Statut des travailleurs au sein de l’entreprise et protections juridiques en matière de mise à pied au Québec : une comparaison des secteurs syndiqués et non syndiqués chez le Centre de finition Laurent Beaudoin de Bombardier

Companies are continuously seeking to increase their flexibility to adjust to unpredictable market changes. However, this quest is generating both internal and external restructuring and is likely to lead to the distribution of the workforce according to the core-periphery continuum. Permanent and skilled workers are more often found at “core” positions inside companies and would generally be unionized. On the contrary, skilled or unskilled temporary workers, coming from subcontractors, are more often found at a peripherical position and would be less often unionized. Also, this quest of flexibility increases the use of temporary layoffs for economic reasons, if required by the situation. Even if labour law allows employers to rely on temporary layoffs, it also protects workers through two distinct sources of protection. The first, which is a legislative matter, applies to the individual employment relationship and dictates the minimum protective standards for workers. The second, which is more like a convention, concerns collective labour relations.  Concerning temporary layoffs, does labour law tend to draw workers protection from collective agreements? Would the law tend to facilitate economic growth and companies seek for flexibility? Would unionized workers at the core then have an advantage over non-unionized workers at the periphery? This paper aims to answer to the following research question: what protection the Quebec labour law can provide concerning temporary layoffs to core or non-core workers, depending if they are unionized or not?  A qualitative analysis of a Bombarbier plant (Centre de finition Laurent Beaudoin CFLB) and of two of its subcontractors, one non-specialized, unionized, Aramark Quebec Inc, and the other one specialized, non-uniozed, Elisan Technologies Inc., will help answer this question. A study of the 2009-2019 collective agreements of CFLB and Aramark and an analysis of the CFLB job offers in the last four months of 2019, will enable us to understand who are the unionized and non-unionized workers working for CFLB, and to categorize them in the core or peripherical CFLB continuum. Then, we will compare temporary lay-offs protections coming for collective agreements to the protections in the law, keeping in mind the core-periphery levels.  This paper is seeking to compare temporary layoffs protections between core CFLB workers and ‘peripherized’ CFLB workers in order to understand if there is a protection gap between those workers. Then, we will try to assess the differences between unionized and non-unionized workers concerning temporary layoffs: is there any difference between the two in term of protection? We will also examine the possible difference of legal remedy usable by workers depending whether it comes from a collective agreement or from the law.  The results show a core worker is more protected in case of a temporary layoff than a ‘peripherized’ worker only if the core worker is unionized. Unionized workers also have a better level of protection than non-unionized workers. The presence of a difference in the conclusion of a legal remedy drawed on collective agreements or Quebec labour law is still unclear. Indeed, no legal remedy have been initiated by CFLB workers. This also shows the limitation of our research work in studying a single company (CFLB).

Keyphrases: Aramark, syndicat, temporary layoff, core workers, peripheralized workers, unionized workers, non-unionized workers, union, collective agreement, labour law