Case History of the FTQ's Social Stewards Network: A Unique Experiment in Union Peer Support for Mental Health in Workplaces in Quebec,Canada

Solidarity's fundamental characteristic is that it does not come from outside; solidarity is the action of helping others experiencing the same kind of distress as I am; it is sharing what is needed with those finding themselves in the same dire circumstances as mine. (Fischer 2014, 206)

During the health crisis, psychological injuries in the workplace increased throughout the world, which the widespread requirement for telework undoubtedly contributed to (Morneau Shepell 2021). Nonetheless, and well before the COVID-19 pandemic, workplace mental health problems were already considered an epiphenomenon of a global social crisis (De Kersabiec 2016). In Canada, every week in any given year, 500,000 workers are not at work due to psychological health issues such as increasing occupational burnout (Lévesque 2021). In the Canadian province of Quebec, a Population Health Survey revealed in 2016 that 26% of workers presented elevated levels of psychological distress, with 60% of their number attributing it in whole or in part to their work (St-Arnaud 2017). Concurrently, research (including Chaignot Delage and Dejours 2017; Linhart 2015) showed the existence of links between the way in which work is organized and the prevalence of certain mental health problems, evidence of the contemporaneousness of a crisis in work (Kelly and Moen 2020; OIT 2016, 2019; Pfeffer 2018) and a complexifying of the modus operandi of the actors—specifically, unions—representing the issues inherent in the conditions in which work is carried out.

Accordingly, this article summarizes 10 years of research on an alternative actor in Quebec industrial relations that, through its activities, can be considered a unique experiment in aiming to remedy the persistent lack of humanity (Chaignot Delage and Dejours 2017) in workplaces, namely the Réseau d’entraide syndicale des délégués sociaux et des déléguées sociales (Union Social Stewards Peer Support Network) of the Fédération des travailleurs et des travailleuses du Québec (QFL [Quebec Federation of Labor]). This trade union organization is the province's largest central labor union, with some 600,000 members working in the public and private sectors (FTQ website 2021). Since 1983, the Social Stewards Network has offered a type of peer support (Bonnami 2019), that, in some cases, is tolerated by employers and, in a few others, backed by them; after almost 40 years in existence, the network now has over 3,000 social stewards active throughout Quebec (FTQ website 2021). The Social Stewards Network is a noteworthy institutional experiment that contributes to the deployment of better structured union capacities in terms of taking responsibility for psychological injuries in the workplace (Dufour-Poirier and D’Ortun 2021b). More specifically, our work aims to fill the conspicuous gap in research relating to labor unions’ capacity to handle such injuries, work-related or otherwise (Cardador, Grant, and Bruno 2019; Doellgast, Bellego, and Pannini 2021). ¹

In addition to its contribution to the advancement of knowledge in this particular research area, the article has two specific objectives. On the one hand, it outlines the development of the FTQ's Social Stewards Network and the nature of its peer helpers’ actions among workers in distress in Quebec workplaces. On the other, it sets out some considerations relating to the need for collective action in handling injuries to mental health in the workplace while invoking the contribution of all workplace actors, above all unions (Dufour-Poirier 2020; Dufour-Poirier and Chaignot Delage, 2022). In doing so, we foster examinations of the capacity of union organizations, as structures of support and/or social capital ² in workplaces (Cohen and Wills 1985; Putnam 1993), to contribute to improving employees’ quality of life in their working environment despite the challenges they face in trying to do so.

There are four parts to this article. In the first, we put into perspective the theoretical relevance of undertaking work examining unions’ capacity to handle psychological injuries in the workplace. The second part deals with the methodology prioritized in this research program. It also provides information about the legal and institutional environment in which Quebec unions operate so as to better situate the innovative character and special features of this type of union intervention in the North American context. The third part comprises a discussion of the background to the creation of the network and the types of problems social stewards face daily in carrying out their roles. It will also look at the network's latest advances as a result of the COVID-19 (C-19) pandemic: those relate to the ©Trans-faire protocol (Dufour-Poirier and D’Ortun 2022). Finally, we will present a few of the challenges countering the type of union peer support provided by social stewards. In the fourth section, we offer some of the lessons that can be drawn from the cases studied, as well as a few thoughts touching on the need for collective action in handling and ideally preventing injuries to mental health in the workplace, a paradigm shift that would call for the contribution of all the actors in a working community, as well as that of society as a whole. We conclude by outlining certain lines of analysis that should come into play when conducting future research in this specific area of expertise.

Literature Review

First, different, and quite unrelated, theoretical solutions have been offered to address the pathological aspects of work and improve workplace mental health, whether in terms of the management of workplace health and safety (Lerouge 2018), psychodynamics of work (Chaignot Delage and Dejours 2017), ergonomics of work activities (Hubault and Bourgeois 2013) and quality of work life initiatives (Levet 2013). In respect to psychological approaches to stress and the increased importance of psychosocial health and well-being as concerns in contemporary workplaces, there are three internationally recognized models for identifying the relationship between the organization of work and illness: the job demand-control-support model of Karasek and Theorell (1990); that of effort-reward (social, organizational and financial) imbalance of Siegrist (1996); and organizational justice vis-à-vis decision-making procedures and interpersonal relations (Elovainio, Kivimäki, and Vahtera 2002). The literature does not foreground the importance of the collaboration of actors (namely the unions) within a working community in better protecting mental health (Clot 2010; Clot and Simonet 2015) in order to increase work meaningfulness (Cardador, Grant, and Bruno 2019), emotional and social support at work (Corbière and Durand 2011; Jackson 1992; Linhart 2015), job satisfaction (Flavin and Shufeldt 2016), and overall level of quality of life across nations (Keane, Pacek, and Radcliff 2012).

Yet, the importance of social support in healing workplace environments is, to say the least, rather bandied about in the literature dealing with the handling of work-related psychosocial risks. Social support, described by Corbière and Durand (2011) as being “team spirit and the degree of cohesion within the group, as well as colleagues’ assistance and collaboration in carrying out tasks” (188), would be a particularly useful bulwark against traumatic work-related stressors (CCOHS 2022). Moreover, the presence of formal or informal psychological support systems in a workplace reveals the extent to which employers take the psychological integrity and mental health-related concerns of workers seriously. In fact, a lack of psychological support, whether formal or informal, in workplaces could in time potentially lead to an increase in absenteeism; interpersonal conflicts; a greater risk of accidents, mishaps and injuries; high employee turnover; and all sorts of tensions reflected in fatigue, headaches, burnout and anxiety, everything hand in hand with lost productivity for the company concerned (CCOHS 2022). Moreover, for Linhart (2015):

Solidarity has a tangible impact on working life. Group organizations act as emotional as well as very tangible resources in terms of knowledge, experience, expertise and soft skills. They help keep people working through the defensive ideologies examined by Dejours (2008), by devising behaviors and practices intended to make people forget its hazards and very real threats. They also enable the putting of the experience of work, the denial of each individual's involvement, and the harshness of working conditions, along with broader, more political, issues, into perspective (103).

