What a warehouse night shift taught me about collective agreements

The first collective agreement I read closely was the one taped to the wall of the night-shift office at Rivemont Distribution in Laval. I was twenty-two, a month out of a bachelor's degree in industrial relations at the Université de Lorvanne, and I had been made supervisor of thirty-eight order-pickers on the shift that ran from ten at night to half past six in the morning. On my second week I posted a schedule that moved two people off their usual days to cover a large order from a supermarket group. The union steward, Gisèle Normandeau, came to the office with the agreement open at the seniority clause and explained, patiently, that I had just given the overtime to the wrong people. She was right. I learnt that week that the schedule is the most read page of any agreement, and that the people who live by it know it better than the people who write it.

Rivemont was a family-owned wholesaler supplying independent grocers and convenience stores across Quebec from two unionised warehouses. After three years on the floor I asked to move into its small labour-relations team, and from September 1999 I handled grievances, prepared files for arbitration and sat as the junior member of the employer's bargaining committee in 2001. I settled more grievances by reading the schedule history than by reading case law. When I left in 2003 I had handled about 180 files, and I had learnt to separate the grievance in front of me from the grievance behind it.

In April 2003 I joined Merrowdale Foods Canada as HR manager of its chilled-desserts plant in Saint-Hyacinthe, which employed 620 people and had come out of a seven-week strike the previous autumn. Relations were poor. More than two hundred grievances were outstanding, supervisors and union officers communicated mainly through letters, and the plant manager, Luc Ferraudière, wanted a settlement culture without knowing how to start one. We began with the backlog. I met the union executive every Tuesday morning for a year and we worked through the files in the order in which they had been filed, not the order in which they were easiest. By 2006 the backlog was 31 files. I negotiated the 2005 and 2008 renewals there, and both were ratified without a strike vote.

I completed an executive MBA part-time at the Halbrook School of Management between 2006 and 2008, mostly on Friday evenings and Saturdays, because I wanted to argue with finance colleagues in their own terms. In 2009 Merrowdale made me director of labour relations and HR for its four plants in Saint-Hyacinthe, Granby, London and Brantford. The hardest decision of those years was the 2012 consolidation of the Brantford plant into London. We gave fourteen months' notice, offered transfers to all 240 employees and kept a job-search centre open in Brantford for a year. Seventy-one people moved to London. The rest received severance and help, and I still think the notice period was the most useful thing we gave them.

I moved into retail in March 2014, at Brisfield Home, a housewares and home-decor chain with 212 stores across Canada that was owned by a private-equity fund. Retail employment was a different labour market from the one I knew. Most store colleagues worked part-time, many were students or holding a second job, and annual turnover in the stores was 88%. A plant schedule is negotiated once every few years; a store schedule is negotiated with each person every week. When employees at our Brampton distribution centre applied for certification in 2017, I insisted that managers answer questions factually and stay within what the law allows, and we bargained a first agreement in 2018 without a dispute. In 2019 the fund sold Brisfield to a US retailer that moved HR leadership south of the border.

Martine Ouellard recruited me to Grangemont in September 2019. A year earlier the company had bought Magasins Ruisseaulac, a family-owned chain of 31 Quebec farm and hardware stores, 17 of them unionised. Grangemont's head office ran in English, and much of what reached Quebec stores arrived in English first. Since then my work has been to make Grangemont one employer across four provinces and two languages: bargaining in Drummondville, building store managers in small towns, redesigning stores around self-checkout and preparing a pay structure that still means something when minimum wages rise every year.

I work best in rooms where the people affected by a decision can see the numbers behind it. I write important proposals in French and English myself rather than sending one for translation, and I attach the dissenting memo when a colleague disagrees. Colleagues would say I ask where the work goes when a plan removes it, that I am more patient with union officers than some executives like, and that I am slow to describe a programme as finished. I would add that I am still learning how to say no to a store manager quickly enough.

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