Status of Women committee  No, they certainly don't. Think about what a woman has to go through to even consider talking to somebody. Many women don't; they will just put their head down and work and hope that it changes, they will try to avoid the situation, or they'll just leave. When you see a departme

Status of Women committee  No, because we don't conduct training for managers.

Status of Women committee  I don't think I have any statistics on duty of fair representation complaints. Perhaps the individual affiliates might. But if they're kept at the CIRB.... It happens very rarely, but in cases where you have a member-to-member conflict...that's why we have processes to hold union

Status of Women committee  Yes, it was a Statistics Canada survey, and my understanding is that it was a survey of individual women. I think they had aimed to contact a significant number of women. You'd have to look at the study to see how many they did contact. It asked them a range of questions around t

Status of Women committee  Indeed it is, yes.

Status of Women committee  No, because we don't represent federal workers directly. That would be our affiliates.

Status of Women committee  Each union has their own educational programs. At the moment, we don't have any specific workshops that we provide on sexual harassment prevention, but it's kind of incorporated into other types of educational programs. I can't speak for what happened 10 or 15 years ago, when we

Status of Women committee  If I could elaborate on that, it exists like that because ensuring a harassment-free workplace is the employer's responsibility, so we want to make sure that employers have that training in place, have those supports in place. That's our job as unions. When we train our members,

Status of Women committee  Well, I think investing in your public servants, for example, at the federal workplace is one suggestion. Good, healthy labour relations are also important. I do think that training for managers is really important. Really, you can go to all the workshops you want, but if you do

Status of Women committee  Definitely. Any symptom of inequality between women and men that manifests at the workplace is going to compound the problem of harassment. It's all interrelated. If there are unequal power relations, it reinforces the kinds of behaviours that we see being acted upon when people

Status of Women committee  I think it really depends on how it's manifested at a particular workplace. It's hard for me to comment. It's something that you need to ask the specific affiliates as they come forward, as your study continues. In principle, when you first become a shop steward, you're encourag

Status of Women committee  I don't know if I can really answer that. I'd really have to look at the whole policy and see. I think, ultimately, resolving sexual harassment as a problem in the workplace is not really about crime and punishment. It's about trying to create healthy workplaces, where justice

Status of Women committee  A lot of it really exists on a policy level, and a lot of this work was done a number of years ago in helping unions create policy. We have policies and procedures for our own events, making sure they are harassment-free events. There are policies for conventions and for educatio

Status of Women committee  I certainly do. I think the comments that were made by my colleague here about the impact of the cuts on stress and quality of life are something that should be paid close attention to. When the stress in a workplace is heightened, people are more likely to be put at risk. It ma

Status of Women committee  The CLC doesn't represent individual members. We're a federation of unions. Each union, and each local in each union, may have a different approach, depending on the workplace, the language that has been negotiated, and so on. I think, though, on the whole, the desire is, in any