Thank you very much.
My name is Paula Turtle, and I am Canadian counsel to the United Steelworkers. I am here on behalf of Ken Neumann, the Canadian national director of the Steelworkers. We thank you for the invitation to speak before this committee today.
The United Steelworkers represents about 230,000 members across Canada in every geographic and economic jurisdiction. In the federal sector, we represent about 12,000 members in transportation, banking, nuclear, and other industries. Right now, about 20% of the Steelworkers' members are women, but the union is growing. We expect that our growth will continue to be fuelled by the addition of female-dominated bargaining units in a number of industries, including the university sector where we now represent several thousand members, mostly women.
The union’s growth and diversity is fuelled by female activists within our union who are committed to ensuring that issues of importance to all workers, including women, are advanced and addressed. Our union has established successful anti-harassment programs and initiatives in many of the workplaces we represent. Before I say more about these programs, it's important to remember what prompted these actions by the Steelworkers at a time when our membership base was much less diverse than it is now.
In the early 1980s, women in workplaces across Canada were enduring harassment and discrimination on the job. They did not speak up. Many of them felt they could not speak up. But gradually, some brave women and their unions began to speak up and to fight back, and they said that sexual harassment is harmful to women and it must end.
Workplace harassment is more than just harmful and corrosive behaviour between individual workers that causes harm to its victims. It also generates conflict in workplaces, which almost invariably affects others by its poisoning effect.
The Steelworkers developed anti-harassment policies, which modified the traditional grievance procedure model, in order to effectively address harassment in workplaces. We developed mechanisms whose goals were to ensure that harassment does not occur, but if it does occur, to ensure that women who are the victims of harassment have a safe and effective way of reporting it and having it addressed. Some of our harassment policies, which have been negotiated into collective agreements, contain broad and expansive definitions of harassment. We think that having a clear and expansive scope of prohibited conduct is important, because it sends a message to employers and to workers that harassment will not be tolerated in any form. The policies also establish confidential and fair means of ensuring that incidents of harassment will be dealt with effectively and promptly.
However, we've learned that developing policies that respond to harassment incidents is not enough. We've also developed a proactive approach to eliminating harassment from workplaces by providing anti-harassment workplace training by union members for employees and management at workplaces. The training program provides important guidance to workers and to managers to enable both workplace parties to understand why harassment occurs, why it is harmful, and most importantly how to ensure it does not occur in the future. It's important to the success of this program that the training is presented to management and workers together. This ensures that both workplace parties benefit from the very important educative function of the program.
A third and important element of the Steelworkers' approach to harassment is to investigate and mediate incidents of harassment between union members in the workplace early and effectively so that harassment ends before it can escalate into more harmful workplace conflict. In our experience, early intervention in workplace conflict also presents the union with an opportunity to engage in valuable education and teaching opportunities to ensure that harassment does not recur. We have a long history of successful interventions in this regard.
We've established mechanisms to successfully address and eliminate harassment in many workplaces, including many in the male-dominated industrial sector. We can confidently claim that our harassment programs and interventions have resolved many disputes that would otherwise have escalated. But harassment can't be effectively addressed in all workplaces in Canada without changes to the laws that govern workplaces.
We're a powerful union with many members and many resources. Our ability to develop and advance anti-harassment training and language is attributable to the solidarity of our membership base, and the fact that the union’s elected leadership has chosen to make it a priority.
Even with the power of a strong and well-resourced union behind it, our programs do not exist in all workplaces, however. That's because they have to be negotiated, and employers do not always agree. Eradication of harassment in workplaces must not depend on a union's ability to negotiate it. We submit that the laws that govern federal workplaces must be changed to make it clear that harassment and violence will not be tolerated in any workplace in Canada, whether the employer agrees to collective agreement language or not, or whether the workplace has a union or not.
We know that the Canada Labour Code does contain some provisions to deal with harassment, but we submit that they would be improved if they included the following:
First, every workplace, union and non-union, must have a human rights committee to deal with all forms of harassment in the workplace, including sexual harassment. The committee structure could be modelled on health and safety committees under part II of the code. They should consist of equal numbers of management and worker or union representatives. They would deal with issues of harassment at the workplace level.
Second, we submit that an essential element of the establishment of these committees would be to ensure that the employees, management, and members of the committees are properly educated and trained so that they can be as effective as possible.
Finally, we submit in this respect that the definition of sexual harassment should be broadened and expanded to echo a more descriptive definition, such as the following, taken from a Steelworkers collective agreement. I'll read from the agreement:
Sexual Harassment is any unsolicited and unwelcome conduct, comment, gesture or contact of a sexual nature that is likely to cause offence or humiliation or might be perceived as placing a condition of a sexual nature on conditions of employment, including any opportunity for training or promotion. Sexual Harassment may include but is not limited to: suggestive remarks, jokes, innuendos, or taunting in a sexual context; unwanted touching; leering; compromising invitations; displaying of pornographic or other offensive or derogatory pictures or material of a sexual nature; sexually degrading words used to describe a person or a group; derogatory or degrading words regarding gender or sexual orientation, or directed towards members of one sex or one’s sexual orientation; sexual assault.
We also submit that the issue of workplace harassment cannot be addressed without addressing workplace violence, including workplace violence connected to domestic violence. Workplace violence may be separate from but may also arise from a source outside of the workplace. Bill 168 in Ontario amended the Occupational Health and Safety Act to require employers to develop, implement, and maintain workplace policies to protect workers from workplace harassment and violence, including workplace harassment and violence which may be related to domestic violence.
The Canada Labour Code establishes duties of workplace parties to deal with workplace violence and harassment, including the development of policies. However, we submit that the code’s provisions are deficient because they do not go far enough to impose clear and specific duties on employers. For example, the code requires employers to develop the policies to deal with workplace violence and harassment, but importantly does not address the issue of domestic violence and its impact on the workplace. Employers are required to take reasonable precautions to protect the safety of employees. However, we submit that given the stigma associated with domestic violence, especially if the victim and aggressor are colleagues, provisions that relate specifically to domestic violence are required.