Decentralized Bargaining in the Quebec Health and Social Services Sector: What Do Local Managers Say?
This article focuses on local bargaining that took place in the Quebec health and social services network between 2005 and 2008 following implementation of the Act respecting bargaining units in the social affairs sector and amending the Act respecting the process of negotiation of the collective agreements in the public and parapublic sectors (QLR, c. U-0.1), better known as Bill 30. This legislation drastically changed the rules regarding relations between local managers and unions in the Quebec healthcare sector by imposing new union accreditation units and decentralizing part of the collective bargaining process. As part of a study conducted between 2008 and 2011, I endeavored to understand the impact of this decentralization on the work of local managers. More specifically, I sought to determine, from the point of view of local managers, whether the increased managerial flexibility that was supposed to have resulted from this decentralization was reflected in the initial local negotiations. The managers interviewed had mixed feelings. It appears that, in practice, the restrictive bargaining framework, combined with the organizational context in which bargaining took place, limited the ability of local managers to adapt work organization to their institutional realities.