Brentwood Town Centre Zellers employees are worried Target Canada will not honour their union agreement when it takes over the location.
The U.S.-based retail company is taking over more than 100 Zellers stores throughout Canada and turning them into Target locations starting in 2013, including the two Zellers locations in Burnaby.
The 120 workers at the Burnaby Zellers are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, Local 1518.
The union has taken the succession issue to the Labour Relations Board, according to Andy Neufeld, spokesperson for the local.
"On Oct. 4, we sent Target a letter saying the collective agreement had expired and we looked forward to setting up negotiations to renew the agreement with them and hoped to have a cooperative, positive experience," he said.
The company responded by telling the union it did not recognize the employees' successorship, according to Neufeld.
"We, at that point, filed a formal claim with the Labour Relations Board to have a successorship applied to the collective agreement that exists for the Zellers employees so that the new owners will then have to honour the terms of that collective agreement," he said.
The issue of successorship is well established in B.C.'s labour laws, according to Neufeld.
The union is concerned Zellers will lay off the employees who will then have to reapply to Target, he said.
"A lot of them have had fairly long career with Zellers, and we think this is only just that the investment they made into that job be protected," Neufeld said, "because they are operating under a collective agreement."
The employees' collective agreement expired on March 31, but according to B.C. labour laws, the agreement remains in effect until a new one is negotiated, he explained.
"I think there's real concern about what the future holds," he said regarding the employees.
Lisa Gibson, the communications contact for Target Canada, did not respond to repeated email and phone requests for a comment on the issue before press time.
Gibson has, however, told other media outlets, such as The Vancouver Sun, via email that the company views this as a real estate transaction, not a business acquisition.
Mark Leier, director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University, couldn't speak specifically about the Zellers employees' issue but said real estate deals and weaker succession rights can adversely affect workers.
"One of the things we forget is that even places like McDonald's are also functioning as real estate companies," he said, adding the company owns the land and franchises the stores out.
"These are very complicated organizations that are making money from all kinds of ways and directions," Leier said.
And these transactions can have a negative impact on unionized employees, he added.
"The difficulty here, in part, is that union successor rights have been significantly weakened over the last 30 years or so," Leier explained, adding the ability to buy a company as real estate rather than as a business further weakens successor rights - those protecting workers if another company buys their employer out.
"It is a tricky complex world out there, and workers are usually the ones who pay the price for that," he said.
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