On April 28, the 2200 employees of Québec's biggest cable distributor, the quasi-monopoly Vidéotron, were voting 99,1% in favour of a strike due to begin on May 8th.

However, on that date, Vidéotron announced the beginning of a lock-out and at the same time the beginning of a tense conflict that could last for a long time, according to the two parties involved. The union is the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the employer Vidéotron, a subsidiary of Québecor World.

Vidéotron's request of 30 million$ in monetary concessions from its workers, such as unpaid overtime, is at the heart of the conflict. Other means aiming to reduce labour costs while increasing the volume of their stockholders' wallets, such as outsourcing are also hotly disputed issues.

But despite their strong opposition to outsourcing, on May 14, Vidéotron's 664 technicians were informed that they had just had themselves and their services sold to the outsourcing agency Alentron, a subsidiary of Entourage Solutions.

And all the while it is outsourcing (a nice word for "scabbing") that has allowed Vidéotron to continue its operations, in a rather slipshod fashion and despite widespread service interruptions. It has also allowed them to save on labour costs at the same time. According to Québecor World, they will pay an outsourced technician over 40% less than one of its own technicians for the same residential installation. According to Vidéotron's collective agreement, only 15% of their labour can be outsourced, but during a "lock-out", all work is done by cheaper outsourced labour.

Vidéotron insists that these measures are necessary to allow them to compete, although it is unknown with whom they which to compete.

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What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing is when a company divorces itself completely from its workforce by contracting a third party agency which sells them services. In other words the outsourcing agency, which is just another company that does nothing but "personnel management", places itself between those who do the work and those who profit from it, and so the workers' salary is passed on from the first company to the outsourcing company (and sometimes to more than one outsourcing company) and then what is left is given to the workers in the form of wages.

The outsourcing agency exists to shield the corporation from the "human resources" it seeks to exploit in as inexpensive a manner as possible, and with as little accountability as is legally allowable.

Big corporations often employ outsourcing to dismantle their employees' unions. To do so, the company simply stops hiring but instead purchases "service contracts" from third party agencies who busy themselves with the recruiting of the new workforce which are employed by the agency and not the corporation. This way the company can replace its unionized workforce with a non-unionized workforce employed by the agency. Sometimes the company skips this step and directly transfers its employees to an outsourcing agency.

This in turn leads to job instability, because a service contract sold to one agency is a temporary arrangement that can very easily be shuffled around to lower wages and labour costs.

In short, outsourcing leads to the worsening of working conditions for working people everywhere.