Combatting Sexual Harassment through Collective Bargaining | WIP Seminar with Shannon Potter (VIRTUAL)

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Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 846 4472 5523
Passcode: wip

Abstract: Almost half of Canadian women experience sexual harassment in the workplace, yet many remain silent in part because their workplace seems to tolerate harassment, lacks effective mechanisms to address claims, or instills fear of reprisal for bringing a claim forward.  Unions, through their ability to negotiate and enforce collective agreements, are well positioned to address this issue. However, because provisions addressing sexual harassment may be contentious within membership, we hypothesize that both the presence of women in negotiations and the leadership role played by the parent (e.g., national or international) union are important in introducing and strengthening provisions on sexual harassment. Empirically, we draw on over 50,000 collective agreements filed in Ontario, Canada, to examine sexual harassment language in union contracts. We characterise the level of commitment to combatting sexual harassment, which ranges from measures that problematize sexual harassment to those that further build awareness of the issue and, finally, to clauses that outline how claims of sexual harassment are dealt with. We do not find that the presence of women in negotiations leads to greater adoption across revisions of a collective agreement.  We do find substantial variation across unions in the adoption of these provisions, and that unions who publicly campaign over the issue of sexual harassment are more likely to negotiate these provisions. We also find evidence that when it comes to provisions on sexual harassment, similar language is adopted within bargaining units of the same parent union, suggesting that parent unions exert influence in shaping how such provisions are framed.

Bio: Shannon Potter received her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, and her MA in Economics from the University of British Columbia. Her research on labor and gender includes projects on collective bargaining (e.g. strikes, conflict and union revitalization, sexual harassment) and organizational practices and gender inequalities in the workplace (e.g. pay gap, motherhood penalty, knowledge management). Before joining Columbia, her postdoctoral work at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations examined the impact of algorithmic management technologies on hospitality workers.