Peter Edwards, Vice-President Human Resources and Labour Relations at Canadian Pacific, delivered the 2015 W. D. Wood Lecture on November 6, 2015 at Queen’s University. Peter spoke about the future of work, the future of the labour movement and how technology will impact jobs.
Peter urged the audience to think about how things like controlling trains remotely, driverless cars, and completely automated factories are going to profoundly change the world.
“We either change with or ahead of them, or we’re out of the business. The world’s going to change,” Peter said. “We are living in transformative times. We’ve had changes like this in the past, but there’s just so many technologies coming together. There’s 70 billion of them in your pocket that you didn’t even know about, 2 billion in the phone’s core processor alone. The changes that we’re seeing will never go backwards.”
Peter brought the discussion back to today, and to our system of collective bargaining. He discussed his own successes in collective bargaining and his refreshing approach to union-management relations. To be successful you have to build a relationship, not just go into the collective bargaining process expecting it to be adversarial.
>> Download the transcript of Peter’s lecture here.
>> View Photos from the lecture on Facebook
