Look for the
certified label

Workers at downtown Zara boutique look for
union representation, with limited success

TRYING TO RIGHT RETAIL WRONGS:
Zara employees on the picket line

by MATT JONES

You wouldn’t think downtown mall Place Montreal Trust was a nest of subversion, but three of its stores have undergone union drives in the past five years. Spanish clothing company Zara joined Indigo and (now closed) Globo Shoes in the world of unionized retail in September 2007. But now, over a year after the union was certified, employees are still without a contract, and organizers say the company has stopped negotiating.

The union drive started in the summer of 2007, when Farouk Karim, 32, who was working in the men’s department, decided he’d had enough of the store’s management and called UNITE-HERE, a union with 50,000 members in Canada and 450,000 in the U.S.

“There was a real lack of respect,” he says. “Your schedule was totally unpredictable. Sometimes you’d get called in to work the day before. A lot of people were students and it was basically impossible to get days off if you had an exam.”

The union was certified after a couple of months of organizing, and negotiations for a contract began soon after. But they ground to a halt as soon as monetary issues came up, says Karim. Since then, UNITE-HERE says that employees who supported the union have been demoted and four have been fired from the un-unionized Rockland and Laval stores. In response, workers have been organizing pressure tactics such as handing out flyers to customers outside the store, as they did last Friday, Jan. 9.

Zara wasn’t Karim’s first experience organizing. He spent five years working as an organizer for the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) and, following his departure from Zara after the union there was certified, has gone on to work full-time for UNITE-HERE.

So what was he doing working at a clothing store? “It was an in between job and I decided to make it interesting,” says Karim. But why Zara? “Listen, my wardrobe needed some work,” he admits.

It’s a temptation that lands lots of young people in jobs with few rights.

“Low wages, lack of job security, lack of training, arbitrary treatment, lack of proper scheduling. There are problems in the retail sector big time,” says Gregor Murray, professor at the Université de Montréal’s School of Industrial Relations. But that doesn’t mean organizing retail is a walk in the park. “First, our system for representation is ill adapted to retail. You have to unionize one store at a time and it’s a very long legal process. Second, the workforce tends to have a high turnover. People can get these kinds of jobs very easily, so when conditions are bad, they just move. They vote with their feet.”

Union life hasn’t been all good for Zara’s unionized employees. On Dec. 17, the Quebec Labour Relations Board revoked the union’s right to act as their representative, arguing that it no longer held a majority among the employees.

The company, meanwhile, denies that it is acting in bad faith. “We would love to have a dialogue with this union, but unfortunately the government has decided that the union is not represented in the store,” says Jesús Echevarria Hernández from the company’s head office in Spain.

Does this mean the end of the Zara union?

According to a UNITE-HERE spokesperson, the union will continue to represent Zara’s employees.