Wednesday, December 3, 2025

The Power of Working Together

Strikes may grab attention—and sometimes they’re necessary—but real success is built on trust, respect, and cooperation

By Wayne Prins, Executive Director

You may have noticed a lot of strikes in the news or visible in your community in the past year. Perhaps they’ve even impacted your life in some way. Remember the chaos of the mail strike last Christmas?

This increase in strike activity isn’t just your imagination. When compared to pre-COVID levels, recent years have seen a huge increase in the number of workdays lost to job action, which is how strikes are measured from an economic impact perspective.

What’s up? Why is this happening?

There are a number of obvious factors that undoubtedly feed the trend. High inflation over the last few years has eroded wages. Housing costs have skyrocketed, as has the general cost of living. Labour shortages have crept into many sectors of the economy. Economic fragility and uncertainty have made employers more prone to squeezing their operations, which usually puts more pressure on workers.

But these factors alone don’t make more strikes inevitable. Going on strike is always a choice and a hard-line alternative to reaching agreement through robust dialogue, interest-based negotiation, and other modes of conflict resolution such as binding arbitration.

CLAC rarely has to resort to strike action because we’re generally able to arrive at an agreement at the bargaining table. I believe this good track record of avoiding work stoppages is thanks to three factors.

First, CLAC’s model of cooperative labour relations, which is built on mutual respect and an emphasis on the value of positive relationships among people, is simply more effective at achieving agreement at the bargaining table without formal disputes such as strikes and lockouts.

Second, this model wouldn’t work without the support and buy-in from you and your fellow members. I have spoken to many of you in hundreds of workplaces over the course of my 23 years with CLAC. I’m often very encouraged by the personal affirmation that a positive, harmonious workplace has made to your work-life. We owe you a great debt of gratitude for inviting us into your workplaces.

Third, a cooperative approach only works when the employer is equally committed to the relationship. Many strikes are caused when employers act in bad faith, make unreasonable demands, are not honest about the state of their business, and generally provoke unions and their own employees to take action.

The actions of these employers are entirely unacceptable, which is why we say that employers get the unions they deserve. Most of the employers we work with—most, not all—demonstrate genuine commitment to positive relations with us and with their employees. This is what makes a cooperative model successful.

There are exceptions to every story, but we’re proud of what we do and how we do it, and I want to thank you for making it possible.

From my family to yours, I wish you a Merry Christmas and happiness and health through the year to come.

The Power of Working Together

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