Could This One Change Give Vulnerable BC Workers More Power?

Oct. 10, 2025

Sectoral bargaining could level the playing field for today’s employees.

For more than 30 years, unions in B.C. have been fighting for sectoral bargaining — a process to bring workers and employers from similar businesses to a single negotiating table.

Instead of organizing hundreds of fast-food outlets, for example, one model of sectoral bargaining could require representatives of the businesses and workers to negotiate a framework agreement for the industry.

Employers say it would create instability and hurt small businesses and the economy.

But unions and labour researchers say it would let precarious workers access unions, reflect the realities of a changed economy and level the playing field for employees.

Last year both sides brought their concerns to a three-person panel appointed to review the B.C. Labour Relations Code and propose changes on a variety of issues, including sectoral bargaining.

The government closed public consultation on their report this month and started considering the recommended changes.

As the province reviews feedback, unions are urging the government to create a new commission to consider sectoral bargaining in British Columbia.

“There is no reason to wait,” said Alicia Massie, director of organizing with the BC Federation of Labour. “This could be a defining moment in our province.”

What is sectoral bargaining?

Existing labour legislation makes it difficult for workers in fragmented, spread-out workplaces — like cleaners, fast-food workers and app-based drivers — to unionize and negotiate for better working conditions, said Véronique Sioufi, a researcher with the BC Society for Policy Solutions.

Current bargaining laws were created and developed in the early 20th century, she said. They require unions to organize individual work sites and were designed for labour relations between an employer and a large group of employees at a single location.

“With strength in numbers, workers could get together and negotiate with that one employer,” Sioufi said. “But there were always some people excluded.”

That model didn’t work for employees in smaller groups, she said, who have limited impact when they walk off the job, giving them less leverage to negotiate better working conditions.

In-home care workers, for example, often work alone.

“That’s a very precarious way to work, because you’re sometimes living in the workspace, your visa is controlled by a family, and you have absolutely no recourse to action and no real model to organize,” Sioufi said.

Fast-food companies often employ about a dozen workers to operate individual restaurants.

“You can put all this effort into organizing one place, and it’s really easy for big companies like Walmart or McDonald’s to close that place down and open up somewhere else,” Sioufi said.

Employees’ ability to organize deteriorated further in the 1990s and early 2000s as businesses started using more temporary workers, contract workers and subcontractors. In the past decade, the rise of remote work and app-based gig work added to the challenge of organizing workers.

Enter sectoral bargaining, which would let workers from a whole sector negotiate better wages and working conditions.

Some public sector unions — like the BC Nurses’ Union or the BC Teachers’ Federation — have already achieved sectoral bargaining, negotiating with an association of employers across multiple workplaces.

But labour groups have been pushing for the provincial government to update its labour laws to consider sectoral bargaining legislation for the private sector.

A race to the bottom

Service Employees International Union Local 2 has been pushing for sectoral bargaining in the private sector.

Massie, with the BC Federation of Labour, previously worked on the union’s sectoral bargaining campaign. It took years of difficult work to organize the highly distributed workforce, she said.

She said a larger cleaning company might hire only a handful of janitors to clean an office building. The industry is notoriously precarious. Labour is often a cleaning business’s largest cost, so companies will often cut wages and benefits in an effort to outbid one another for contracts.

“There’s not enough collective power among those small workplaces to really be able to have a fair chance against some of these multimillion transnational companies,” Massie said. “It’s a bit ridiculous to imagine three janitors going up against these employers in negotiations.”

The union has established a citywide bargaining table for cleaners in Vancouver, which brings 11 employers to a single table to negotiate collective agreements for more than 3,000 workers.

Massie said the union pushed several major employers to come to a single negotiating table. Many employers agreed to participate because it made negotiations stabler and simpler, she said.

“It’s resource-efficient for the employers and for the union, because it means you only have to negotiate one time,” Massie said. “It also means that you’re raising standards for all these workers.”

Citywide negotiations in Vancouver started in 2023 and marked a step toward sectoral bargaining for cleaners.

“We’re just all holding hands and jumping off the cliff together, which is great when it works, but it’s tough without a formal framework,” she said.

That year, approximately 2,500 cleaners at eight employers in Metro Vancouver got collective agreements at a single bargaining table.

Two years later, the citywide negotiating table has grown to include about 500 more cleaners at three more employers. This year is the second time the companies have agreed to participate in citywide bargaining, and negotiations ended with contracts ratified July 6.

A model from abroad

The BC Federation of Labour is calling for the province to establish a commission to address the decades-old push for sectoral bargaining.

“Currently, many workers face huge structural barriers that keep them from organizing,” said federation president Sussanne Skidmore. “There needs to be new ways of bargaining that let workers exercise their fundamental right to join a union.”

