Collective Bargaining in a Context of Employment Flexibilization in Two Plants in Quebec
Recent work in institutional analysis has highlighted the actors’pivotal role in institutional change, notably the power of the tradeunion actor to renew labour institutions. This research has emphasizedthe importance of agency in responding to the question of workerrepresentation through the construction of worker identity beyond theworkplace, the creation of a broad coalition beyond the tripartiteindustrial relations actors, and the expansion of the repertoires ofaction beyond the enterprise and national context boundaries. Contraryto this perspective on agency, which formally depended on themechanisms of industrial democracy, this paper argues that structuralconstraints can handicap or even prevent the strategic capacity oflocal actors from renewing the collective agreement rule in theneo-liberal context of economic globalization. Drawing on two case studies from two plants in the primarytransformation industry in Quebec, one belonging to a Canadianmultinational company and the other to an American, this paper analyzeshow local actors, in the context of institutional change, negotiateemployment flexibility and worker security. The results of thesenegotiations undertaken by the local actors: in one case, negotiationswith ‘backs to the wall’ and, in the other, ‘a gun tothe head’, show that the outcome depends on external factors farbeyond the local actors’ reach. Agency came up against the economic imperatives of the market,employment deregulation state policy, and the parent companies’demands related to the competitive advantage of the subsidiaries. Inthe American plant, the actors have removed the old collectiveagreement rule and substituted it with a new one more in line withmarket demands. In the Canadian plant, they have stratified thecollective agreements by adding a new agreement based on the employmentstatus and putting permanent and contractual workers into opposition.In both cases, structural conditions have limited the localactors’ margin of manoeuvre with negative consequences for theperipheral workers of the flexible firm.