Second, turning to the field of industrial relations and following on from the preceding, the subject of occupational mental health has also generated many publications over many decades. In the last century, now standard authors already considered that the advent of unions was directly related to workers’ psychological reaction to work (Paquet, Jean-François, and Gosselin 2004). Specifically, Veblen (1914) was the first to contend that unionism arose from an imbalance between individual needs and the realities of the industrial world, with workers experiencing increasing difficulty in satisfying their needs within the new “industrial” forms of work organization they were obliged to adapt to. Organized labor was therefore viewed as an “adjustment mechanism,” an instrument for collectively advocating for the implementation of changes likely to make working environments more human and respectful of workers’ psychological balance. However, once this was achieved, unions lost their reason for being, as they only represented a temporary, transitional movement destined to disappear once workers gained such respect and/or improved their adaptation to the new working arrangements (Perlman 1928).

Clearly, there is more contemporary research dealing with the way in which unions or other workplace representatives contribute to well-being (Blanchflower, Bryson, and Green 2022; Flavin and Shufeldt 2016; Keane, Pacek, and Radcliff 2012; Wels 2020). Nonetheless, little research has tackled the way in which organized labor has been engaged, formally or informally, in this area, and certainly not enough to understand the initiatives unions have taken in terms of protecting mental health in the workplace (Doellgast, Bellego, and Pannini 2021; Mias and Wolmark 2018; Thébaud-Mony et al. 2015), and providing general support (Lowe and Northcott 1988), and emotional support at work (Jackson 1992). By extension, Quebec research tracing the evolution of union strategies targeting prevention (going far beyond the promotion of workplace well-being) proves just as limited (Deslauriers 2016; Edelson 2016; 2021). Such a gap in the literature demands the conducting of research more specifically investigating the initiatives taken by unions with respect to peer social support and the prevention of workplace distress (Dufour-Poirier 2020).

On one hand, certain of the publications consulted (Goussard and Tiffon 2017) reiterate the inadequacy of unions’ traditional actions, historically focused, as previously noted, on formal bargaining or mobilization around specific problems or issues (e.g., major restructuring) (Le Capitaine and Dufour-Poirier 2020), on the protection of physical safety in the workplace and on assigning monetary value to related hazards (Delmas 2012; 2014), while the seriousness of the situation would instead invite them to pursue collective action in regard to injuries to mental health ³ (Poirel et al. 2020). This work leads to a grim observation: the tendency to individualize such injuries and emphasize workers’ responsibility in the case of negligence or error rather than to treat them as collective and organizational issues (Chaignot Delage et al. 2019; Poirel and Houde 2019). Such considerations reflect the vast debate around the tendency on the part of some unions to favor individualized and clientelist, à la carte–type representation (Peetz 2010), rather than prioritizing a strategy whose effectiveness would be measured in more comprehensive, collective terms (Boxall and Haynes 1997). This would particularly apply to collective action with respect to the issues fueling union programs and priorities, including those at the source of mental health injuries in the workplace (e.g., work organization, management styles, supervisory methods, and so on). On the other hand, in some are discussed health-improvement measures (e.g., eating an apple, doing yoga, seeing one's doctor, etc.) implemented or to be implemented in order to better regulate the occurrence of stress in the workplace and manage its consequences (MSSS [Department of Health and Social Services]) 2019). If union support is sometimes mentioned and designated as an added value, increasing the credibility of the proposed activities (Brun, Biron, and St-Hilaire 2009; Douesnard 2018), generally no mention is made of the nature of union participation in a concerted approach targeting a collaborative mutual understanding of mental health issues, or of having all the actors in a working community address them at their source (Poirel and Houde 2019).

Third, from that perspective, a number of researchers (including Linhart 2015) do not hesitate to refer to unions’ missed opportunity with respect to the organization of work: tackling an analysis of the work and the dysfunctions responsible for the upsurge in psychological injuries in the workplace would certainly create a dynamic for discussion and exchange in a spirit of making working environments healthier and providing a more preventive, collaborative and balanced management of mental health in the workplace. Indeed, Linhart (2015) stresses the crucial role unions can play, through work groups and the social support they provide, in preserving workers’ psychological integrity:

On their level, work groups are stakeholders in a secret, micro power struggle and, through the values they support, provide the basis for more comprehensive union engagement. They play a decisive role in keeping misery at bay as much as possible. (104–105)

The recent publication by Doellgast, Bellego, and Pannini (2021) is the first to be in keeping with the above: it shows the capacity of the unions at France Telecom to discuss and deal with workplace mental health and well-being as union advocacy and mobilization issues with communicative power, as well as to contribute to strengthening union practices and strategies within a relational framework of social dialogue. Other contributions of this type are nevertheless needed to offset the lack of research in terms of unions’ capacity to fulfill their members’ psychological needs and support their related advocacy work, as well as the nature of the psychological contract binding them (Wels 2020). Our work fits within that area. Our analysis looks at a unique example of the social support that social stewards provide on an ongoing basis in workplaces. Formally, of course, but also sometimes, in a number of cases, informally, as many of them at the time of writing are still working in secrecy.

Methodology

Our longitudinal research program was based on a qualitative research design. Few studies to date have empirically documented the innovations labor unions have deployed to handle mental health injuries in workplaces, meet workers’ psychological needs and contribute to improving their quality of life at work. We thus determined that a qualitative study design, which would allow for an in-depth analysis of the data, was needed to understand this issue.

This article is based on a comprehensive body of empirical data gathered as part of a qualitative longitudinal research program. Data were collated from 2013 to 2020 by means of 12 discussion (120-min) groups (n = 160), as well as some 60 (n = 60) semi-structured indiv etary were chosen iidual (90-min) interviews conducted with social stewards from various backgrounds under a purposive sample (Fortin 2010). More specifically, the focus groups ranged in size from eight (8) to twelve (12) participants. A discussion facilitator and a secretary were chosen for each group. The secretary was chosen from among the focus group participants. He/she was tasked with writing up a summary of the group discussions. An exhaustive number of participant observation phases were also carried out throughout this decade (2013–2022). Although it is expensive to gather and analyze such data (Peneff 1990), the biographical interview method was prioritized to collate the human experience accumulated by social stewards over the years, their need to share their stories and the necessity for us, as researchers, to reconstruct facts and examine the richness of such life trajectories (Bertaux 2016).

