The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/canadian-unions-started-labour-day/
This week the top stories sections on our Canadian French- and English-language pages included statements from several national unions that strongly suggest that there’s a co-ordinated effort being made to push for the elimination of s.107 of the Canada Labour Code. That’s the provision that the Liberals used, most recently anyway, against the CUPE members at Air Canada.
S. 107 had been largely forgotten until it was resuscitated by the current federal government. It’s been used against several unions in recent years but the flight attendants were the first striking workers to ignore the feds and carry on with their walkout.
There example seems to have inspired a bit of a national, cross-sectoral, pushback.
We also carried news of other signs that the movement is pulling itself together. A good summary of those stories can be found in a CBC analysis piece currently in our top stories section.
Other stories included the BCGEU scalable walkout in BC, and from Alberta news of a settlement in the public service by AUPE while CUPE members in long-term care facilities across the province were out on the streets demanding better wages for care workers.
And, of course, we carried dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stories about Labour Day events across the country.
But my favourite item, among our Canadian stories at least, was from The Tyee. The title says it all: Why One Young Union Organizer Sees a Brighter Future.
As LabourStart is a global organization I should slip in at least one non-Canadian story worth being highlighted for you. This week’s is from the US where Labour Day was a chance for the USian movement to organize resistance to the Trump regime’s anti-worker agenda. In case you were disconnected all summer, a perfectly rational response to the news flowing out of the country to the south of us, a half a million workers have had their right to a union stripped from them by executive fiat.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included Lana Payne’s re-election as Unifor’s National President, and a perhaps surprisingly good, because it appears in The Globe and Mail, piece on how women workers have used their unions to improve their lives at work and away from it.
Then again, the authors are Peggy Nash and Julie White so the content is no surpriser after all.
Another nice piece was from the CBC which in the fallout from the CUPE flight attendants strike looked at a other workplaces which rely on the unpaid work of women.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was the release of what is being called a landmark report on the mental health of construction workers and a strike vote by BC nurses that looks to be driven almost entirely by workplace stress issues.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Sao Paulo Brazil where media workers held a demonstration in solidarity with Palestinian journalists. Theirs was just one of hundreds held around the world after a targeted attack on a group of journalists brought the total number killed in Gaza to almost 300. There’s a bit of a Canadian connection to the story behind this photo: The same day this demo in Brazil took place, Unifor, which represents many media workers, awarded the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate its Nelson Mandela Award.
The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:
In 1879 coal miners in Springhill, Nova Scotia organized Pioneer Lodge of the Provincial Miners’ Association, later known as the Provincial Workmen’s Association. The PWA went on to become an influential force in the province.
And in 1894 Labour Day was observed for the first time as a statutory public holiday, under a law introduced that year, at the request of unions, by the Conservative prime minister Sir John Thompson.
There are lots more labour history items like this to be found at the bottom of our Canadian news pages. Look for them and be inspired.
Finally, a bit of a shout-out to the teaching staff at the Séminaire Saint-François in Quebec. Their union, the CSN, reports that 98% voted in favour of strike action.
That was on Wednesday and at the time this show was being recorded no lightning strikes or rains of blood have been reported.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 