by KEN HECHTMAN

For Indigo employees Matt Jones and Erin Silver, the Quebec Labour Tribunal’s Feb. 7 ruling certifying their union was the payoff of a 10-month effort. “It started in April 2002 with a couple of us talking about a union,” says Silver. “We called the major organizations and CSN got back to us first.”

According to Jones, Confédération des syndicats nationaux organizer Kevin Schwankner met them at midnight when they came off shift. Schwankner’s first piece of advice was to maintain absolute secrecy. “He told us, ‘If you’ve been talking about this on the shop floor, you’ll have to drop the whole thing now,’” says Silver. “Before we collected our signatures, we had no rights. In that time, management could have fired anyone.”

In theory, once the required 50-per-cent-plus-one employee signatures are collected and filed with the Ministry of Labour, certification is automatic. In practice, management can be expected to contest every step in court and in the workplace. Last July 7, Linda Dow, Indigo’s senior VP of retail, addressed the Montreal employees. Silver recalls her saying that “the trust was broken and that we didn’t need a third party to deal with complaints.”

A series of meetings followed to hear complaints. “The company tried to pinpoint managers who overstepped their bounds, figuring that’s why we formed a union. The problem was never individual bad managers. Even the best managers were so controlled by the company that their best efforts couldn’t meet what we think is fair,” says Jones.

Wages were at the top of their complaint list. A new employee starts at minimum wage. “It used to be higher, but it was reduced after the [August 2001 Indigo-Chapters] merger,” explains Jones. A series of evaluation-based McRaises, typically $0.15 but never more than $0.60 an hour, leaves Jones earning less than $8 an hour after two-and-a-half years with the company.

The “Three-strikes-you’re-out” sales quotas for discount cards were also a sore spot. This goes a long way to explain why the cashiers at Indigo used to push them so aggressively. If they missed the quota (card sales should count for 1.7 per cent of daily sales) three times, they’d be fired, although no one ever was.

Indigo’s next tactic was to hire union-busting lawyer Danny Kaufer from the firm Heenan Blaikie. “Kaufer earned his stripes breaking the McDonald’s union in Quebec,” says Silver. Kaufer’s first line of attack was to count managers as employees to calculate the number of signed union cards needed. The Labour Tribunal ruled that management are not counted as employees. Next, he argued the store coffee shop was a separate business entity. The Board ruled it wasn’t. “Kaufer didn’t expect to win all these,” said Jones. “The thing he was brilliant at was wasting court time - five months of it - and running up our legal bills.”

Silver’s and Jones’ advice for McWorkers in a similar situation: “Keep it quiet, get a core group of five to six organizers to collect signatures one at a time. You’ll get most of them immediately after a particularly harsh policy is announced, but you can’t do any of this inside the shop,” says Jones. :