Lana Payne came from nowhere to lead Canada's most powerful union to some spectacular victories — but can she change Unifor itself?

It was just after 11 p.m. on Oct. 29, 2023, and Lana Payne was pacing up and down a hallway on the 20th floor of Toronto’s Sheraton hotel trying to clear her head. There was a lot on her mind. After weeks of talks, Payne, the , Canada's biggest private sector union, had less than an hour to go before the strike deadline with Chrysler parent company Stellantis.

This was her chance to wrap up three months of high profile contract talks with the Detroit Three automakers — Stellantis, and General Motors. Payne pulled out her phone and began drafting a text to Stellantis’ chief operating officer, Mark Stewart. Her words, she felt, carried the weight of more than 8,000 Canadian workers at the Franco Italian automaker and the future of their collective agreement.

The text read: “We'll be on strike as of midnight.” Payne was acutely aware the decision would put thousands of Stellantis workers on the picket line — potentially for months — marking the union’s first walkout at Stellantis workplaces since 1987. “It’s the hardest decision that you'll ever make in bargaining,” Payne said.

In a year marked by high profile strikes and wage gains, Payne has emerged as a formidable force, steering negotiations to secure groundbreaking deals for workers. As Unifor — a 315,000 member workers’ organization that straddles every industrial sector of the economy — faces a critical moment in the wake of the , soaring inflation, surging corporate profits and interest rate hikes, Payne's leadership signifies a pivotal juncture for workers demanding higher wages, more benefits and greater job security.

Unifor national president Lana Payne leads the way toward a meeting with Stellantis as part of the auto talks in Toronto in this file photo from Aug. 10, 2023. Since in August 2022 Payne has overseen a high profile strike by Metro grocery store workers in the Greater Toronto Area, announced an organizing campaign for Amazon employees in Vancouver and launched bargaining for autoworkers, a key sector for Unifor as it looks to secure a place in the green transition.

Perhaps more importantly, Payne has become the face of transformation within Unifor itself. She succeeded larger than life former president Jerry Dias, who left under a cloud of scandal, and unlike previous leaders, she did not get the traditional endorsement from her predecessor. Because of that, she's seen by observers as having the power to turn the page on Unifor's highly centralized leadership structure and the perception among some within the union that it's led by an old boys' club.

“Payne's victory gave her a clear mandate to do things differently,” said Larry Savage, a professor in the labour studies department at Brock University. Still, union culture is strong and changing it is harder than it looks. So is Payne the person to do it? The lasted a mere seven hours, with the two sides negotiating well into the night.

It ended with one of the best contracts autoworkers had ever secured in Canada. The deal included base hourly wage increases of nearly 20 per cent for production and 25 per cent for skilled trades over the lifetime of the contract. By the end of the three year agreement, a full rate production worker will make more than $44 per hour, according to the union.

In an interview with the Star, Payne referred to this confluence of events as “a moment” — a window of opportunity that, under her leadership, Unifor has been able to harness. “It’s not a fluke,” Payne said. “We have a moment in time and this means we’ve got to push harder at the bargaining tables.” Born in St.

John’s, Nfld., in 1965, Payne from a young age had a deep understanding of the role of unions and their impacts on workers and families. Before she began school, Payne’s family moved to Deer Lake, Nfld., when she was five, where her father, Eugene Payne, worked in construction as a welder. He was often away from home “for months and months on end,” working on big construction projects in Labrador in the '70s and '80s, Payne said.

Payne’s mother, Mary Payne, worked as a server and a bartender for many decades. “My mother was doing very difficult work — split shifts and a lot of hours,” Payne said. “She worked her whole life and only recently retired.” “It was a very working class home,” she added. “We didn't have a lot of extras and my parents worked very hard to support all of us kids — there were four of us.” Unlike Eugene, Mary’s jobs were not unionized so she did not have health benefits, which were crucial for the family, as Payne’s sister was diagnosed with diabetes at age nine.

“I knew from a young age the importance of unions,” Payne said. “I knew what it meant to my dad.” At 17, Payne moved back to St. John’s to study English and political science at Memorial University. On her bus rides to school she would often chat with strangers, curious about their lives and stories.

