Collective Representation at Work in the Context of Outsourcing of Public Homecare Services in Quebec
Outsourcing, which entails the indirect integration of work into the organization of production and services, poses significant challenges for workers’ collective representation. This is because the relevant labour law is premised on a completely different organizational model. To gain insight into these challenges, three case studies were conducted on collective representation in the context of outsourcing of public homecare services in Quebec during the 2003-2013 period. The workers involved—for the most part women—held precarious jobs in three types of private service providers integrated into local networks of services: social economy domestic help enterprises (EESAD), users of the Service Employment Paycheque plan (SEP) and employment agencies. We examined whether these workers are represented collectively and which social actors are involved. We also investigated whether these practices are confined within the boundaries of the entity identified as the employer in the legal sense or whether they are “reticular”, extending solidarity to the sphere of strategic power (Appay, 1997) exercised by the public authorities in the networks. Our results show that there is no reticular collective representation in these local networks of services where the gendered devaluation of work, partly overcome in the public sector, is back with a vengeance. Employees in 15% of EESADs are unionized but the union representation practices only focus on the legally recognized employer, the EESADs. In the employment agencies integrated into these local networks, no form of collective representation exists, nor does such representation exist in the case of the SEP. However, collective action targeting the public authorities involving working conditions under the SEP has had some one-off success. Driven by a coalition of local associations representing people living with disabilities, it paves the way for the idea of employee-user alliances around service and job quality.