Head Tale

The recent Air Canada lockout where management basically admitted they were relying on the government to legislate flight attendants (who, among other asks, had the wild request to actually be paid for the entire time they’re working, not just when planes are in the air!) back to work.

That happened but what they didn’t count on was that the union (CUPE) defying the order (memories of SUN defying a provincial government back-to-work order in 1999 and my mom was on the Executive of SUN.)   And I know I’m perceived as a pretty left-wing, progressive guy but in this case, it was the NDP doing the legislating (boo!) and I also have frustration with unions – my own and others – as much as with management.

Anyhow, the way the whole thing played out with Air Canada and seeing the public sentiment support for the workers reminded me of *another* lesson I learned from the best manager I ever knew at RPL (never managed me directly but probably taught me more than anyone – and I’ve reported to something like two dozen people in my 15 years at RPL and known probably a hundred different managers over the years.)

The context of this advice wasn’t really labour-related – RPL was moving towards a province-wide library consortium that was (and I believe continues to be) the largest library consortium in the world by number of individual sites (300+) and geographic area (the entire province).   (By comparison, Toronto has about 100 branches for five million people.)

I was in charge of organizing all the training for staff – frontlines, managers, support services – including our new ILS, our new program registration software (I coordinated a team of six fellow librarians to deliver this while I was in the room for support as we ran about 40 half day sessions for staff in RPL’s designated training room over a month.) and I also was the lucky guy who’d been sitting at the planning table so got to take on the end-of-day talk about the various policy changes this new consortium would require.

The analogy (I’m really good at analogies he says humbly) that I came up with was that it was like ten neighbours (at the time, Sask had 10 library “regions” including our two major cities and the northern region) who all lived on the same street deciding it would be better to all move into a giant mansion together.

But where they all got to have their own house rules previously, now they had to come together and decide on rules they would all follow – who would do the cleaning, how they would split the bills, who would pay for upgrades, how it would work if someone wanted to move out of the house and about a million other things.

Library workers generally don’t get a lot of “perks” but one that RPL had was that our patrons paid fines at the time but staff were exempt.  But with the change to the province wide system, the leaders had decided that some systems had fines, some didn’t but they would move towards everybody having fines – from the smallest 10 hours a week smalltown library to Regina and Saskatoon.  (I advocated for following the lead of the systems that *didn’t* have fines but there was no appetite for that at the time as it was seen as too much of a loss of revenue.  Of course, RPL is now fine free as are many systems, not just in Saskatchewan but across Canada and North America and I will eventually do a post about all the times I’ve been *way* ahead of the curve – something that’s been identified by more than one of those previous 24 supervisors/100s of managers as a huge (and rare) skill I have.).

Anyhow, it was also decided that the exception for staff would no longer exist.

And it was in a conversation with that wise manager who was advising me on the training needs from a management perspective – especially regarding policy – when she said “Don’t go to war with your staff because even if you win, you lose.”

What she meant by that was management was fully within their rights to make a policy change.  Absolutely.  But she had enough insight into human psychology and change management to know that this relatively minor change (most staff probably never even had to be fine free as they returned their books on time – they work *at* the library after all!) could be received poorly as “losing something” (even for those who weren’t going to lose anything!) and have unintended consequences.

And after doing a month of training where I talked about this policy and toed the company line to explain why this was happening (yeah, I can do that!), it was clear that the manager was right.

Before, generally, staff would check out their books and the organization could run reports to track how many fines were being waived/exempted from staff overdues.

But now, staff were coming up with ways to “get around” this new rule – extending due dates, backdating at check-in or even not checking out books at all – as just a few things I heard about.

Again, all of this was triggered by a policy change that *didn’t even matter* to the majority of staff.  But sometimes perception is reality and in the major move to a new province wide system, this major change had left staff unsettled, uncertain and small things like this were something to fixate on that they could retain some control and memory of “the way things used to be”.  (Weirdly, there’s a parallel to why people were hoarding toilet paper during the early days of Covid!)

So to bring it back to the lockout at Air Canada.  Managers often misunderstand the power they have.  They frequently think it’s absolute and they are in a position to tell people below them what to do and they’ll do it.  Simple.

What they don’t realise is the power actually lies with the people below – unionized or not – workers have power in various ways to react to decisions/policies/directives that managers make which they don’t agree with.  Everything from malicious compliance (see teachers going wild with the list of books they want to remove from library shelves in Alberta to protest a government directive) to quiet quitting to yes, strike actions.