Triangulating the data from these different sources and methods of data collection allowed us to achieve data saturation, a key aspect in developing categories and analyzing data, thus further validating our findings (Fortin 2010, 474). Every individual and group interview was recorded and transcribed verbatim and then coded using grids developed according to the data reduction approach advocated by Huberman and Miles (1991) before qualitative analysis by meaning unit. These verbatim transcripts were then divided into semantic units and coded, allowing us to compare the various respondents’ points of view. We also analyzed the notes taken by the secretaries in each focus group. After each discussion, the researchers wrote up a preliminary summary of their observations. These observation notes were counted as part of the body of research data. Lastly, we examined publicly and privately available documents dealing with our research subject (e.g., union newsletters, private and public reports, and websites). In addition, the work of coding and breaking down the individual and group interviews and our observation notes into concept units was systematized using Atlas.ti software. All data were triangulated with all information deemed relevant for that purpose (Huberman and Miles 1991) and forms part of the empirical corpus of our research program.

Specificities of the Quebec Institutional Context

Notwithstanding the heavily documented drop in unionization rates and the crisis with respect to trade unionism in the majority of countries in the West, to this day Quebec remains the area with the largest number of unionized workers in North America. ⁴ In 2019, 39.3% of workers in Quebec were covered by a collective agreement, in comparison with 29.1% in the rest of Canada and only 11.6% in the United States (Labrosse 2020). The rate in Quebec can be explained by the high percentage (84.2%) of unionized workers in the public and parapublic sectors; in contrast, in 2019 only 23.9% of private sector workers were covered by a collective agreement (Labrosse 2020). The system of collective labor relations in Quebec is mainly decentralized; in this way union certification is generally awarded per workplace and local union action within workplaces predominates. The labor relations system at work in Quebec is of the monistic type on the level of the specific workplace, not the company. In concrete terms, this means that when an absolute majority (50% + 1) of workers in a specific workplace of a company sign membership cards a union local will be formed, which will then qualify it as the sole bargaining agent authorized under the province's Labor Code; this is known as the monopoly of union representation (Le Capitaine and Dufour-Poirier 2020).

It was, in fact, Quebec's Labor Code that inspired Barack Obama to promote the defunct Employee Free Choice Act during his first presidential campaign. In that spirit, the proposed Act would have allowed a union to be certified as the official bargaining agent with an employer if union officials collected the signatures of a majority of workers indicating their wish to have the union represent them, a similar provision to that in effect in Quebec. Moreover, it would have removed the existing right of the employer to demand an additional, separate ballot when more than half of employees had already given their signatures indicating their support for union representation. It should be noted here that in Quebec there is no provision for holding such a vote following the filing of a request for certification when there is what is called an absolute majority; that measure only exists for cases in which the proportion of signed membership cards is between 35% and 50%. The proposed Act would also have required employers and unions to enter binding arbitration to produce a collective agreement within at least 120 days after a union is recognized: in Quebec, the time frame is more favorable for workers since it is reduced to 90 days. Finally, the proposed Act would have increased penalties on employers who discriminate against workers for union involvement; such provisions also exist in sections 12, 13, and 14 of the Quebec Labor Code. Any recalcitrant employer engaging in such behavior may then be subject to a petition to the Commission des relations du travail (the provincial equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board in the United States) requesting it to order the employer to cease such action and rectify its consequences [sections 118 and 119]. Such a request must be filed within 30 days of the alleged contravention of the employer coming to light [section 116]. Legal proceedings may also be instituted. The court may order that interference in union activities cease as well as impose a fine on the offending employer ranging from $100 to $1,000 each day or portion of a day the offense continues [section 143] (Ministère du Travail du Québec 2014).

Despite these advantageous provisions for union actors, the fact remains that, still today, the province is significantly lagging with respect to legislation concerning the recognition and handling of psychological injuries in the workplace as occupational injuries in due form. Certainly, reports from Quebec's Institut national de santé publique (INSPQ [Public Health Institute]) (2020), Pelletier et al. (2021) and Ministère de la santé et des services sociaux (MSSS 2019) have for years stressed the relevance of promoting effective prevention measures for mental health problems, given the considerable societal burden they represent. ⁵ However, such promotion has not sparked discussion of the issue of work itself, still less invoked the need to consider a major overhaul of the forms of work organization (given its impacts on people) to support the development of a new paradigm for health—primarily mental health, as concerns us here— at work and through work.

Proof of that is the fact that mental health is still only hinted at in Quebec statutes. It is true that, in October 2021, the Quebec government tabled the much-anticipated Bill 59, intended to update the occupational health and safety regulations ⁶ in effect in the province since 1977, which have long been scathingly criticized in terms of the recognition of work-related psychological distress. ⁷ It is also true that employers are now newly required to conduct an audit of psychosocial risks in workplaces so as to make them healthier and safer in terms of mental health, in compliance with section 51 ⁸ of the Act Respecting Occupational Health and Safety: nonetheless, despite the expectations raised in that regard, a number of experts in the field wonder how employers will conduct such an audit ⁹ and, especially, what resources they will enlist to do so. It is also not known what the nature of the accumulated case law in terms of preventing and handling workplace mental health injuries will be, the content of which it nonetheless seems responsible for specifying: in this way, it is still unclear as to what disorders are likely to be included on the list of work-related psychological injuries, and thus accepted as actual occupational injuries.

Similarly, the adjustment disorders, anxiety, and depression resulting from occupational burnout still do not appear on the Quebec list of illnesses deemed to be of occupational origin; in actual fact, only post-traumatic stress is now entered on the list of occupational illnesses included in the aforementioned bill. Moreover, that effort at reform did not make provision for reviewing the list of occupational illnesses, on an ad hoc but nevertheless regular basis, in order to ensure its relevance through continual updating. Therefore, the Social Stewards Network operates within the limits of a regulatory framework putting more emphasis on compensation for injuries (Laflamme 2008) than on instituting a truly preventive strategy for mental health risks (Poirel and Houde 2019; Poirel et al. 2020). We are thus far from seeing consideration of an overhaul of the structures for and conditions of work for better organizational and public health management in Quebec (Desjardins and Giguère 2013), which would lay the groundwork for a paradigm shift in the way of dealing with problems that are deemed individual, rather than organizational (Dufour-Poirier and D’Ortun 2021a; 2021b).

In concrete terms, it means that workers grappling with mental health problems must still provide overwhelming evidence that their disorder is characteristic of or related to the particular risks of their job to justify compensation for an occupational illness; in reality, providing such evidence proves almost impossible (Laflamme 2008). Despite that, two recent decisions suggest the opening of a precedent along the lines mentioned above. The first, issued by the Quebec Administrative Labour Tribunal (2020 QCTAT 1789), now recognizes that workload may be a source of chronic stress. The second, rendered by the Quebec Court of Appeal (QCCA 857), confirms that fragile mental health may justify a duty of accommodation to prevent any type of discrimination (Corbière et al. 2014; St-Arnaud 2017) or stigmatization.

