Where a retail people plan meets the store, the warehouse and the law

I have bargained or led bargaining for about twenty collective agreements in warehouses, food plants and stores in Quebec and Ontario. I prepare a mandate the board can see in cost terms, including the cost of a stoppage in our peak season, and I describe the legal setting accurately. In Quebec, for example, the labour code restricts an employer's use of replacement workers during a strike, so a stoppage at our Drummondville distribution centre would stop deliveries to 67 stores. I keep store-level certifications separate in my thinking from warehouse agreements, because in Quebec unions are usually certified store by store and each unit has its own history. Between rounds I meet union representatives regularly, resolve grievances quickly and keep the seniority and scheduling clauses under review with the people who apply them. I do not treat a ratified agreement as a victory. I treat it as a set of promises we now have to keep, shift by shift.

A farm and home retailer does about a third of its annual sales between April and June, when feed, seed, fencing and garden demand arrive together. We hire about 1,600 seasonal colleagues each spring and need many of them to come back the following year. I plan the season from the work rather than the payroll budget: loading in the yard, mixing and advice at the feed counter, receiving pallets and staffing the tills. We keep a returning-seasonal register, offer first choice of hours to people who worked the previous spring and bring them back for two paid days in March to relearn the store. In 2025, 52% of our seasonal hires were returning colleagues, compared with 24% in 2020. Frontline turnover across the stores fell from 74% to 55% over the same period. I watch turnover in the first ninety days separately, because that is where a weak schedule or a poor induction shows first.

Of our 168 stores, 101 are in towns of fewer than twenty thousand people. Recruiting a manager from a large city to run a store in such a town is expensive and often short-lived. I build store-manager succession on geography: hub stores carry an assistant manager in development who covers holidays and vacancies in three or four neighbouring stores, so that a successor has run a store before being appointed to one. A candidate's acting weeks are recorded, and a regional manager signs off readiness only against that record. I also look beyond the front end for candidates. Our best recent appointments have come from feed and farm counter leads who know the customers, the products and the local farmers by name. I report the bench to our board's human resources and compensation committee twice a year, by region and by language, so that directors see where the next three vacancies would be hardest to fill.

About a third of our people work in Quebec, where the Charter of the French language gives workers the right to carry on their activities in French and limits when an employer may require knowledge of another language. Since the 2022 amendments, an employer must be able to show that the duties genuinely need the other language and that it has tried to avoid imposing the requirement. I treat those obligations as design requirements for our systems, training, job descriptions and meetings, not as a translation budget. We author training in French for Quebec stores, review every language requirement in a Quebec posting against a written reason and provide interpretation in company-wide meetings. Our francization work with the Office québécois de la langue française runs through my team. I also remember New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province, where four of our eleven stores serve mainly French-speaking communities.

Most of our store colleagues are paid within a few dollars of the provincial minimum wage, and the minimum moves every year: each October in Ontario and each May in Quebec, with different rules again in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Each increase raises the starting rate and compresses everything above it. By 2026 a department lead with eight years' service earned only C$0.90 an hour more than a new seasonal hire, down from C$2.75 in 2021, and the compression showed up in our exit interviews before it showed up in the budget. I model pay structures by province against the next three expected increases, cost the steps above the minimum explicitly and present the board's committee with the choice between restoring differentials and accepting more turnover among experienced staff. I also keep our pay-equity obligations in view, because in Quebec they require a maintenance evaluation every five years.