Accredited for a year, the union representing employees of Face Trois Musique/Third Side Music, one of the largest players in the music publishing industry in the country, recently learned that the Administrative Labour Tribunal (TAT) will send an arbitrator to oversee negotiations to conclude a first collective agreement. The approach of the employees of the Montreal company’s office is unusual in a Quebec music industry that is not very unionized.
The thirteen members of the Union des travailleurs et travailleuses de Face Trois (affiliated with the FNCC-CSN) wanted to negotiate with management to better regulate their working conditions within the company founded in the mid-2000s and representing a catalogue of more than 70,000 songs composed by artists from here and elsewhere in the world.
“We have one of the best staff-to-represented-artist ratios in the industry, allowing us to work very proactively in areas including sync licensing, creative services, administration and more,” reads the company’s website, which also has a Los Angeles office with six non-union employees.
Negotiations between management and union representatives have not progressed since the beginning of the year, laments union president Claire McLeish, a musicologist by training. “Mediation is difficult because management was sending a representative to the negotiating table who had no executive power, so every demand had to be sent back to the bosses, which slowed down the process.” The union then went to the TAT to ask for an arbitrator.
However, this request was contested by management, which filed a complaint with the TAT for “bad faith negotiation” against it, alleging that “the Union is unduly delaying the process of negotiating a first collective agreement and is abusively appealing to the Minister of Labour to appoint a dispute arbitrator,” according to a decision, unfavourable to the employer, published by the TAT on May 27.
Patrick Curley, President and General Counsel of Third Side Music, assures that “the objective is to reach an agreement with the union,” believing for his part to have “negotiated in good faith” with the Union “without being able to reach an agreement. We are not at all against unions. My message is that we absolutely respect the right of workers to unionize, it is a process [de négociations] that we respect and in which we will participate in good faith.”
“In the context of negotiating a first collective bargaining agreement, it is quite common to see employers use different tactics to drag out the process,” analyzes Yanick Noiseux, professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal and specialist in the world of work and unionization. Dragging out negotiations means that “in the meantime, the personnel within the company may have changed, the employer may hire new employees and then contest the union of unionized workers.” Patrick Curley told us that a request to revoke the Union’s union certification had also been filed with the TAT.
The cultural industries “are sectors that are not at all used to unionism,” says Annick Charette, president of the Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture (FNCC-CNN). “They see unions coming as if they were a scarecrow. Being forced to negotiate certain aspects in their workplace doesn’t please them at all. Afterwards, we also have an educational job to do in this sector: [les syndicats] are not there to scare, but to discuss.”
The president of the FNCC indicates that, like the representatives of the Union of Workers of Face Trois, other workers in the cultural world have recently approached the Federation to begin unionization efforts. “Why do cultural workers like those at Face Trois want to unionize? Because they are tired of funding culture, in the sense that it is always their working conditions that are the first to go down the drain.” [lorsqu’il faut rationaliser]and this is because these workers are extremely dedicated people who value their mission more than their own benefit. So they accept much lower working conditions than in other environments.”
In another rare example of mobilization to defend labour rights in the cultural sector, unionized employees of the Fantasia Festival (accredited as the Syndicat des employé-es de l’événementiel) held a one-day strike last Thursday to increase pressure on the employer in their negotiations. Here again, employment status and wages were concerns; an agreement in principle was finally adopted by the employees on July 16, two days before the opening of the 28e edition of the festival.
“People understand that times are changing, that the pandemic and inflation have affected everyone, and that to improve their working conditions, they have no other power than to come together” to defend their rights, says Annick Charette. Claire McLeish has a hard time explaining the stance of Face Trois Musique management: “I don’t understand why they don’t see [notre démarche] as an opportunity to develop a better business structure and a better working environment.”