”
To the dismay of the massive Quebec bookstore's top managers, this disproportionate response to the unionization of one of their stores found its way online for all to see on June 25.
Hélène Tougas asserts that bosses at Renaud-Bray bookstores don't respect the work of their employees, who live in constant precarity. "The employees are young," she says, "and afraid of losing their jobs. For many, it's also their first job."
Ms. Tougas adds that “they'll just listen to what their manager says and do things their way. They haven't necessarily learned that there are standards to be met in the workplace, which should be valued.
This kind of situation opens the door wide for bosses to cut corners on working conditions, to give more power to managers and management, and to allow Renaud-Bray to save money at the expense of its employees' quality of life.
The last thing these bosses want is for a meddling union to get in their way.
As reported in Radio-Canada's article following the leak of the video, a member of management can be heard saying they draw inspiration from Amazon warehouses, where high employee turnover makes it harder for workers to unionize, and risks blurring their motivation.
Ironically, given that Laval Amazon warehouse workers have recently unionized, the aforementioned manager believes them to be “lazy people, [that] don't want to work.” It seems that for Renaud-Bray's bosses and shareholders, employee precariousness is seen as a net positive, and unionization as a threat.