Eight winters on the poles, then the other side of the table

In February 1991 I spent most of a week at the foot of a pole outside Saint-Jacques, in the Madawaska valley, holding a ladder and passing tools to a journeyman who was splicing a cable the ice had pulled down. I was nineteen, eight months into an apprenticeship with Pellerin Cable TV, and colder than I have been since. He made me radio the dispatcher every hour whether or not there was anything to report, and he made me tap each pole with a hammer before anyone climbed it. Neither rule was written anywhere. Both were the reason he had worked thirty winters without a serious injury, and I have spent most of my career trying to write rules that crews trust as much as they trusted his.

I grew up in Edmundston, the son of a pulp-mill millwright, and took a diploma in electronics engineering technology at Valmeraux Community College because it led to work close to home. Pellerin was a family-owned cable company with about 38,000 subscribers in northern New Brunswick. I finished my apprenticeship in 1993. That autumn a colleague fell from a ladder when a strand anchor gave way, and within three months the technicians had voted to join a union. I became a steward the following year, at twenty-three, and sat on the union's bargaining committee for the 1996 agreement. I learnt what a management proposal sounds like when you have to explain it in a church basement to forty people who will live with it.

I had started a business degree in the evenings at Université Beaulac in 1993, mostly because the stewards' course made me curious about why employers bargained the way they did. I finished it in 1998, and that September Keswald's director of labour relations, who had sat opposite me at a regional safety conference, offered me a post as a labour relations officer. Crossing to the employer side was harder socially than professionally. Several friends thought I had changed teams. I thought, and still think, that I had kept the same work: making sure the rules governing a technician's day were written by people who understood that day.

At Keswald I handled grievances for field crews across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, became manager of field labour relations in 2001 and joined the employer's team for the 2002 craft renewal. In 2005 I moved to Winnipeg to lead labour relations and field workforce planning for Redwillow Telecom, whose territory included communities reached only by air or by winter road. Repairs there waited days for a technician flown in from the south. Working with community-run training organisations in several First Nations, we hired twenty-six resident technicians who lived where they worked, and repair waits fell sharply. By 2010, though, eleven of the twenty-six had left, and when I asked them why, the answer was consistent: we had offered an entry-level job with no route to a full trade. I carried that lesson home.

From 2011 to 2016 I was vice-president, people, at Quillon Contact Services, a Halifax outsourcer answering customers for telecom operators, utilities and travel companies. Annualised agent attrition was 68% when I arrived and 44% when I left, after we fixed schedules in blocks, rebuilt the first week of training and filled most team-lead roles from the floor. In 2013 I opened our centre in Cebu, which employed 1,900 people by 2016. The agents there were good at the work. What I learnt, watching clients move queues between countries, was how much a contact centre does for a company besides answering the telephone.

Keswald asked me back in 2016 to lead labour relations and the field workforce. In January 2018 one of our technicians slid off a forestry road in the upper Miramichi during a blizzard and was out of contact for five hours, with a wind chill near minus thirty, before a plough operator found him. He recovered and came back to work that spring. The agreement we then reached with the union, putting check-in devices in every truck and writing into the collective agreement that their location data could not be used for discipline, is the work I would most like to be judged by.

I became chief human resources officer in September 2021. Since then we have brought 610 cable technicians from Bracewood into our craft unit, decided which customer calls stay in our own centres and built an apprenticeship that has started 128 fibre splicers, many of them in communities our network reaches last. I work through the collective agreements rather than around them. I write each bargaining mandate with the chief financial officer and the head of field operations in the same room, I read a sample of grievances every month, and I still ride with a crew for a day each quarter. People who work with me would say I am slow to announce a programme, quick to ask who will explain it at the union meeting and stubborn about writing down what we promised.

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