Little did she know her future husband, Edward Whelan, who was studying biology, was also a regular passenger. Before they met, Whelan came to think of her as “the girl on the bus who talked too much,” Payne said with a laugh. A few months later, Payne, “in true fashion, ended up asking him out,” she said.

They have been married for nearly 40 years. Payne’s personal introduction to the labour movement as a worker came when she worked as a journalist for the Evening Telegram in St. John’s when she was 21 years old. She was fresh out of university and reporting on her first court story. That day, Payne accidentally wrote down the wrong name for the defendant — and her error was published.

She was fired for the mistake. Following the advice of her father, Payne filed a grievance and eventually got her job back with all her backpay. “It was the very first grievance that had ever been filed in that workplace — they hadn't been unionized for that long,” Payne said. Shortly after, Payne ended up covering labour for the Sunday Express, an investigative weekly paper.

But when the publication closed for financial reasons just 18 months later in 1991, Payne took a contract with the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union (FFAW) working in communications. What she thought would be a six month contract turned into a 17 year career that would define who she is today. “I knew that this is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life,” Payne said.

In 1992, not long after Payne joined the FFAW at the age of 25, the federal government banned cod fishing and shuttered the commercial northern cod fishery, once Canada's largest fishery. The cod moratorium caused the largest round of layoffs in Canadian history with more than 30,000 jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador gone in the blink of an eye.

“It was an economically devastating time,” Payne said. But Payne learned many lessons during this period which she said she applies today. “It was an incredible experience to be able to work with the people of the fishing industry for 17 years and transform from that moment of complete bleakness to hope and rebuilding,” Payne said.

In 2008 Payne was elected president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour, where she led a successful campaign for an increase in the minimum wage, resulting in a 67 per cent increase over approximately five years. She stayed at the federation of labour until 2013, when Unifor was created, marking the coming together of the Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW) and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada — two of Canada’s largest and most influential labour unions.

“The fisheries union was part of the CAW and they asked me if I would be interested in coming and taking on a leadership role,” Payne said. She was elected as the Atlantic regional director of Unifor in 2013 until just before the pandemic in 2019, when Payne served at the union’s secretary treasurer until 2022.

The experience, she said, during which tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs, prepared her for the rocky presidential election not long after. “We had to show our members that we were going to do everything possible to make sure that their jobs, their health and their safety was protected,” Payne said.

When Payne announced her candidacy for Unifor’s presidency in April 2022, it was a shock to many and marked the union’s first contested election in almost a decade. Her election surfaced amidst a union leadership in disarray, grappling with a legitimacy crisis and a damning investigation into a kickback scandal involving its president.

“I had no intention of doing this, running for president,” Payne was quoted as saying in the National Executive Board minutes. “But these last three months changed everything for me to a point where I felt there were some who were not taking this serious(ly) enough.” Unifor elected Payne as its president on Aug.

10, 2022. Payne won by a significant margin, beating out Dias’ pick and former assistant Scott Doherty, as well as the president of Windsor based Unifor Local 444, Dave Cassidy. Historically, Unifor’s leadership group is also known as the "administration caucus,” explained Savage, who is co authoring a book on Unifor that will be released this summer.

“It's the body in the union that determines who will fill leadership positions.” “It operates kind of like a one party state in the union,” he said. “It’s a very powerful force." The leadership group had backed all previous presidents — but not this time. “Payne's election was the only time where the administration caucus had not endorsed the candidate,” Savage said.

Cassidy, in a previous interview with The Canadian Press, said he expects to see more contested elections in the future. “Those days of giving the rubber stamp to somebody and somebody getting (elected) just automatically are done,” he said. He isn’t alone in that thinking. “I feel like the days of the good old boys’ club … it doesn’t work anymore,” said who supported Payne in her campaign, in a previous interview.

amid an investigation into an alleged kickback he received from an as yet unnamed company supplying COVID 19 rapid tests. The investigation found that Dias allegedly received $50,000 in exchange for promoting those tests to Unifor employers, and gave half the sum to his then assistant Chris MacDonald, who filed a complaint with the union.

“The scandal turned things upside down inside the union and provided an opening for people to do things differently,” Savage said. The union is highly centralized, with the president picking whoever is on staff, he said. “And so there is this tendency for staff to be extremely loyal to the president of the union and are seen as an extension of the authority of the union's president,” Savage said.

