The McGill Daily : Minolta's Bad Copy :: Minolta copy center fires staff

Minolta’s Bad Copy

Minolta copy center fires staff; employees protest dismissal

by Philip Trippenbach
News Writer

A copy centre that has tens of thousands of dollars in contracts with SSMU, the Science Undergraduate Society, and other McGill clubs fired its entire front-office staff in late January. It is now facing allegations of poor treatment and bad working conditions from the employees it laid off.
The Minolta copy centre at 920 Sherbrooke St. fired its entire front-office staff on January 25, days before the employees were to lodge a formal collective complaint with management, to be delivered in person. Six employees were fired, leaving only the location manager and a technician employed at the centre. Management cited ‘restructuring’ and ‘economic reasons’ as the causes for the dismissals.
Two office trainees performing internships at the centre were hired into the front office as customer service representatives on the day of the firings. Since the layoffs, the centre has hired at least two more employees. The copy centre is currently advertising job vacancies and will soon move to a larger location directly below its present quarters.
Doug Bastien, a Concordia commerce student who was working at the centre for a year and a half when he was fired, believes the group dismissal was unjustified. He said Minolta employees had been organizing a group complaint to bring to upper management, but had their employment terminated before they could meet to discuss it.
“Our main complaint is the tactics used by the company to avoid discussion with the employees,” he said, calling the firings “an effort to wipe out employee dissent.”
Bastien contends that management was unwilling to work with employees to resolve their grievances. “They would rather fire all their employees than address their concerns,” said Bastien.
Employee concerns were common enough: scarce breaks, low pay, increasing workload with the centre’s anticipated move downstairs, and friction with the location manager, Gary Abenain. According to Nelson Guevara, assistant manager of the centre until he was fired on Jan 25, several formal complaints regarding working conditions were lodged over the past year, but management had yet to deal with the grievances.
“There has been no follow through. The complaints kept getting passed back and forth between the manager and the president. Nothing was getting done.”
Bastien said that turnover at the centre was particularly high, noting that eight people had quit or been fired since he began in July of 2000. He said that many employees decided to quit because of the bad working environment.
“Working conditions were terrible, and people kept leaving. The turnover was really high – eight people passed through while I was there,” he said.
Marina Leichis, director of Human Resources at the Minolta head office, said she thought the dismissals were unimportant. “I need a better explanation as to why this negligible, within the present economical climate [sic], commercial event was deemed newsworthy,” she said. Leichis added that “the specific employment matters, however, are confidential by law... Anything related to Minolta’s business operations outside of the public domain is equally proprietary company information.”
Leichis stressed that Minolta is not the only company involved in restructuring operations, and that Minolta’s provision of service to McGill students has not been affected by the dismissals. “We are ... not the only supplier to McGill with a restructuring process on our hands. It has not affected our ability to provide services to McGill’s students, nor their quality, or cost,” said Leichis.
But Bastien dismissed the HR director’s logic. “[Minolta is] disloyal to its employees, faithful to the bottom line,” he said.
Isabelle Billeau, another of the dismissed six, said that the employees’ concerns were straightforward. “We were thinking of going together to the head office to discuss our complaints. We weren’t making a revolution,” she said.
Guevara agrees with Billeau’s assessment. “The manager thought we wanted to unionize. We didn’t. We just wanted to discuss some of the problems at work.”