Therefore, Quebec law does not directly address the protection of mental health in the workplace through a system of prevention that is truly primary, systematic, and participatory (relying on the contribution of all stakeholders when discussing the upstream causes of psychological injuries in the workplace), as nonetheless provided for in the regulations enacted to that end (Dufour-Poirier 2020). This is shown by the designated bodies’ very low rate for recognizing chronic work-related stress as an occupational illness: the cost associated with such recognition would be considered excessive, if not prohibitive, by many employers for it to be part of the correctives to be made in that area (Laflamme 2008). For the sake of clarity, in that sense, optimum and primary management of mental health would refer to the implementation, by unions or in collaboration with them, of targeted actions to eliminate the upstream causes of such disorders, including in the organization of work, the conditions for its performance, and the administrative procedures surrounding it. For its part, secondary prevention refers to the introduction of training and awareness-raising measures to improve the management of difficult situations, in this case in terms of mental health, and provide workers with the tools to better deal with or limit their exposure to them. Finally, tertiary prevention refers to the implementation of what is called remedial, that is, reactive and curative measures, intended to treat and care for workers struggling with psychological problems. In line with the foregoing, social stewards put tertiary prevention (as well as, when the particular intervention framework allows it, secondary) measures in place by providing workers with resources and ongoing support to prevent situations from further deteriorating or reoccurring.

Lacking the available legal tools, Quebec labor unions must exercise institutional ingenuity to limit adverse effects on health in the workplace, assuage areas of conflict and put psychological well-being at the forefront of organizational priorities; in the area of workplace mental health, they operate in a kind of legal and institutional vacuum. Notwithstanding those observations, unions have not remained inactive with respect to the gradual, yet no less sustained, upsurge in psychological distress in workplace settings (Chaignot Delage et al. 2019; Dufour-Poirier and Bourque 2013; Dufour-Poirier and Le Capitaine 2015, 2016, 2018). In the FTQ's specific case, the creation of the Social Stewards Network goes back to 1983, thanks to a collaboration with Centraide (known as United Way in the U.S. and English Canada), when the world was in the midst of a global economic downturn (Dufour-Poirier and Bourque 2013). The Conseil du travail de Montréal (CTM [Montreal Labour Council]) ¹⁰ is acknowledged as being the principal body responsible for the Social Stewards Network of the FTQ's creation. Inspired by the union counselor programs in place in the U.S. and English Canada since the early 1970s, the CTM's objective at the time was to develop mutual aid relationships ¹¹ between unions and the community groups working mainly with the unemployed and people who had been injured on the job. The idea was no more or no less than to address problems that up to that point had not been covered in collective agreements, but were nonetheless experienced by FTQ members in their working environments.

A Brief Timeline of the FTQ's Social Stewards Network

In 1982, the extent of the economic downturn and unemployment prompted the FTQ to launch Opération chômage (Operation Unemployment). One of the first steps it took was to train union activists to provide basic information and technical assistance to members experiencing problems. The training dealt with various subjects such as unemployment insurance, social assistance (in U.S. terms, “welfare” payments), and debt problems. These “social stewards” were then tasked with informing members about their rights and, if need be, advocating for them with the bodies applying the related public policy statutes. In April 1983, the FTQ hired 79 social stewards for a period of 1 year. ¹² In the following year, 1984, the initiative was replicated. That time, some 40 social stewards provided support for members struggling with money problems, alcoholism, substance abuse, domestic violence, job insecurity, and so on. Their role would become increasingly formalized: they received training variously relating to job search, helping relationships, and listening to people in need. At the same time, the FTQ set up the Committee on Alcoholism and Other Addictions, featuring an approach based on union peer support and voluntary rehabilitation in the workplace setting. The success of those initiatives quickly confirmed the validity of establishing a union network that was independent of employers’ employee assistance programs, which only lead to greater individualization of problems.

At its 18th convention in 1983, the FTQ announced the official launch of the Social Stewards Network in collaboration with Centraide Montreal, ¹³ a well-known philanthropic organization in Quebec. The Network then took the form of a three-year pilot project to verify its short-term feasibility and relevance. For the FTQ unions, its establishment meant acting outside their traditional fields of operation to take on a new role based on listening and empathy. They also wanted it to provide assistance to workers who were unemployed and therefore had no union connection. From the start, it was intended to foster “the establishment of regionally based, local community and union networks so as to share a rich variety of experiences and points of view” (Rhéaume and Chenel 1994).

The next stages in the development of the Network served to more thoroughly define the role of a social steward. Many people contributed to the process, including university professors, specialists in stress, mental health and addictions in the workplace, and psychiatrists. The expertise of alcohol addiction and family treatment and rehabilitation centers was also enlisted. Various training modules were developed and constantly improved to enable the social stewards to learn the basic principles and then hone their knowledge of the peer-to-peer support relationship, occupational burnout, conflict resolution, psychological harassment, compulsive gambling, and synthetic drug addiction. Information evenings and day-long seminars on specific topics and issues, visits to treatment centers, and knowledge-sharing activities among the Network's social stewards were gradually added. The FTQ's education department held the first five-day course for social stewards in May 1984; the course was condensed into three days in 1988. When the Network was launched at the FTQ's 1983 convention, Louis Laberge, its then—very famous—president declared that the Social Stewards Network was the very heart of that central labor union (Harrison 2012)! That pronouncement garnered the Network a great deal of media exposure in Quebec and is still remembered today within the organization (FTQ 2018).

During the 2000s, the Social Stewards Network had to contend with the increase in workplace stress that went along with the insecurity and growing flexibility of jobs. Those years saw a surge in occupational burnout and depression, often accompanied by individuals returning to work overmedicated as well as struggling with online addiction (Conseil regional du Montréal métropolitain 2021). On another note, the incorporation of the Social Stewards Network into union local organizations and those of the FTQ did not always go smoothly. As of 2007, the Network stepped up its efforts and increased its operations to overcome the misgivings of some employers as well as those union representatives for whom the peer support role held by the social stewards was not the concern of the union movement and even changed the nature of its mission (FTQ 2012). In that regard, those who championed the Network would continue to insist on the complementarity of regular and social stewards’ roles and on the necessity of them being made stronger.

The network has now existed for almost 40 years and has some 3,000 social stewards who are active throughout Quebec. It is known as a network of sentinels with the mission of facilitating access to specialized services and preventing the most serious problems (e.g., burnout, depression, or suicide) in advance (Rhéaume et al. 2008). It is also a mechanism for training the next generation and ensuring the transfer of the union values and knowledge acquired over the years. The success of these initiatives combats the hesitations with respect to the social stewards’ role of certain union representatives, who believe that unions should continue to focus on their traditional labor relations activities, that is, collective bargaining and representation. Even more fundamentally for such critics, proposing a union role based on peer-to-peer capacity for empathy and listening would alter the very mission of a union at the local level, which should be aimed at negotiating working conditions, promoting the socioeconomic interests of members, and managing conflicts with employers. However, even if the network contributes in that way to spotlighting a major player in the Quebec union landscape's ability to adapt and gradually transform itself through peer support (Bonnami 2019), this attempt to remedy the persistent lack of humanity in workplaces remains very little known among both unionized workers themselves and the general public.