While both Jim Stanford — economist and director at the Centre for Future Work — and Savage disagree that there’s an old boys’ club at Unifor, they said there were aspects of the union’s leadership that may have led to this perception. Dias had been a senior leader within the former Canadian Auto Workers before it became Unifor in 2013.

“He was carved in the mould of some of the great leaders of the former CAW,” Stanford said. All of the former leaders had been hand picked by their predecessors, and were “larger than life figures with tremendous skill and gumption at the bargaining table,” Stanford said, adding that “(Dias) did some amazing things as the first president of Unifor.” “He was cut from the same cloth.” In the investigation into Dias, it was revealed that there was a Signal group chat called “The Big Three” consisting of Dias, Doherty and MacDonald.

Dias and Doherty posted in the group memes about loyalty after MacDonald filed his complaint, according to the third party investigative report seen by the Star. When details of the group emerged, “I think that really fed into this idea that the union was being run by this old boys’ club,” Savage explained, adding that the group name was an allusion to the three Detroit automakers formerly called The Big Three, representing the oldest and most significant Unifor union management “marriage.” “The union just demographically is overwhelmingly male dominated,” Savage said.

Stanford explained that Unifor also had an entrenched system in which the president had three to six hand picked assistants who “project the president's personal authority into local union affairs and bargaining tables and political campaigns.” In , Payne said the assistants to the president put “the politics of the union … ahead of the crisis,” adding that the group was fundraising among staff for Doherty’s election bid, which she said “has never occurred before.” “This assistants to the president system was, in a way, contrary to the principles of collective democratic leadership,” Stanford said.

“Payne abolished this system when she became president.” Stanford said the union “is not an old boys’ club per se, there was a lot of diversity in the leadership team … but it did run as a very tight structure with the president personally holding a lot of power.” “In some ways that can be very efficient.

But it reaches its limits, particularly if that president is in trouble.” Savage agrees. While the administration caucus can help balance out the executive and make it more diverse, he said that “without meaningful checks and balances, a culture of deference to the leader can rot the union from the neck down." Payne’s election, without its usual endorsements, has allowed for the opportunity to make the union structure less centralized, Savage said.

The new president appears to be making an effort to narrow the perceived gap between the interests of the national body and the priorities of locals, Savage said — a key campaign promise and a response to criticism that Unifor had become too centralized. The union has worked very closely and held dozens of sessions with locals and their bargaining committees across the country, Payne said, as part of its work to strengthen local power and "to identify the key issues facing workers to develop our new national bargaining strategy." “The workers that you represent have to have confidence in what you’re doing, and to feel part of it and feel inspired by it,” she said.

“You can’t be the strongest union possible unless you make those connections with your members.” While many were relieved Payne offered an alternative to Dias’ leadership, some criticized her for using the crisis to fulfil her own personal ambition to win the presidency. “I don't feel it's necessary to respond to those kinds of criticisms,” Payne told the Star.

“I was dealt a very big problem. I handled it with the kind of leadership that I felt was necessary,” she added. “In the end I felt the union needed to be able to also carry on with a different kind of leadership that I could offer it.” Payne was responsible for navigating the internal crisis in the union at the time, Savage said, adding that she had commissioned an independent investigator to dig into Macdonald’s complaint.

“One of those decisions — and I think this is part of her public relations background — was to get out ahead and demonstrate full transparency to the membership so they can have confidence that the union was not trying to sweep things under the rug.” Citing a commitment to transparency, Unifor released a copy of the investigation into Dias — along with full minutes of relevant executive meetings — to its 315,000 members across Canada.

In Unifor’s National Executive Board minutes from March 2022, Payne was quoted as saying: “We either get in front of this train or it’s going to roll us over and it is not going to be good.” Unifor’s year of wins under her leadership has shown that Payne is not to be underestimated. What remains to be seen is whether internal organizational change will follow.

For Stanford, the union's leadership crisis is a thing of the past and Unifor’s success over the past year and a half overshadows any scandal. “I actually think the union came out stronger because of it and it brought on a new team of leadership,” Stanford said. A month after 3,700 grocery store workers at Toronto area Metro stores earlier this year, they returned to work under a new contract Unifor called “historic.” Long days of picketing, including demonstrations at warehouses that halted deliveries to Metro stores across the province, led to a deal giving all workers an immediate raise of $1.50 an hour.

