Supreme Court Ruling Boosts Need for HR, Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

15 Oct

In a surprising reversal of its own prior rulings, Canadian employees will now over time gain stronger rights to bargain and probably to strike to get their way. HR practitioners and leaders take note: this won’t happen overnight, but employees in general will slowly gain considerably more say in organizations where they may have been ignored before. As Canada “internationalizes” its labor laws, so will the US in time.

Many have argued unions have served their purpose and are no longer needed in our modern era because employees have all the rights they should expect. Yet bullying, arbitrary terminations and capricious management decisions continue to occur in most organizations.

I’m relatively a conservative who would sometimes take a dim view of this. However there is no doubt, not a shadow, that there is still room for employees to be increasingly involved in decisions and management of organizations. How this happens will be very important. This ruling allows it to evolve over a long period of time, through lengthy and expensive court challenges that will define a further new era in employee involvement. Although costly for the few “bad actors” who will be involved directly, this way of staging change “slowly, but surely” should actually prove beneficial, far better than some sudden leap to new legislation.

Whatever your view on this, you might want to take a look at this article by Queen’s law professor, Kevin Banks, which concisely explains how the Canadian Supreme Court has determined to open up labor laws to further, perhaps endless, challenges that unions can now undertake to extend worker rights.

The upshot is to give added impetus to what HR managers have been saying for decades – you get the unions you deserve if you act poorly, and you prevent third party involvement if you proactively ensure your employees are involved, engaged and consulted. This will slowly drive less HR-conscious companies to get with the program and start involving people more broadly. Stats show this actually pays off in far superior results, but if that carrot hasn’t provided enough incentive, this will certainly continue the “stick” threat toward much deeper and more complete implementation of effective practices.

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