Overview of Social Stewards’ Roles and the Impact of Their Workplace Interventions

A union executive's role in a workplace is well known at the union local level. As previously mentioned, in Quebec and, more broadly, in North America, collective labor relations prove to be highly decentralized. In such a context, union stewards’ traditional roles mainly focus on negotiating members’ working conditions, seeing to compliance with collective agreements and the formal representational duties associated with their roles (e.g., filing grievances). In contrast, social stewards are agents of informal support and recovery who listen to their coworkers and try to cultivate close relationships of trust with them: by implication, they act according to the maxim Listening to others is to make them exist (D’Ortun and Dufour-Poirier 2021).

Preventive management, active listening, building relationships of trust, mobilizing everyone as fellow team members . . . those are the ingredients for success when it comes time to help people, because they will already have the idea that “I can talk to that person about absolutely anything, and he or she will never judge me.” They won’t be afraid of approaching you when need be. On the employer side, they can invite those kinds of discussions, have happy hours, and so on (Focus Group no. 8, 2018).

Social stewards, therefore, act in a more informal vein, with a limited number of them enjoying formal recognition within collective agreements, all combined with substantial union leave. Furthermore, in most cases social stewards’ interventions take place outside the formal representational channels traditionally prioritized by unions, making them agents of an innovative type of mediation at the institutional level. The majority of social stewards act on their own, that is, outside of the mandates fulfilled by other members of the union organization in the local, a division of union labor that to date still lessens the potentially transformative and ameliorative impact that social stewards’ actions could have in workplaces (notably in terms of work organization methods and their possible modification). In fact, the division of union tasks tends to confine them to a psychological support and guidance role for their peers experiencing problems, preventing them from acting as agents of change in both the union and the workplace they are connected to as well as from providing upstream support for collective bargaining.

Despite such limitations, these front-line workers (or workplace streetworkers, as they like to describe themselves) that are social stewards seek to provide workers with active, empathetic listening and helpful referrals (to physicians, psychologists, lawyers, etc.) to prevent crisis situations. The issues for which they provide support are varied and have evolved since the Network's creation in 1983: alcoholism and all kinds of other dependencies, debt problems, conjugal violence, violence in every type of relationship (including between coworkers), sexual and psychological harassment, gambling and online addictions, depression, burnout, and so on. In serious situations (e.g., providing support for the coworkers of someone who has committed suicide in the workplace), social stewards can go so far as to provide assistance complementing the professional treatments offered by employer-established employee assistance programs, often managed by outside firms removed from workers’ everyday realities. In doing so, social stewards ease the emotional strain present throughout the workplace concerned, both among their peers and employer representatives, who are frequently poorly equipped to deal with such tragedies; it is one of the benefits most often associated with their interventions.

Moreover, in the case of a coworker's extended absence, social stewards can take charge of the administrative procedures required by human resources departments on behalf of the worker, and follow up with insurance companies. By extension, at times the departure of a coworker for a protracted period may make a workplace atmosphere that is already under pressure for many reasons—people retiring without being replaced, constant work overloads, and more—further deteriorate. Such absences may also lead to more work for the other members of a team, causing frustration among more than one. In such cases, among the positive impacts related to their actions, social stewards prepare the ground beforehand, for coworkers as well as employer representatives, sometimes opposing the attitude of the managers in place, for the successful return of a worker after an absence of whatever length of time, and also prevent the risk of a relapse and/or recurrence, according to the particular circumstances:

I called those [people with] MBAs the “More bullshit around” bunch! They come into a company, and then they set up their pattern. What matters to them is the figure at the bottom of the column, and that's why they changed the name—they no longer call it human resources, now it's human capital, or just resources (Interview no. 25, 2014).

Social stewards then do their best to ease tensions and calm things down, even refute unthinking assumptions (such as, that worker's just been on vacation, having a break!) to restore as good working relationships as possible among the members of the team: one of their actions’ most fundamental contributions takes place on an informal level, within the social relations of the workplace community.

Often, the work has to get done even though someone is not there, and it's the coworkers who have to do it, which can tick them off. That can lead to anger, to a work atmosphere where there can be quite a bit of frustration. An extended or a mid-term absence—even sometimes a short-term one!—can be resented. People say to themselves, “He or she is away, doing nothing, while I’m stuck here doing all his or her work!” (Interview no. 32, 2014)

In doing so, social stewards meet the demands specific to peer helpers (Bonnami 2019), making use of and sharing their experiential knowledge voluntarily. As they are trusted workers who are part of the landscape, they try to reinject a measure of the humanity and cohesiveness lacking in many workplaces in order to alleviate the distress experienced by workers, and sometimes “find a solution for problems, help people, even every so often help someone stay alive one more day, or just simply be able to keep on going.” In addition, through active, and caring listening, they can prevent a negative situation from spreading throughout an entire workplace, as well as meet the need for workers to be recognized and for repairing the broken mechanisms required for solidarity among them. As a result, social stewards become conduits for humanizing and assuaging tensions in workplaces, as well as agents of union representation serving all the actors (even employer representatives) playing a part in the working community at issue. Therefore, their actions benefit not only the workers they help, but also their coworkers and the front-line employer representatives who have to deal with them.

As a social steward, I just want people to have someone to talk to about what they’re worried about. It's an alternative to going to see the employer and then saying, “I can’t take any more of your crap system!” ¹⁴ You’re living in frustration, you could just scream—you need to get all that out! The more we moved ahead, the more we realized it was the whole method of working that was bothering people. The employer realized that we were the ones who were handling that frustration [which does not include dealing with work organization, still the domain of employers]. It may well be part of a “dirty job,” but we’re the ones who clean up the mess they’ve made of the workplace! At least we, the social stewards, take care of our people (Focus Group no. 1, 2018).

Given the closeness of the ties they have developed on the ground, social stewards are able to testify to the escalation of mental health problems in the workplace—including dependencies of every type (energy drinks, drugs, alcohol, etc.), depression and, in the most serious cases, suicide—particularly those related to new methods of work organization. At the head of these are the phenomenon of work overload and the acceleration in the pace of work in line with the known demands for performance, profitability, productivity, and efficiency. On the one hand, this situation, which existed well before the pandemic, is reflected in workplaces in the efficient use of resources. Complying with the dictate to do more with less brings with it a number of pitfalls, including an increase in the incidence of violence between coworkers.

We often have discussions about the fact that the workload is increasing, and there's no sense to it. We’re going against the machine, all we hear is productivity, productivity, do more with less. People are constantly in a race. It's clear to me that everybody is going crazy and that everybody is . . . . People haven’t become that way for no reason. People don’t fight, don’t become violent amongst themselves for fun. Tensions are rising. It just makes no sense. The boss is on our backs all year long. You can’t go faster. Could you just stop and think for a second? Those bosses, instead of asking the right questions, for them it's always a matter of profits (Focus Group no. 5, 2018).