By this month, full time and senior part time workers will have received another 50 cents, essentially bringing back the pandemic era “hero pay” that ended in 2020. According to Economic and Social Development Canada, as of Sept. 30 there had been 147 work stoppages in Canada in 2023, fewer than in 2022, 2021 and most years this past decade.

But the average length of these work stoppages so far is the highest it’s been since 2017, and the number of person days not worked — which factors in the number of workers involved — is the highest since 2005. Government data on major wage settlements shows in 2023, wage gains in collective agreements are rising — the average annual percentage adjustment for these settlements so far is 3.7 per cent, up from 2.5 per cent in 2022 and less than two per cent for more than a decade before that.

The average first year percentage adjustment for those major settlements is 4.6 per cent. What stood out to Savage the most this past year was the staggering number of rejected tentative agreements. “Half a dozen tentative agreements have been voted down by Unifor members — it’s an unusually high number,” Savage said.

The trend shows how high workers’ demands are and what they are expecting not just from their employers but also from their unions, Stanford said. There have been high profile rejections by workers at Metro in Greater Toronto, Windsor Salt, the St. Lawrence Seaway and SkyLink, for example. Metro workers spent more than a month on strike after rejecting the first tentative agreement recommended by their bargaining committee.

After a gruelling five month strike, Windsor Salt workers also rejected a tentative deal before accepting a wage increase of $4.60 per hour. Canada’s St. Lawrence Seaway employees also walked off the job for the first time since 1968 and rejected a tentative agreement before they received a 13 per cent pay raise.

Unifor’s bargaining this year with the Detroit Three automakers was a particular shock for Savage because of the juxtaposition between the strength of the deals the union achieved and the relatively low support they got in ratification votes. “These were some of the best, if not the best, contracts autoworkers had ever secured in Canada.

And yet, they barely made it through ratification, in the case of Ford and Stellantis,” he said. Both Savage and Stanford pointed out that Payne’s effort to mend fences during the Dias scandal might have helped her with the , which take place in a “hyper masculine environment,” according to Savage.

“Payne made an effort to build bridges with folks who had not supported her,” Savage said. “She wanted to maintain some key staffers, even those who had not supported her, rather than go in and clean house.” One of those staffers was Shane Wark, an assistant to Dias who had supported her opponent Doherty in the elections.

“Wark played a very prominent role in auto bargaining,” Savage said. “Shane Wark is just an outstanding negotiator and was outstanding in all of these rounds of bargaining in the auto sector,” Payne said. “It’s not just me … collective bargaining is about the collective. There is a team of people doing this work.” What’s different about Payne in these instances, which Stanford said sets her apart from her predecessors, is her “commitment to collective leadership rather than great man leadership.” “Part of her challenge was to knit the union together and rebuild the unity,” Stanford said.

“Payne was able to cross over those remaining tensions that were there from the leadership contest.” The tides are starting to turn in 2024. Inflation is down — even though many paycheques have yet to catch up — and there’s a slight uptick in unemployment, hitting 5.8 per cent in December.

But it doesn’t look like Payne is going to slow down any time soon. This upcoming year she has her sights set on the telecommunications and media sectors — Unifor Local 87 M represents media workers across southern Ontario, including the Toronto Star. Unifor will also be bargaining with Via Rail this year with some 2,400 workers’ contracts expiring at the end of 2024.

Stanford emphasized: “A good union and a good union leader can channel (workers’) anger and ambition into concrete progress.” Internally, Payne said she is continuing to work on changing the leadership team structure. "The Union's senior leadership team structure was modernized to reflect the democratic nature of the union, and to incorporate greater accountability into the work of the union," she said in an email.

In the past year, new accountability procedures have been introduced, Payne said, adding that she expects the union's first ethics commissioner to be appointed in the near future. For Savage, it’s too soon to tell whether there will be a permanent change to the internal system. “I don't think Unifor is an entirely new union under Payne's leadership … but it has only been a year and a half,” he said.

“Opting for Payne over Doherty helped the union turn the page on the Dias scandal, but beneath the surface there's a lot of continuity in terms of the union's culture and political focus.”.