#tenant union

[smoking-witch]

Reframing common employer phrases into plainspeak

Laziness = poor ppl resting/playing, ever

Working vacation = rich ppl getting paid to rest/play

Rage applying = looking for a better job

Rage quitting = leaving toxic job/boss

Quiet quitting = refusing to do free labor

Blackmail = employees leveraging anything

Insubordination = talking about pay at work

Company culture = guilt trips & pizza as pay

Morality clause = make us look bad, get fired

"We're like family" = "we ask for favors, then never pay you back"

"We expect everyone to pitch in" = "we expect you to do free labor"

"HR is here to help you" = "HR is here to stop you from suing us"

Thx for coming to my TedTalk

[chronicallycouchbound]

Rent strikes aren’t always an option.

I live in an area that has some decent tenant’s rights laws, and it even protects things like when your landlord won’t fix major issues in your apartment, you can withhold rent until it is fixed.

But since I use government aid vouchers to pay my rent, I can’t participate in rent strikes/rent withholding.

My apartment has some pretty serious issues: broken windows, overhead lights out, a fairly large crack in the floor next to my toilet, the shower almost always only sprays scalding water, all my appliances break frequently, the electrical system is fucked, my door lock doesn’t function properly, and I could keep going. I can’t do anything but call my maintenance guy and hope they eventually get around to it. These problems have been going on for years.

My housing is nearly unlivable, at best it’s unsafe, and there’s no end in sight. I had to stop living at my apartment for several months because of a combination of factors (I’m also being stalked by two separate people) but nothing changed when I went back. There’s no other wheelchair accessible ADA apartments available, and I’m not a high priority for other apartments anyways because I’m not currently legally homeless.

I’ve been considering signing off of my lease and sleeping outside again because it would put me at the top of the wait lists for new housing opportunities, and I qualify for other services. I’ve spent over half of my life homeless so I know what it entails.

And what’s fucked up is that this is something a rent strike might not even fix. My apartment is in high demand (less than 1% of housing is ADA accessible, wait lists in my state are about 5 years long, I’m allowed to break my lease at any time because they have a long line of people who need apartments) so there’s basically nothing I can do.

We need systemic changes.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The Kingston Community Legal Clinic is warning residents after a Landlord and Tenant Board adjudicator decided a landlord was wrongfully attempting to evict their tenant.

“The landlord seeks possession of the rental unit so his mother can live there,” adjudicator Laura Hartslief wrote in her June 28 decision on the fate of Jason Martin’s home in the basement unit of 151 Fraser St. “I am not satisfied that it is more likely than not that she genuinely intends to live there.”

Jordan Morelli, a physics professor at Queen’s University who owns the rental unit, said he is devastated by Hartslief’s decision.

“It’s a complete outrage that we’ve lost this thing because I’ve been trying to get my parents here for two years,” Morelli said. “I really want my parents to be living in there.”

John Done of the Kingston Community Legal Clinic represented Martin at the Landlord and Tenant Board hearing. He said his clinic has seen a significant increase in evictions for landlords to renovate units or to use for their own use — which is what Morelli applied for. In many of those cases, but not all, landlords evict a tenant who is paying a lower rent, renovate the unit, and rent it out again for sometimes double the cost.

Done said that, at first, Martin was resigned to moving out, but when Done saw Martin’s case, he urged him to push back against Morelli.

“These are situations we see all of the time in a Landlord’s Own Use application, and our view is (that) once we start putting these under the microscope, a lot of them don’t have merit,” Done said. “Once Mr. Martin said he would accept our help, then there were, indeed, some things that sort of leaped off the page. … There were the hallmarks of these (types of) landlords’ applications that I don’t think they could show good faith.”

Martin, who on Wednesday said he still couldn’t believe he was successful, said Done worked wonders. Martin said, the stress of the case, which was drawn out over two years due to a scheduling overflow caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has caused Martin to lose five jobs over the two years.

“When I got that decision, I actually had to leave work,” Martin, who has been working steadily at a local fishing tackle manufacturing company since the end of May, said excitedly. “I couldn’t believe it, and I was overwhelmed. I was shaking, I couldn’t talk, my brain went to mush. I’m very happy with the decision.”

Morelli owns a total of 10 units within five properties in Kingston. He said he wanted to use Martin’s apartment as a new home for his mother, Henriette Morelli, who currently lives in a two-bedroom condominium with her husband, Edwin Morelli, in Saskatoon.”

- Steph Crosier, “Tenant wins at board hearing,” Kingston Whig-Standard. Jul 11, 2022. This was a front page story in the print edition.

///

We are happy that this story is now out in the open for all to see. It won't be the last word on the matter, that's for sure. But it clearly demonstrates why Queen's University professor and faculty association president (as well as former president of the Kingston NDP riding association) Jordan Morelli's N12 eviction notice was thrown out at the LTB. In our opinion, what this stories reveals is that Morelli is willing to exploit the housing crisis for his own financial gain. 

Prior to this instance, there was two previous times where he claimed family members were moving in to units when they never did. He paid these tenants a meagre $3000, money which they quickly burned through with their rent prices hundreds of dollars a month higher. Meanwhile, he charged higher rents to the people moving in: one unit went from $409 to $1150 a month, while another went from $670 to $1200. He made that money back within months. 

Morelli wants to claim he is a victim in all this, and actually goes so far as saying that the landlord tenant laws works well for tenants. But the facts speak for themselves: The LTB rejected his case because they do not believe his story. Additionally, close to 90 percent of tenants at the LTB have no legal representation, and if it weren't for KUT and KCLC supporting Morelli's tenant, Morelli would most likely have someone living in Martin's unit's at double the rent. 

Tenants can win when they stand up and fight. Get to know your neighbours and organize with them! In Martin's case, former tenants stood with Martin to explain what had happened to them after moving out. This sort of solidarity led to Martin staying in his apartment at a rent price he can afford. KUT stands with tenants across the city and will do what we can to help.

- official statement of the Kingston / Katarokwi Union of Tenants, July 12, 2022 (Martin is a member)

/// The tenant union had helped several other tenants of Morelli, who had also been told they would have to move out of his own properties for the same reason of family need, and the communication between tenants allowed them to learn he was using the same line on several tenants - allowing the tenants to resist his efforts or negotiate for better accommodation to leave. Martin’s is the first official victory against this particular landlord, but likely won’t be the last. Of course, Morelli is a self-pitying landlord in all of this, being quoted in the article as saying: “Somehow I’m the bad guy in all of this; they’re trying to paint me as a villain.”  Morelli is hardly the worst landlord in Kingston, Ontario, and nowhere near as powerful as a rental company like Homestead. His tactics are typical of landlords everywhere. The reason why he acts the way he does, and can act the way he does, is at base a structural issue, in which housing is an investment and a means of accumulation rather than a basic right. But Kingston is a smallish town, with a proportionately smallish, vague, fragmented, and often dysfunctional ‘left’, so Morelli’s role has been controversial and increasingly divisive. Notably, it was discovered by the tenant union that his mother, who he has been claiming he was going to move into one of these vacated units, is a retired university professor who likely doesn’t want to live in a tiny basement apartment! 

As the press release from KUT notes, Morelli is a major player in the local political scene, as former riding president for the federal NDP, as secretary of the Kingston and District Labour Council (and had the temerity to send this article to other council members, even after the Council passed a pro-tenant motion!) and at Queen’s University, where he is a professor and head of the faculty association. In those roles, he is a bad faith opponent of tenant rights, student activism, grassroots unionism, and the left-wing of the NDP (as well as the small, overlapping and fractious autonomist, anarchist, communist and decolonial groups in the area). For instance, this was his response to the Ontario government, controlled by Conservatives, capping rent increases!

If there was any justice in the world or social democracy and labour unionism was not so pathetically degenerated, this kind of coverage should get him kicked out of the KDLC or NDP.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Report from the Montreal Autonomous Tenant Union (MATU) on a recent march against ongoing threats of eviction.

With a strong crowd for an 8am start time, the Montreal Autonomous Tenant Union (MATU) moved through the streets to the Housing Tribunal, the administrative apparatus ordering hundreds of evictions every year. After some chants and an anti-capitalist Christmas carol, a handful of militants entered the tribunal, while others maintained a banner wall outside.

The union was prevented from entering all at once what are supposedly public audiences to witness the eviction proceedings. A conflict with the security and two police officers was resolved when only three union members were allowed to enter the hearing. The bias in the courtroom was clear on the part of the judge, and weighted towards the landlord. Once we got up to leave, security pushed us out of the lobby and the doors to the courthouse were locked behind us.

However, the landlord, Satish Mantha, and judge clearly got the message from the demonstration. Tenants are watching, and our union is not going to sit by idly and let an eviction take place.

[millionmovieproject]

[polyamorouspunk]

Resources on Tenant Unions put together by KC Tenants

Link

[anti-workshop]

Being a worker-owner of a radical, union screen printing cooperative is pretty great sometimes. Shout out to the Autonomous Tenants Union for the poster.

We’re finishing up run #1 of anti-workshop orders next week, then we ship them out via USPS. If you provided an email when you purchased, we’ll send you a tracking number.

Buy radical shirts here and support striking workers!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Housing is a labor issue

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class

The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:

https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/

She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/

She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079

UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.

As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:

https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46

While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.

Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":

https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf

LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:

https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf

And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law

UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.

Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf

It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"

Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:

https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/

Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/

Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."

The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy

Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/

States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4

New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:

https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/

New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/

The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

[wack-ashimself]

'Residential Council' As if we all didn't IMMEDIATELY see thru that shit.

They're getting smarter on ways to control poor people.

Low income housing. Want to form a council to help with building activities (holidays, bingo, decorations, contests, etc)

NONE of which is really chosen or asked by the people (3 spots still open-6 floors of people, and they still can't fill it).

It's formed cuz of 2 things.

1-the main office is supposed to do this. They always have. They don't want to. So a job THEY ARE PAID TO DO (fairly not well, and def overworked) they are pushing onto us of the building to do (in which we do not get paid).

2-it's to stop ANY kind of tenant union. This nips it RIGHT in the bud. Give a few people who want power a little of it, they feel like they are doing something, when they are just working for the owners of the building..

No joke, I laughed OUT LOUD loudly when I saw this. And the few I asked about this laughed too. We ain't that fucking stupid to do your job for you.

[whetstonefires]

Underrated thing about The Crow (1994) is that ultimately it's a film about a guy utterly wrecking his shitty landlord.

Like yeah, Top Dollar is a spooky casually homicidal goth mob boss who ordered the brutal murders of the protagonist and his fiancee, and we get the whole classic revenge spree film slaughtering your way through the criminals to get to the top guy formula.

(With in addition to the whole revenant bit the interesting variant that Eric isn't even actually going for the guy at the top, he just interjects himself into the proceedings lmao.)

But also he's a slumlord, and the reason they died was Shelly formed a tenant's union in response to wrongful eviction proceedings. And Top Dollar would rather have his building sitting empty than put up with that shit.

Which will make it very funny if the remake that got greenlit for next year is deep-sixed by the studios' deranged collective refusal to come to terms with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.

[drumlincountry]

FINALLY joined a trade union. Please clap.

[mobydyke]

comrade rose tyler..... travelling space and time with her IWW card checking in with workers of all types asking what are your pronouns, how are you being treated, have you ever considered organizing your workplace? i just know she hands out copies of kropotkin and marx everywhere she goes before she realizes they're too earth-centric so she puts together an interplanetary team and they rewrite the bread book to have more universal relevance. she goes down as one of the greatest union organizers and leftist theorists in history but because her direct influence spans tens of thousands of years, she's heavily mythologized as well. she becomes an icon. in heavily policed workplaces, asking someone if they know rose tyler is asking if they're union-friendly. union leaders begin to use flowers as secret codenames to protect their identities and families from retaliatory action. rose tyler physically does not exist in this universe anymore but her legacy is bigger than she'll ever know

[strongintherealgay]

my property manager: won't maintain the laundry machines so my clothes never dry, won't even replace the broken garbage can they took out of the laundry room, increases the amount of quarters you need to pay to do laundry, won't do a simple repair for the baseboard by our stairs for months, replaced the back doors to our building with ones that don't fit properly, inspect our apartments thrice within the past two months, and won't replace the windows so all of our electricity bills increase drastically during winters

also my property manager: we're going to increase the rent on your tiny studio by over $50 we prommy we don't like doing this :( it's just expensive to take care of your building :( :( yes the government gives us money because this is building is affordable housing but we need to bleed you dry or else we'll die :( :( :(

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

[AL: Great interview with members of Rent Strike Bargain in BC about tenant unionism and collective struggle for tenants’ rights. As an early member of a tenant union in Ontario, I can’t recommend this kind of organizing enough - fantastic read.]

1. How many people rent their homes in British Columbia? How many people rent in Metro Vancouver? Are there figures on how many union members are renting? How many non-union workers are renting?

As of 2018, there were 600,000 renters in BC representing about one-third of all households, a number that rises substantially every year. The figure does not include illegal suites. In 2011, 136,135 (51%) of the 264,575 private households in the City of Vancouver were renter households.

Since we are a labour-tenant campaign, focusing on union members who rent is important to us as a group. We were unable to find published statistics on how many renters in British Columbia are unionized workers, so we developed our Workers Who Rent survey and distributed it to several unions in the province. Of the 833 responses we received, 93.5% (779) of respondents identified themselves as renters and around 60% of respondents provided a labour union affiliation.

2. What rent controls exist in BC and how are landlords working around these controls?

British Columbia currently has rent control tied to the tenant, and not to the unit. This means that if the same person stays in a unit, the rent is only allowed to be increased once a year up to a maximum percentage set by the province. However, once the tenant leaves the dwelling, the landlord can rent the same unit to someone else at any rate they choose. The lack of vacancy control – rent control tied to the unit, rather than the tenant – has created a perverse incentive for landlords across British Columbia to force out long-term tenants who have affordable or lower than market rents so that they can raise rents beyond what the current rent control regulations allow.

Tenant groups, unsurprisingly, have a history of organizing for vacancy control at the provincial level. More recently, the province ignored the recommendations of tenant groups across the province in 2018, when the BC Rental Housing Taskforce decided against recommending vacancy control and eliminating this loophole. Instead, the Task Force declared their intention to maintain rents tied to the tenant and not to the unit, signalling their alliance with landlords. Following this decision, the government made things worse by allowing a landlord to apply to the RTB to increase rent beyond the annual maximum allowed when they have completed necessary repairs to a rental unit. This has raised a huge concern for tenants in that the longer a tenant stays in a unit, the more an incentive exists for a landlord to find a way to evict them. Empowering landlords with the legal ability to exceed the maximum annual increase by removing a tenant or applying to the RTB for an exception has weakened housing security for renters across the province.

In BC we have few unfilled units in the market (aka a “low vacancy rate”) so more renters are competing for housing. This incentivizes landlords to evict and increase rent to the maximum number those tenants are willing to pay to secure decent shelter. A February 2022 study by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) determined the vacancy rate in Vancouver was the lowest in Canada at 1.2 percent. A previous survey published in September of 2021 out of the University of British Columbia, Understanding Evictions in Canada through the Canadian Housing Survey, found that Vancouver had the highest rate of evictions in the country.

We urgently need Real Rent Control (vacancy control) for working-class people to survive in this environment. A recent report by the CMHC, which measured average rent levels in Canadian cities and compared them to average hourly wage earnings from Statistics Canada, found that an individual earning an average wage would have to work 198 hours a month to afford the average rent of a 2 bedroom apartment in Vancouver. In Victoria, a worker needed to work 163 hours. In both cities, an individual must work more than full-time hours (defined in the CMHC report as 150 hour per month) in order to afford housing.  Wages are simply not keeping up with skyrocketing rents. Collective bargaining, which has helped elevate wages for workers, also must be accessed to empower workers to reduce their rents.

Our campaign for tenant collective bargaining rights comes after years of tenants organizing for vacancy control in British Columbia. Through past experiences, tenant groups have learned that the political class in Victoria has made it clear that it will not protect tenants by closing the vacancy loophole and otherwise protecting against ever-increasing rental rates. If the government refuses to act, another way to achieve vacancy control and lower rents is by tenants bargaining for vacancy control in a collective lease.

3. What is the role of the RTB? Is it working for tenants? What is RSB’s perspective on this body?

The Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) is a quasi-judicial tribunal that administers and enforces BC’s rental legislation, the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA). It adjudicates disputes between landlords and tenants, such as wrongful evictions. Like other tribunals, it is intended to be easy for lay litigants to access without a lawyer, and to allow for quick decision making. Tenants who wish to make a legal challenge against their landlord regarding their tenancy are, for the most part, limited to the RTB.

In BC, the RTB is highly criticized by tenants, tenants’ groups, and tenants’ advocates, and is perceived as providing an unfair process that leads to unpredictability in how a dispute will ultimately be resolved. Unpredictability in the outcome of complaints tends to dissuade tenants from seeking to enforce their rights. RTB arbitrators are employees hired by the Director of the RTB to make decisions on the Director’s behalf, which makes their “appointments” less transparent and more bureaucratic. Unlike judges, arbitrators are not bound by precedent, which makes decision-making inconsistent and outcomes difficult to predict. Tenant hearings are also not transcribed or recorded, which makes it very difficult to seek judicial review where an arbitrator has acted unfairly.

The RTB also has a poor track record when it comes to protecting tenants’ rights. For some time, the province has been collecting data that tracked how many RTB disputes were settled, won by the tenant, or won by the landlord. Through FOI requests by tenant groups, the data revealed that the majority of disputes between tenants and landlords are settled–but out of the disputes that proceeded to a hearing, the vast majority were determined in favour of the landlord. Of great concern to RSB is that the government appears to have stopped collecting information about how many disputes are settled and how many are rendered in favour of the landlord versus the tenant (see here). You can read more about our opinions on the RTB in our August article for The Georgia Straight, “The BC NDP and [RTB] are failing renters.”

4. What are the major factors driving up rents? What percentage of rents are being pocketed by landlords, as opposed to covering maintenance costs, taxes, staffing, etc?

If housing is continued to be viewed as a for-profit commodity rather than a human right, rents will continue to rise, and tenants will continue to face displacement. Housing has been marketed as an attractive investment, which means that the people developing and renting it out are incentivized to spend as little money as possible and to make as much profit as possible. Elites in Ottawa and Victoria have let this problem get so out of hand, that much of the economy is reliant on land tax revenue and the speculative value of property owned by the government–see, for example, how the province has balanced its most recent budget here.

In a further tip of the hat to landlords and developers, the provincial government has embraced an approach to housing construction that focuses on deregulation in the belief that this will promote development and increased supply of housing. Increased housing supply will not fix our affordability problem and has so far only further enriched an elite class of property owners who have a clear interest in increasing the cost of housing as much as possible. Patrick Condon is a scholar at UBC who has written extensively criticising the idea that simply increasing supply leads to increased affordability. You can read his article here.

In addition, as mentioned, there is an economic incentive for landlords to evict tenants in order to raise rents. A common tactic that is used by landlords to accelerate this process is through deferring regular maintenance. This simultaneously makes the units less liveable and more unsafe for current tenants. Manufacturing emergencies to force a “renoviction” is an easy pretence for landlords to displace long-term tenants, and once the repairs are complete the rents are raised substantially. As we also mentioned earlier, the BC government provides another tool for landlords to use to raise rents without eviction too; by making necessary repairs and applying to the RTB for an order to increase the rent. Renters should not be responsible to pay for these repairs or for maintaining the value of the building for the landlord–that is their job to do with the money they already collect from us on a monthly basis. Further, we see government approval of increased rents for necessary repairs as a means for landlords to effectively evict those tenants who cannot afford an increase and will have to move.

We also simply do not know what percentage of a tenant’s rent is being pocketed by landlords as opposed to covering maintenance costs, taxes, and staffing because this information is not publicly available nor is it available to individual tenants. However, a framework allowing for tenant collective bargaining should allow for access to such information to encourage good-faith bargaining, which exists in labour collective bargaining.

5. RSB’s prime objective is to win collective bargaining rights for tenants in British Columbia. What brought RSB members to these conclusions about the need for tenant collective bargaining?

When Rent Strike Bargain was first established, the goal was to run a campaign to change the law and to build long-term capacity for the renters’ movement. We had recently gone through a massive change in provincial power, moving from the BC Liberals to the BC NDP, and many renters experienced the shocking realization and disappointment that we had no friends in government after all. So, we wanted to come up with a campaign focussed on empowering renters to take control of their homes.

Some of our early members came across the article Tenant Organizing and the Campaign for Collective Bargaining Rights in British Columbia, 1968–75 by Paul S. Jon, which described the BC tenants’ movement and a campaign for collective bargaining in the late sixties to mid-seventies. What was so powerful about that campaign was that its ends (winning collective bargaining rights for renters) were also its means (organizing for power through tenant unions). However, the BC renters’ movement was different then, and more rural tenant unions already existed. Connecting with this history, we were inspired to create our own three-pillar platform for empowering tenants to act collectively to protect their homes:

Fostering Tenant-Labour Solidarity

Seeding new Tenant Unions across the province

Achieving Collective Bargaining Rights for Tenants

Many of our members have backgrounds in both tenant and labour organizing. In organizing the campaign, we found that there was quite a bit of interest in exploring how these two working-class movements could mutually strengthen each other to pursue their own goals. What we realized in planning the campaign was that a provincial drive to start up new tenant unions would need provincial partners that were democratic and led by local members. While some tenant unions have vanished over the years, labour unions still exist in even the smallest of towns and have helped us to get in touch with working-class people who already had some idea, through participation in labour unions, of what collective bargaining and organizing could do for renters.

- “The challenges of tenant unionism in British Columbia,” Rank and File. March 18, 2022.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

always on my organizing grind gonna get my building unionized

[bisexualamy]

favorite thing about organizing is that it works and you win things for your union worst thing about organizing is you have to pretend to be grateful for things that have always been basic things you were owed from the start