On the other hand, in addition to the frustration of many with the decline in quality and loss of meaning in what is nowadays too often slapdash work, that trend is combined with individualized management mechanisms and performance evaluation practices. As well as undermining collective solidarity and making workers more responsible for a company's future prospects, such individualization ends up putting them in competition with one another, in accordance with the principle of every man for himself, which does not fail to cause frustration and anger.

It's fine to say that team spirit is your priority, but what are you actually doing so that people do prioritize it? What are you doing so that your work atmosphere is viable, dynamic, that it makes people want to get up in the morning and come to work there? What are you doing as a manager to change your management style, your corporate culture? As for us workers, we have responsibilities, we have obligations. I am paid to do a job. That person there is not making the environment in which I work a healthy one, so that I can advance in a healthy way. For my part, it's my challenge as a social steward to try to get the employer to change its corporate culture (Focus Group no. 4, 2018).

Such toxicity in the relationship seems to be exacerbated as it is often accompanied by a conspicuous dehumanization of work and management procedures that negatively affects workers’ performance. As our research has progressed, a number of its contextual elements have been faulted: the undifferentiated standardization of tasks, unsuitable nature of work with respect to the characteristics (notably the talents) of workers, lack of consideration of occurrences likely to impact their work performance, and so on. Moreover, workers’ unsatisfied need to see their contributions recognized in the workplace, in short, not to be considered only an easily replaceable cog in the wheel, often also happens to be coupled with a feeling of anxiety in an environment of insecure employment relationships.

In the face of all these issues, social stewards must often demonstrate ingenuity in order to limit the negative impacts on health in the workplace and mitigate areas of conflict. The main impacts associated with their actions are thus linked to their capacity to reinject a measure of the humanity, social support and capital (Putnam 1993), and cohesiveness lacking in many workplaces in order to alleviate distress and restore a bit of humanity and meaningfulness to work and in the workplace, without taking on full-blown, supportive upstream management of mental health problems. Caring workplace guardians, social stewards provide working communities with bias-free safe havens, reestablishing relationships and rebuilding social cohesion, a feeling of having a shared future, among people who have lost their sense of connection to others through and in their work. They act like a space for decompressing, where people can vent about unfair practices at work, frustrations can be alleviated and certain crisis situations in the workplace can be defused, for the good of all those involved. At times, some social stewards go a step further and even manage to demystify the nature of changes underway in the workplace to open up avenues for communication, and discuss certain of the conditions surrounding workflow. Through their actions, they confirm the need in the workplace for humanizing management frameworks and practices, opening true channels for discussion with workers, and taking their perspectives into consideration when reviewing work organization procedures. To reiterate, such actions prove to be positive for both workers and employers, which then benefit from peaceful workplaces, as they are more attuned to workers’ needs and psychological expectations, and thus ultimately more efficient and effective. This is accompanied by, in the case of worker disability, relapse rates that are significantly lower statistically than in the past.

The supervisor introduces a change, you feel affected by it and that stresses you out. The only person you could talk to about it was him or her. But the supervisor would end up by saying, “You know, we don’t have a choice, we have to go ahead and anyway, in the end you’ll get used to it.” I don’t need you to explain to me how to manage the change! When you bring in a change, I just need you to reassure me. That's the difference between an employer and social stewards! A social steward is someone who's going to listen to you, who's going to reassure you! I’m not going to start by telling you, “You’ll see, you’ll get used to it, you’ll go through denial at first, but it’ll pass.” A worker doesn’t need to be told that. Go and listen to people's, to your workers’ anxieties, then reassure them about those anxieties! That's the difference social stewards make in their workplaces (Interview no. 12, 2014).

By means of active and attentive listening, social stewards then prevent negative situations in workplaces from spreading and at the same time meet workers’ needs to be listened to and recognized. Among the possibilities considered, that of training employer representatives in empathetic listening would be a true gain, not only for workers but also for companies. Mutual listening and recognition of the individuality of the people working appear to be key to humanly sustainable work.

For my part, I’d welcome much more listening, both on the part of employees and on the part of bosses, that there’d be harmonization, not necessarily of the work to be done, but with the people doing it. Because no one is like anyone else. Every person is unique. That's why work should be adapted to reflect people's skills—if that's done you can get the best out of every person, and along with that results. Because if you try to do too much with Kaizen or things like that, overly standardize procedures, it doesn’t necessarily mean that will be a success. . . . Every person is different, and you have to take account of those differences, with individual abilities, so that every person can feel valued through it all (Focus Group no. 3, 2018).

In that respect, following extended absences social stewards are sometimes called upon to negotiate the implementation of less stringent working conditions and/or support measures, as well as changes to disciplinary actions, with employers, by emphasizing employees’ determination to get themselves back on track (e.g., in the case of some kind of addiction). One practice mentioned by social stewards consists of negotiating a “last-chance agreement” through which employees with high absenteeism rates related to problems with alcohol, drugs, gambling, and so on agree in writing both to undergo therapy and treatment for the addiction and recognize the employer's right to fire them should the absenteeism be repeated. Social stewards unanimously acknowledge that such “last-chance agreements” often meet with failure, either because appropriate care has been provided too late or due to the employee being unable to “get back on track.” In spite of that, overall the success social stewards have achieved in workplaces depends on the quality of the mutual and often implicit commitments made between social stewards and the people they are “helping,” which explains the importance ascribed to the ability to listen and be empathetic as skills that are critical for carrying out their duties. Nonetheless, social stewards’ actions basically remain individual interventions apart from other union functions, limiting the possibility for transforming the particular workplace, contributing to the upstream preparation of collective bargaining and, more generally, renewing the roster of union actions available in locals.

An Institutional Maturity Enhanced Through © Trans-Faire

The COVID-19 pandemic and the related public health measures, including social distancing, as of the announcement of the Great Lockdown in March 2020, disrupted the community support provided by social stewards and radically changed their capacity to act in workplaces. In theory, the social stewards’ approach and roles (active listening, peer-to-peer mutual assistance, acting as sentinels in their workplace settings, guidance or referral to the appropriate resources, implementing follow-ups) had remained the same. In practice, however, the pandemic had seriously compromised their capacity for actions on behalf of workers (some of whom were affected by the expansion of telework, or already experiencing problems before COVID-19 and were seeing their difficulties increase on a daily basis) due to social distancing and, on the part of some, psychological distress (loss of meaning, uncertainty, and loneliness). Given the urgency, the social stewards found quick, specific and original solutions to such problems in order to create (or maintain) caring support in the way of listening, encouraging and directing toward assistive services remotely. A considerable number of social stewards took the initiative to innovate on the spot to successfully continue in their role as peer helpers in workplaces.

