When the Law Comforts Trade Union Strategies Reproducing Institutional Arrangements that Are Sources of Systemic Discrimination
This article presents a case of mobilization against the systemic discrimination of care workers, the great majority of whom are woman, black and Haitian, and who occupy jobs with degraded standards in employment agencies that supply workers to one sole parapublic organization. At the intersection of the ongoing changes in workforce management and the reorganization of care management, this case is representative of how the boundaries of the employment relationship are presently being redrawn. As the mobilized workers are unionized, the case also allows us to explore a range of union attitudes. A trade union strategy predominates: it consists of defending or managing collective bargaining. It is comforted by a set of institutions that produce contradictory constructs of equality issues and the problem of discrimination. If these institutional arrangements breach employers’ «innovations» and support the adoption of trade union strategies aimed at preserving the bilateral employment relationship, this paper argues that this strategy is also symptomatic of the monistic view with which trade unions approach the erosion of the dominant model of the employment relationship, reducing it to conflicts of interest between employers and workers. However, this erosion is also the result of the mutual and reciprocal reorganization of the different social forms of the division of labour between classes, sexes and races. By not calling into question what constitutes the basis of the compromise of the wage society, namely the reduction or exclusion of groups of the population from the standard of full-time and permanent employment, trade unions give priority to strategies which contribute, as illustrated by the case chosen, if not to the creation of discriminatory standards, at least to the legitimization of borders between those who have access to quality jobs and those who do not.