The Next Negotiation Starts when the current deal is signed.

Would you build your own home?

This is the single largest investment that many people make, and labour makes up a large part of the price of the finished home. Why not do it yourself?

Contractors will charge between $50 to $150 per hour depending upon the trade and location and the general contractor will charge up to 20% markup on top of that.[1] If your wage is less than that, you should pick up the tools and do it yourself. Right?

We know that most of us should not try to save money by constructing our own home because we do not have the experience, the knowledge, nor the tools to do a high-quality and safe job.

We pay trades people to do the work that they do because they have specific training and years of experience doing this work. Value is the difference between what the product is worth and the cost to make it. We can also look at the price of risk reduction in this example. The risk of building a home that is unsafe is too great to leave it to the inexperienced and untrained.

So why do we believe that any smart person should negotiate a collective agreement even if they have no specialized training nor experience?

Some common misconceptions:

1.       Bargaining is bargaining. There is nothing special about collective agreements or labour relations.

 Although it is obvious that building a home is much more complex than simple DIY projects, it is not always obvious that bargaining a collective agreement is more technical and specialized than bargaining at the car dealership.

 Collective Agreements are regulated by either the Canada Labour Code or one of the provincial statutes. There are numerous regulations that apply to the primary legislation and there is a body of arbitral jurisprudence (like common law) and rulings provided by the Labour Relations Boards (Canada Industrial Relations Board in the federal jurisdiction) of each jurisdiction. This is an immensely complex legislative and precedent-driven quasi-legal environment with a specialized contract format and context. It is unique and unlike commercial agreements in many respects.

 2.       I am a good negotiator, I don’t do it often, but I know my business best.

 The largest unionized employers have dedicated negotiators and many collective agreements. In most relationships between a business and a national or international union, the Labour Representative is vastly more experienced in the collective bargaining process than the Human Resources leader. Union chief negotiators bargain with different employers many times per year. The average collective agreement settled in 2024 was 42 months in duration.[2]   This means that most HR professionals with one collective agreement will bargain every 4 years.

 Who is the skilled tradesperson at the negotiating table? The LR Practitioner working for either a union or the employer with many rounds of bargaining and specialized training in Labour Relations or Labour Law.

 3.       If we get it wrong this time, we can fix it in the next round of bargaining.

 Once errors are made and rights are ceded in a collective agreement, the next round of bargaining starts from where you left off. There is no such thing as a reset or a takeback without paying for it or entering conflict that could be costly. Since the employer is assumed to be the more sophisticated party to the agreement, any errors in drafting and format will benefit the less sophisticated party, the legal term for this is “contra proferentem”. You will not be able to easily argue that you did not mean to write the clause in the memorandum of settlement that way because you did not have experience or specialized knowledge.

 4.       What happens at the bargaining table does not matter because conflict will either happen or it will not regardless of what the negotiators say.

Professional labour relations practitioners know that bargaining starts as soon as the last agreement is signed. The expression of concerns and interests at the bargaining table is the product of what happened during the life of the current agreement. This does not mean that the outcome of bargaining is set before it starts. A skilled negotiator will employ the right tools to create value in a bargaining discussion such as: interest-based discussions, the marshalling of the issues in the most effective order, the use of problem-solving techniques, employing external data effectively, and competing on issues when required. Beware of tradespersons who have only one tool or do believe that there are possibilities for value in every conflict.

If you would like to talk about value creation and the difference that a specialist can make in your bargaining process, please reach out.

[1] Home Guide.com Retrieved on 23 FEB 2025. https://homeguide.com/costs/general-contractor-cost

[2] Stats Canada Website. Retrieved on 23 FEB 2025. https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/collective-bargaining-data/wages/wages-year-sector.html