As a result, a novel protocol aimed at sharing and pooling innovative solutions among peers—© Trans-faire—was launched in November 2021. Its name couples the prefix “trans,” expressing the idea of “change or transfer” (Merriam-Webster) and the French verb “to do” (Dufour-Poirier and D’Ortun 2021a, 2021b, 2022). The protocol enables social stewards who have voluntarily chosen to do so to describe their experiences and the innovations and solutions they have advanced in their workplaces to their colleagues, as well as document and present what they have developed on their own, how they set about doing so, the obstacles they encountered, and so on. It, therefore, encourages social stewards to share information about the actual problems they have experienced and resolved in the field, fosters relationships of trust among peers, as well as boosts the creation of collective intelligence ¹⁵ through the exchange of new knowledge, expertise and soft skills that have been tested and verified in the field, and opens up new prospects for action. The impact of this protocol on these peer helpers was illustrated at the 2022 Annual Conference, a major event for the network. It dealt with subjects that are not taught in its formal training program within eight workshops conducted by social stewards. The sharing of these experiments aimed to create a dynamic learning community so as to take advantage of this group of union activists’ collective intelligence and capacity for taking action in terms of handling psychological injuries in the workplace.

Challenges Countering Union Peer Mutual Assistance

In any event, the Social Stewards Network has succeeded in making a number of advances. Social stewards have contributed to healing the environments of numerous Quebec workplaces and transforming the traditional roster of actions of many FTQ-affiliated labor unions. However, several challenges remain in maximizing the scope of the impacts associated with this type of union peer support. We shall outline three of the main ones.

The first challenge concerns the psychological burden of the role, which is likely to inhibit many activists from taking it on. Some social stewards find it difficult to determine whether their actions have an impact (positive or not) on the workers they help, as well as on the workplaces where their interventions take place. By extension, a number of social stewards feel stifled in a role that in their view compels them to control their emotions perfectly, temper their reactions when faced with certain cases, shape their actions according to the people they are dealing with, and exhibit exemplary behavior at all times:

It weighs heavily on you! It's like we have to be angels. All the same, you can’t help everybody! (Interview no. 28, 2014)

At the same time, it appears to be rather difficult to be privy to confidences, as well as manage feelings when faced with certain problems (e.g., when a worker committing incest seeks a social steward's help). Other social stewards admit their powerlessness or inability to deal with the consequences—sometimes foreseeable, sometimes less so—related to mental distress experienced at work. In the aftermath of an intervention deemed to have failed, and without being able to talk about it with others, some of them even have a deep sense of guilt and remorse about not having been able to grasp how bad a situation was and prevent a person who was suffering from taking dire action:

Because I had seen him [that particular individual] the week before, just smiling away. That's the picture I had and then I said to myself, I didn’t see! I did not see anything wrong! But then, the guilt started to kick in a bit . . . . After that, you keep saying to yourself: I didn’t see anything wrong (and then, unspoken, in the back of your mind: How is it that I didn’t notice anything?!) (Interview no. 33, 2014)

The second challenge reflects the limited nature of the social steward's role and of the opportunities for taking action the role provides in workplaces (notably in terms of prevention), at least in its current form, which is separate from traditional union structures. In addition to that problem, a number of social stewards are rather confused about their role. For instance, are social stewards there solely to spot problems or can they go further and truly contribute to the implementation of a culture of (primary) prevention in workplaces? Indeed, some social stewards are somewhat relieved at the idea that they do not have to do more in situations that are tricky to deal with:

I’m a social steward—a social steward! I’m not a doctor, or a psychologist! Plus, there's also the relationship we have with our status [as social stewards]. It's possible that there are some among us social stewards who have more experience or background or spine—whatever you want to call it—and they are capable of sorting out major problems. But that's not the majority of us (Interview no. 15, 2014).

Conversely, others feel constricted in such situations and express frustration about not being able to delve deeper into the issues surrounding coworkers’ problems, lacking the legal status to do so, due to the requirement that they not infringe upon the areas of practice set out by the bodies representing the regulated helping professions. Another contention is not being recognized within their union and able to work together with the entire apparatus of the local on mental health issues. That would ensure collective management of injuries to mental health and contribute to a true transformation of the particular workplace by designing a culture of prevention for it based on the contribution and collaboration of all its stakeholders.

Added to the foregoing is a third challenge, namely that of improving the Social Stewards Network's integration into FTQ-affiliated unions and increasing its visibility, indeed its legitimacy, among employers and workers. Promoting the network, while at the same time breaking the taboos and prejudices relating to mental health among members and union affiliates in particular, were messages that social stewards repeatedly hammered on:

It's overlooked. What's really significantly lacking is the promotion of that action, which is damned useful and appreciated (Group Interview no. 8, 2018).

In that respect, many employers still do not seem to have understood the relevance of a union peer support network developing in parallel with their own employee assistance programs. In such instances, social stewards must establish the merits of their actions among employers a priori unconvinced of the reason for their mission. Even more astonishingly, as noted above, for certain leaders of union locals the actions taken by social stewards fall between, or are even at odds with, those of other union representatives (e.g., members of local executives, occupational health and safety representatives, shop stewards, and so on), calling into question the complementarity of such roles, the synergies likely to emerge between them, the relevance of social stewards in workplaces (“it's not up to us to deal with such issues!”) and the possibility of the latter contributing to the upstream preparation of collective bargaining. For others, the problems social stewards face are at the bottom of the list of union priorities and meeting agendas; consequently, their actions tend to be seen as “a service for the weak” (Group Interview no. 6, 2018), peripheral to traditional union actions that are considered more strategic (like formal collective bargaining) and of greater importance for members. This diminishes the impact and the potentially transformative scope of social stewards’ actions.

Notwithstanding those stumbling blocks, social stewards’ actions, like the tact and interpersonal skills they require, highlight the fact that “mutual assistance is an integral part of organized labor that has formed, first, around the problems experienced by people in their living environments and then, in their workplaces” (Harrison 2012, 1). And through such mutual assistance, social stewards have, unknowingly, revived an old aspect of union action, as well as put forward a beneficial return to its original mission.

The synoptic table in Appendix I provides a general summary of the findings presented as part of this article.

Conclusion

Beyond this period of the pandemic, social stewards have long been familiar with the pitfalls of performance, profitability, and productivity diktats. In recent years, they have been prime witnesses of the increase in cases of mental distress in workplaces and their level of acuteness: loss of meaning in work that is often slapdash in nature due to efficiency pressures and faster production demands; working conditions frequently not grounded in workplace realities; discrepancies between required work and actual work; feelings of not being deserving of a job; extreme difficulty in reconciling work and family life; decline in the feeling of belonging to a working community that, incidentally, is increasingly insubstantial; and so on. All such problems, severely exacerbated by the pandemic, have certainly reconfirmed the priority of social stewards’ infraregulatory, occupational mental health-related actions in maintaining the health of workers, as well as, indirectly, the legitimate and fundamental role labor unions play in collective representation in Quebec.

