by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Three days a week, Nicole Trachy and her gang at Rank and File (also known as Au bas de l’échelle) field calls from non-unionized workers who want to know what rights they have against disagreeable practices forced on them by their employers.

“My boss is forcing me to work overtime.” “Do I really have to pay for my own uniform?” “The chief is making me drive around all day at my own expense.”

Trachy regrettably has to tell many of their 2,000 annual callers that Quebec’s Act Respecting Labour Standards—passed in 1980 and amended a decade later—offers them little recourse to fight for their workplace rights.

The group has written a wish list of 90 changes that would level some of the gulf left between the non-unionized workers and their syndicated brethren. They whittled the list to six demands, which this spring they—figuratively speaking—nailed on the door of Quebec’s Labour Ministry. The National Assembly is expected to pass a new labour law in the fall session.

Trachy, whose group has been counselling beleaguered wage slaves since 1975, notes that the existing legislation addressed a far different reality than that of today’s workplace. “When the law was originally established in 1980, most workers were full-time, permanent full-time or permanent part-time, but now you have occasional, contract or temporary workers. These workers have no security and the law doesn’t protect them,” she says.

Forty per cent of Quebec’s employees are members of trade unions—Canada’s highest proportion—but another 1.5-million rely on the Act to protect them from workplace abuse. The provincial government agreed that it’s time to look at some changes, and spent the summer sounding out a whole lot of people on the future of labour rights for the non-unionized.

Predictably, employers’ groups came out against any changes to Quebec’s labour laws. “The best antidote to poverty lies in employment,” says Anne Le Bel, communications VP for the Conseil du Patronat. “For companies to create business, it requires less regulation in labour laws. We’re concerned with the struggle to create wealth. A portion of those people could work and have a fulfilled life. It’s a pity and we should encourage helping these people find jobs. We should look to eliminating poverty in the long term.”

New protection

Trachy, however, appears to have won the ear of the government with the list of demands that begins with the suggestion that employers be forced to compensate part-time or contract workers in cold hard cash, money saved in denying them benefits they would otherwise receive as full-time workers.

They also want to end the practice of shifting workers into self-employed positions. “For example, a bar owner divides his bar into separate administrative sections and tells each employee that they’re self-employed. He tells them they’ll make a higher income but then they’re not covered by unemployment, workers’ compensation, pregnancy leave. They lose all their protection,” Trachy says.

Over half of all Quebec’s non-unionized workers have fewer than three years of uninterrupted service, and in the current law, employers can fire them without good and sufficient cause. Trachy wants workers with one year seniority or more protected. “It would stop the arbitrariness of employers,” she says. “Besides, it won’t cost employers anything because they’ll still be able to fire someone with good reason.”

Workers now have the right to 24 consecutive hours off per week but have no right to a specified daily rest between shifts. “You see people working in those doughnut shops who finish at midnight and start the next day at 6 a.m.,” Trachy explains. “They get four or five hours sleep. We want there to be eight consecutive hours between shifts and a weekly rest of 36 hours.”

Trachy notes that 39 per cent of Rank and File’s callers complain of psychological harassment by workplace superiors. The law currently provides workers no protection from such mental abuse. Mentally traumatized workers can only be compensated if they pursue their case in civil court. Rank and File has demanded protection for the psychologically tortured that would operate along the same lines as currently existing laws against sexual harassment.

The group also demands that exemptions allowing employers to pay babysitters, domestic workers and restaurant staff less than minimum wage be withdrawn. They also want workers to enjoy more rights to refuse overtime and for the law to make it more difficult for employers to manipulate schedules aimed at denying workers overtime wages.

Trachy says that her group’s demands are practical methods to protect workers, not rooted in any dreams of proletarian uprising. “We’re not sitting around a table and thinking, ‘What would be good for non-unionized workers?’ We’re grounded in our direct relationship with non-unionized workers who tell us what’s going on in the labour place every day,” she says. :