The federation, which represents workers from more than 50 B.C. unions, urged the government during last year’s labour code review to consider a model like New Zealand’s Fair Pay Agreements, a sectoral bargaining model implemented by the New Zealand government in 2022.

If a union or group of workers could secure the support of either 1,000 workers or 10 per cent of the workforce in a specific industry, the group would be eligible for a fair pay agreement.

The process would bring workers, employers, unions and other stakeholders to a single table to agree on minimum pay and employment standards for all workers in a single industry.

While the agreement would set the baseline working conditions, individual work sites could still unionize and negotiate for better working conditions.

“It wasn’t a mechanism to try and replace normal collective bargaining; it was to create a floor to result in the better pay and conditions that people really need and deserve,” said Sam Gribben, lead communications officer with the New Zealand union E Tū.

E Tū, which represents more than 55,000 members as the country’s largest private sector union, applied for a fair pay agreement for janitors.

Gribben said many cleaners are migrant workers, who are harder to organize. He said many are contractor workers, employed in small groups by multinational companies, like in B.C.

“We see this race to the bottom where companies are forced to compete with each other on the lowest costs,” Gribben said.

Giving cleaners the chance to negotiate a better sector-wide minimum wage could protect against that downward pressure on pay, Gribben said.

“Instead of being racing to the very bottom of the bare minimums that are required under law, which would inevitably end up with workers being paid under the living wage, a new wage and a new set of conditions would be set for that whole industry,” he said.

But after a general election in October 2023, a new coalition took power in New Zealand’s government.

It reversed many of the changes made by the previous administration and repealed the Fair Pay Agreements system in December 2023.

A 30-year debate

The B.C. government has been hearing about sectoral bargaining for more than 30 years. In 1992 a labour code review panel included employer-side lawyer Tom Roper, union-side lawyer John Baigent and labour mediator Vince Ready.

Baigent and Ready proposed a sectoral bargaining model, which would give a union a multi-employer, multi-location contract if it organized workers at several workplaces within the same industry.

After unions reach a certain threshold of support, they could avoid further certification votes and ratification disputes at distributed workplaces. It would make it easier for franchise and contract workers to unionize and get collective agreements.

Roper, the lawyer representing employer interests, dissented from the recommendation.

The model was never adopted. More than 30 years later, sectoral bargaining still hasn’t made it past the labour code review.

‘We have the solution just waiting’

Last year’s review panel — including lawyers Sandra Banister and Lindsie Thomson, representing union and employer interests respectively, and chair Michael Fleming, a mediator-arbitrator and former associate chair of the BC Labour Relations Board — detailed the dilemma in their report.

The panel considered submissions from stakeholders including workers, employers, industry groups and unions.

Unions strongly support sectoral bargaining, according to the report. Some told the panel that sectoral bargaining would make it easier for precarious workers to organize and allow a union to negotiate working conditions for an entire sector. This, according to unions, would improve industrial stability.

Employers strongly oppose it. Bridgitte Anderson, president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, told the panel in a letter that sectoral bargaining would “shift the balance in labour relations” and challenge small and medium-sized businesses.

The panel wrote in its recommendation that employers said it would leave many businesses unable to survive, hurt the economy and have a destabilizing impact on labour relations.

The panel ultimately decided sectoral bargaining was beyond its mandate.

Still, the panel wrote that “given the legitimate concerns raised in many of the submissions and presentations, particularly from domestic worker organizations, we believe it is necessary to make a recommendation.”

It recommended the government create councils to review the working standards and conditions for domestic, agricultural, food delivery and ride-hail workers.

The panel submitted its recommendations to the government on Aug. 31, 2024.

The province released the panel’s recommendations last June and was accepting public feedback on the report until Sept. 19.

Now, the provincial government is considering feedback on sectoral bargaining.

The B.C. Ministry of Labour did not make a representative available for interview. In an email to The Tyee, a ministry spokesperson said sectoral bargaining is a “complex issue,” and the government is considering the public’s feedback on the labour code review recommendations.

“The B.C. government is committed to a labour relations framework that fosters long-term economic stability and ensures workers have the right to bargain collectively.”

But the BC Federation of Labour’s Massie is urging the province to act on sectoral bargaining.

“We’re really reaching a point at which it is impossible to ignore,” Massie said. “Every single person, every British Columbian, knows work is not the same. We need a different model.”

Massie said there’s no better time to consider a new way to collectively bargain.

“We have the solution just waiting,” Massie said. “All we have to do is reach out and grab it. We can’t wait another 30 years.”

[Top photo: Sectoral bargaining would see employers and workers negotiate basic conditions across an industry, like fast food or home care. Photo via Shutterstock.]