[In terms of mental health in the workplace, unions] have to be innovative. If mental health is not unions’ number one priority, then what exactly are they doing?! It makes no sense whatsoever. No, if union structures and representation do not have the goal of ensuring people's well-being and if unions do not see the social injustices, the psychosocial difficulties, if they are not in the process of dealing with those issues, what on earth are they doing with their time?! It's the union that has to push. That has to come from us, the membership, but we have to know that it exists. . . . Everyone has to push, put their shoulder to the wheel, lend a hand. And that has to come from all unions, because if not, that [management of mental health in the workplace] will never move forward (Interview no. 10, 2020).

Social stewards have not yet taken charge of mental health issues in the workplace in a completely deindividualized, inclusive way: without taking away any credit from them, it remains that social stewards’ actions mainly take place when the damage has already been done and an employee is hurting, according to a tertiary prevention approach and not without, for many of them, first having to negotiate the legitimacy of their presence and their actions with employers, workers, and even the union local structures they are part of. Despite that, their actions prompt serious thinking about the possibility of a collective management and (ideally, upstream) prevention of structural issues related to mental health in the workplace that would rely upon the contributions of all stakeholders. These considerations also supplant the tendency to individualize management of injuries and offer à la carte union representation in such situations. Advocating for such a collective approach would even involve employer support, notably to demystify the nature of changes that may be underway, open communication channels, reinstate dialogue on an employer-union basis and discuss certain of the conditions pertaining to the organization and execution of work.

When I was asked to become a social steward and contribute in that way to everyone's well-being and quality of life at work, I saw a chance to demonstrate partnership. The union and the employer should work together. Both of us want the business to do well. Because if it is doing well, I have a job. It [managing mental health in the workplace] has to be a team effort, otherwise, it won’t work. [As a social steward], you can’t do everything on your own. Because if not, without being able to make things happen, what's the point of being a union activist?! (Interview no. 2, 2020)

Such initiatives would enable all stakeholders in a working community to consider the needed humanization of work organization methods, as well as collectively solve the ills stemming from work and the policies regulating it (Chaignot Delage et al. 2019). The conclusions likely to emerge would be in synergy with the precedential decisions rendered by administrative tribunals and Quebec civil law courts in recent years, as referred to previously. Furthermore, they would also fit within the work to make the topic a fruitful tool for mobilizing and attracting a new generation of union activists (Cardador, Grant, and Bruno 2019; Chaignot Delage et al. 2019; Dufour-Poirier and D’Ortun 2021a; 2021b).

In the end, this study again brings to the fore the importance of union actions and local unionism in workplaces (meaning listening to members and taking their needs into consideration—in other words, using the jargon of the field, getting out of the union office and out on the shop floor, among other things), thus demanding a return to the roots, that is, to the very ontology of the union movement, its fundamental mission and its raison d’être, rather than a renewal as such. In fact, it is urgent for unions to consider injuries to mental health in the workplace as opportunities for reconstructing their frames of reference and their strategies as well as expanding the scope of their activities, so as to rethink work, its organizational procedures and the corporate internal policies regulating it (Dufour-Poirier 2020)—in short, to heal work. Furthermore, while social stewards, lacking the suitable legal tools, have not yet succeeded in acting as true agents of prevention, they nonetheless have managed up to now to preserve, on various levels and with varying degrees of success, what constitutes the human dimension of work, that is, the cooperation and solidarity that are the very foundations of dignity in the workplace. Such observations fall in line with the study by Cyr et al. (2016) underscoring the importance (now undoubtedly reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic) of the support work carried out by peers in workplaces as well as how enthusiastic they are about providing it, like the social stewards in union ranks:

A very clear theme throughout the consultation was that people do not see peer support as just a job but as a calling with a passion for making a difference to people's lives. People talked about the need for compassion, love and open-mindedness as key ingredients in success (95).

Seen from a broader perspective, the actual issue behind the remediation of such problems and the achievement of such aims is the preservation of countervailing powers in any society: for that, social stewards should be given the appropriate legal tools to enable them to properly fulfill their role as advocates and act as effective bulwarks against distress in the workplace and, moreover, no longer be just alternative actors in union representation in Quebec, but true agents of change. As we have seen, social stewards have informally suggested experimental alternatives to collective representation outside of the channels of traditional union orthodoxy.

At the time of writing, social stewards’ work focuses more on supporting individuals than on fostering a collective union strategy, despite their efforts to support a well-balanced working environment and improve coworkers’ relationships. Current thinking within the Social Stewards Network, as well as within the ©Trans-faire protocol discussed above, nonetheless leans in favor of the medium- and long-term promotion of unions taking more collective responsibility for psychological injuries in the workplace, through, among other things, the sharing of the knowledge, expertise and soft skills social stewards have developed as a result of their experiences and the decompartmentalization of union work carried out in terms of prevention. The potential forging of alliances among members of local executives, occupational health and safety representatives, shop stewards, and social stewards to heal workplace environments would thus move toward strengthening the effectiveness of the union actions and representation serving an—also revamped—collective solidarity (Boxall and Haynes 1997).

More generally, beyond the Quebec context, such a concept is an argument for the decompartmentalization of union work and roles in order to maximize the impact of the initiatives to take collective responsibility for injuries to mental health in the workplace, fostering at the same time a renewal of union thinking and the implementation of more integrated strategies that are closer in tune with current occupational contingencies. Considering such an avenue, social stewards would undoubtedly be in a better position to contribute to the transformation of the prevailing work organization methods and organizational culture in their local working environments and more fully carry out their role as conduits of industrial democracy and social justice among their peers. It is certainly one of the most important lessons to be learned from the institutional experiment conducted by the FTQ's Social Stewards Network in Quebec.

Finally, in addition to reiterating the amazing plasticity of the union movement and its capacity for adapting in the face of adversity, the initiatives implemented by social stewards also attest to, indirectly but no less certainly, the need to decompartmentalize union work, that is, to no longer sharpen its divisions, but rather use the existing synergies between the various functions in its apparatus (shop stewards, prevention representatives, members of the local executive, social stewards, etc.) to maximize the range of these peer helpers’ interventions in the field. Through their actions, social stewards confirm the vacuum of union activism and demands observed in the field in terms of mental health in the workplace. That vacuum also speaks to the urgency for labor institutions and actors (including, obviously, the Social Stewards Network) to ensure they jealously maintain the balance between social justice and industrial democracy, and at the same time their own legitimacy and long-term survival. That is also the case with respect to the well-being and future of all of us, both at work and outside of it.

To conclude, the findings of this research program most certainly call for further work measuring, among other things, the impact of social stewards’ interventions in particular workplaces, while preserving the confidentiality of the elicited comments and observations. The findings of such studies could subsequently be the subject of comparisons between unionized workplaces benefiting from social support measures like those provided by social stewards and others, whether unionized or not, so as to better understand the nature of both the problems found and the ecology of the human relationships developed within them. Such studies could also be set in specific industry sectors, as well as be the subject of international comparisons. These final lines reflect the essence of the thinking driving our specific area of research in the field of industrial relations.

The greatest poverty is to no longer be able to count on anyone.

Mother Teresa