![]() Within a three-month span, two workers in the store were given write ups from management, ostensibly as a means of engaging in progressive discipline. It had nothing to do with our performance.” “A number of us did not receive good evaluations. “Performance evaluations started coming in,” she tells me. She’d been working for Indigo for about a year, and in that time she’d begun to notice an imbalance of power within the store. Sabrina, a worker at the Chapters Woodbridge location, was ready to quit to make her point to management. “We had to be swift and intentional in the way we organized,” Jennifer recalls. Many were dealing with the same issues that workers at Square One had. Their posts caught the attention of workers at some of Indigo’s other 200-plus Canadian stores. Over the past three months, four Indigo stores in three provinces have voted in favour of unionization. They also spoke to workers who had concerns about the process of unionization, and answered their questions honestly. They took guidance from UFCW and set up an Instagram account where they debunked common disinformation about unions. Knowing the types of lies management may spread during an organizing campaign, the first priority for the workers was busting myths. ![]() Several other workers I spoke to also shared stories of management intimidating them for suspected organizing. “Indigo has a history of union busting.” Jennifer explains how workers at a warehouse that Indigo uses attempted to unionize, at which point executive management showed up on site to convince workers not to join the union. They reached out to their coworkers, and to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Many of them had connections to local activist organizations and unions. To shift that power, workers at Indigo Square One began organizing. Indigo made it clear that they wouldn’t take employee concerns seriously – at least as long as management held all the power. ![]() “But instead of talking with us, Indigo decided to tell people to get with the program or leave the company.” “It was our first introduction to organizing the store,” Jennifer says. They passed the petition around the office and eventually presented it to management. ![]() That’s when the workers in the store came together and decided to sign a petition explaining to management that the extra duties – without extra pay or incentives – were unacceptable. "Instead of talking with us, Indigo decided to tell people to get with the program or leave the company.” “Their plan was to use employees, without any proper discussion, and force them to do the work,” Jennifer explains. A designated cleaner had been cleaning the store months earlier, but management decided to cut custodial services before the pandemic because the store had not hit its stretch target for sales. Indigo didn’t enforce any sort of mask policy. (The workers who agreed to be interviewed asked that I use only their first name.)Įmployees were told that they needed to constantly sanitize the store and clean the bathrooms themselves multiple times throughout the day. “All of a sudden we were given extra duties in the store without any extra PPE,” Jennifer, a worker at the Canadian bookstore chain tells me, explaining what happened when the first wave of workers returned to work in April after the initial COVID-19 shutdown. Photo via Ragavi Vasanthakumar.įor Indigo workers at Missisauga’s Square One mall, it was “The Bathroom Issue” that started their path to unionization. The company's Chapters Woodbridge location, shown here, voted to unionize with UFCW on January 8. Indigo, which owns stores under the banners Chapters, Coles, Indigospirit, and The Book Company, is Canada's largest bookstore chain. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |