By Edward Lander and Hailey Ford
From the time he was 16 years old, working as an entertainment technician at Canada’s Wonderland had been Nigel Campbell’s entire summer. He and a team of about a dozen worked tirelessly six days a week and seven hours a day, managing some of the theme park’s productions and performances from behind the scenes. Campbell said an appetite for unionization had been brewing in his team since 2019 but grew even stronger during the pandemic. He was paid $18.50 per hour before the unionization, a rate he said didn’t reflect the hard work that the team of technicians was putting in.
“That feeling was in the air of ‘we can be treated better,’” said the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) performance production alumnus. “It’s a challenging job. And then when you look at your paycheck at the end of those two weeks, you’re like, ‘I really could be doing something else.’”
Campbell knew that many other entertainment technicians in Canada were unionized, largely with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 58, the union representing hundreds of Toronto’s stagehands. He also knew something else from his chats with Justin Antheunis, the president of Local 58: workers at Wonderland had attempted to organize back in 1989 and failed.
Antheunis had spoken about finding work through the union as a guest speaker in Campbell’s classes. If Campbell was going to make this happen, Antheunis was the person to speak with.
“To circle back [to Wonderland] and give it another try would be kind of a cherry on top,” said Antheunis. He was in full support and met with Campbell to guide him in his pursuit.
As of 2023, just over a quarter of Ontarian workers are covered by unions, a rate that had been steadily falling for decades but is starting to rise again. Some say the youth are partially to thank.
“That’s the power of young workers coming together. They see things a little bit different,” said Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) president Laura Walton. “They have really great ideas and it’s been invigorating for the movement.”
There are unique challenges that come with unionizing a seasonal workforce. A high turnover rate makes organizing a struggle and with workers not knowing whether they’ll be around for another season, starting the long process of unionization can feel futile.
Campbell faced exactly this problem. He tried calling everyone he’d worked with in the past season to see if any of them were returning for the summer. The answer: none of them. This meant he’d have to start from the beginning, slowly feeling out how a brand new workforce felt about forming a union.
However, during the summer of 2022, Campbell had an advantage: he was now a supervisor—the first time he had been one in a summer season. His position allowed him to hover between the workstations of the new technicians—the Canterbury Theatre, the Waterfall Show, the Kids Playhouse and many more. He needed to pitch the idea of organizing without setting off alarm bells for management across the park.
“You have to be covert in your language because once the employers catch on to the idea floating around or rumours happening, then they start clamping down,” he said.
If Campbell played his cards right, management wouldn’t have a chance to interfere.
Campbell slipped questions about labour into casual conversations with his team, revealing the unionization plan only when he felt the time was right. Months later, in the final four weeks of the season, the whole team was on board and ready to take a vote.
“One hundred per cent yes, everybody voted. One hundred per cent participation,” Campbell said.
“It was a managerial shitshow”
Another vote had to take place to officially confirm the result. This happened soon after, gathering the same unanimous support. But being unionized doesn’t make the problems go away overnight. Things often get worse before they get better. Many workplaces, including Wonderland, aren’t happy when change comes.
“Everything just got harder,” Campbell said. “When the employer is in this position where they lost, everything just gets stricter. If you’re late [to work], sometimes that slides by. Now, there’s no leeway. You’re five minutes late, you’re getting written up.”
The first trick up Wonderland’s sleeve was trying to discount the vote. Campbell had gotten signatures from his entire team of techs but management argued the park’s hair and makeup crews also fell into their category and that, without them, the vote was null.
The park’s plan backfired. Campbell approached hair and makeup, asking whether they wanted to organize too. Though initially miffed they were left out of the first vote, they were happy to join IATSE—but with a different local that would represent their specific needs.
Campbell’s efforts to keep the unionization efforts a secret also meant other park employees weren’t aware of the plan. When Campbell came into work on the day of the final vote, he ran into a friend in another department of tech services. He asked him, “What would you say if I told you I just unionized Wonderland?”
The coworker brushed him off, “Not gonna happen,” he replied.
“What if I told you it was already done?” said Campbell.
His coworker was dumbfounded. Campbell laughed and said this was the reaction just about everyone had.
Still, Wonderland wasn’t done making things difficult for the freshly-unionized techs.
“Within bargaining, it was a lot of delays,” he said. “We propose something, they don’t propose anything back. They’re just like, ‘No, we don’t want to accept it.’”
Eventually, raises were negotiated with an increase of over three dollars in the first year. Now, starting hourly wages for technicians sit at just under $22. They also managed to get written rules surrounding unsafe work practices and the right to refuse tasks that would put health and safety at risk. It allowed people to be more confident, speak up and share their thoughts and concerns in the workplace.
The Eyeopener reached out to Canada’s Wonderland for comment but they did not respond in time for publication.
“That’s something a lot of bosses fear most, that their employees will talk to one another and realize the issues that one of them is having are the issues that all of them are having,” said Campbell.
Anti-union messaging, unease about dues or misunderstandings surrounding their purpose worm through the minds of workers, slipping through as memos, emails or offhand comments. Unionizing can be a difficult undertaking but many young people are pushing through the noise, working to build a better workplace for themselves and those who will come after.
“There’s been people who have been telling young people that they can’t do things all the way along,” said Walton. “This generation of workers coming up is magical.”
Young workers are less likely to have had negative experiences with unionizing or run-ins with poor union leadership. They’re entering a workforce that has far more examples of labour wins than failures. Successful organization efforts at big corporations like Starbucks and Amazon are a beacon of hope for young people looking to fight back against a system that seems bent on exploiting them.
Fourth-year TMU image arts film studies student Elliott Frith is very familiar with this system. He spent this past summer working in reforestation in British Columbia, planting thousands of trees over 11-hour work days in a travelling camp. Being paid for each tree planted and pushing themselves to their limits made for a strenuous work environment.
One day, towards the end of the season, the team of about 60 people was instructed to do a camp-wide replant on a plot of land that had been covered days earlier. Frith said this meant they had to replant trees that had been planted incorrectly and were unsure if they were going to be paid for their work with management, saying they would notify them. He said both supervisors and management never gave a clear answer on whether pay would be coming.
The Eye reached out to a representative* of the reforestation company, who said planters should be compensated for replant days and they eventually were.
The next day, while the managers were in a meeting, Frith called his exhausted co-workers to a general assembly in the mess tent to talk about what happened. He discovered nearly everyone was upset, not just about the replant, but with just about everything they had gone through over the course of the season.
“Everyone was pissed off about all sorts of stuff,” he said. “We had to do mandatory meetings on our day off, we weren’t paid accurately for our setup and teardown of camp.”
“That’s the power of young workers coming together. They see things a little bit different”
The company representative refused to comment on the mandatory meetings.
Frith knew that without him and his co-workers’ labour, management wouldn’t make a dime. If they wanted to make a change, they had the power.
The planters decided to pen a letter, airing their grievances with the company and threatening to strike indefinitely if they weren’t compensated for the replant day. If management wouldn’t pay, the planters wouldn’t work.
That night, alongside two more experienced coworkers who had offered to back him up, Frith hand-delivered the letter to his supervisor. The next day they waited patiently for a reply. In the evening, a pickup truck pulled up to camp and one of the company owners stepped out. What ensued was a stern lecture. “Am I the asshole here?” asked the owner, claiming that the planters’ use of the word “demands” was insulting.
“They tried to make us feel like we were asking for too much when we were literally just asking for minimum wage,” said Frith. “He really tried to harp on our inexperience.”
During the tense negotiation, the two parties went into recess and the planters gathered once again in the mess tent to plan their course of action. Most still wanted to strike—if a letter had brought out the owner of the company, what could a strike do? They returned to the table with the same set of demands.
Management conceded, offering to pay wages for the replant day. Planters later learned the company had been budgeted three hours pay for camp setup and teardown, of which they were currently only being paid two.
The representative of the reforestation company said their data entry person had entered the setup and teardown hours incorrectly and workers were eventually paid for a full three hours.
Tree planting is individualistic, laborious work. Paid by the tree, planters are encouraged to compete with their co-workers to sow as many as possible. Frith said this fosters a “grindset” mentality, where employees push themselves beyond their physical and mental limits to meet quotas and bring home the most cash. Accompanied by the high turnover rate of seasonal work, unions in the field are few and far between.
“We can represent and we can defend and we can sit there in front of management’s faces”
Frith’s team, however, didn’t need to join a union or create one formally. Their success was rooted in a foundational principle of the labour movement: that workers together are stronger than their bosses.
“The only way [working people] get anything—to use that word the owner hated so much—is to demand it,” said Frith.
Labour organizing in Canada started as far back as the early 1800s, paralleling the industrial revolution. In 1872, the Nine Hour Movement spread to Canada, demanding nine-hour work days rather than the up-to-12 that most were working. While largely unsuccessful, the workers’ fight led to the Trade Union Act of 1872, which transformed unions from illegal organizations to government-protected institutions.
The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike was the largest one Canada ever saw. Frith considers it one of the most important events in Canadian history. Led by workers and a coalition of unions, the strike shut down Manitoba’s capital for six weeks. It was ultimately crushed by all three levels of government and a handful of employers, sparking bitterness and leaving a lasting memory in the Canadian consciousness.
In the wake of 1919, the labour movement intensified. Unions formed their own governing bodies and collaborated, all while gaining more reform in government that made pro-union legislation possible. Through these fights, Canadians won the five-day work week, the eight-hour day, the right to time off and countless other wins that comprise the state of work as known today.
The live-in staff at TMU’s three residences—comprised of residence advisors (RAs) and academic links (ALs)—work where they live and live where they work. They’re students themselves, struggling to find a balance when work, life and school all happen within the same few blocks. In 2022, they made the move to unionize.
Fourth-year RTA media production student and community leader for the International Living and Learning Centre (ILC) live-in team Jack Morrissey was the bargaining chair during the negotiation process and is currently a union steward for OPSEU Local 596.
Morrissey first heard whispers about the possibility of unionization in his common room while he was still a first-year student living in the ILC. He overheard murmurs that would slip into the standard chatter of the residence staff, which he would join a year later.
Pay wasn’t their main concern, balance took that title as there were no set hours and no hourly compensation. Although they were instructed to work 12 hours a week—now 10 hours a week according to the 2024–2025 application document—many felt pressured, whether by themselves or by management, to do a whole lot more.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, things took a turn for the worse. Both of the residence life managers (RLMs)—the supervisors who oversee the live-in team—quit, after which only one new RLM was hired.
The Eye reached out to TMU’s Housing and Residence Life department for comment on their staffing. In an emailed statement, they said their management team has consisted of three people as of 2022 and, “during varying points of the pandemic, operational demands fluctuated.”
“It was a managerial shit show,” said Morrissey.
During the bargaining process, they negotiated a threshold of working hours for the year. If an RA or AL exceeds that, they get paid hourly. Morrissey said this was not about getting paid more, it was to prevent management from pushing excessive hours.
“The management chain was kind of rotted right from the root,” he said. “It’s important to critically think about how we can switch from pointing fingers to making change and empowering our voices as workers to be heard up that chain.”
They also negotiated for better job security, stable subsidy rates on their rent and CPR training for staff. If there were defibrillators in residence, Morrissey wouldn’t know where they are. The 2024–2025 school year marks the first that RAs have been trained in first aid following the unionization in 2022.
“That’s something a lot of bosses fear most, that their employees will talk to one another and realize the issues that one of them is having are the issues that all of them are having”
In the same emailed statement, the Housing and Residence Life department said first aid training was put on hold from 2020 to 2021 to limit exposure to COVID-19 and was reinstated in 2024. They also said that residence buildings currently do not have defibrillators.
Live-in staff also had another qualm—the balance between their academics and employment. “Student staff” is the term used to describe the RAs and ALs on the live-in residence team, but according to Morrissey, they were either one or the other, depending on which suited management best. They were “staff” when they were disciplined or told to work more hours to fill gaps but “students” when trying to host guests or asking to be treated the same as other residence employees.
Like Campbell, Morrissey also felt the shift in the air that came from becoming unionized. His workplace began to actually feel more like a workplace. Unionization put a stop to preferential treatment, petty comments and made the divide between the live-in team and management less faux-friendly. Morrissey said it also allowed them to be a lot more open with their concerns, coming a long way from secret meetings in random common rooms.
“People have been way more engaged as actual staff and have felt way more connected as a team,” he said. “We can represent and we can defend and we can sit there in front of management’s faces.”
While issues have continued to emerge, Morrissey said they’re just growing pains. What’s important is that workers can voice their concerns on the systems, management and the expectations placed upon them while now having a means to solve them.
“I would push to unionize in like 90 to 95 per cent of cases. And now is the time to do it,” he said. “Management fears union rights more than you’d expect.”
Campbell no longer works at Canada’s Wonderland. The season in which he organized the tech team would be his last and he knew this all along. Frith said he won’t return to the company he worked for this summer and Morrissey will graduate in the spring, leaving residence behind.
For Campbell, this knowledge was part of what drove him. He wasn’t unionizing for himself, but rather for workers of the next season—and all the seasons after that—who will be better off because of it.
*This source has been granted anonymity by reasonable request. The Eye has verified this source.
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