The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/avi-lewis-how-to-create-thousands-of-unionized-jobs/
This week the top stories sections on our Canadian French- and English-language pages included a new poll, commissioned by Unifor as it campaigns to save the Canadian auto industry, that shows a clear majority of Canadians in favour of saving it and the decent work it provides, a neat piece from BC about new-age picketing by civil service workers who would normally be working at home, and lots in both official languages about the escalating strikes by public transit workers in Montreal.
Other stories included the no-surprise announcement by the loonie right UCP government that it will be legislating the ATA back to work next week and more employer-side escalations in the Charlottetown water service strike and the union’s call for a boycott of the contractor at the bottom of that mess.
But my favourite item, among our Canadian stories at least, was from Nova Scotia where part-time faculty are off the job, striking against precarious work.
As LabourStart is a global organization I like to highlight at least one non-Canadian story for you. This week’s is from South Africa where a tripartite meeting chaired by the ILO provided just a glimmer of hope for a global working class response to the climate crisis.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included an impending strike by long-term care workers in Nova Scotia, and a win for the union-supported coalition for pay equity in New Brunswick as the newish provincial government announced that it would be extending pay equity legislation to include workers in the private sector and those who work in care homes. Both hold the potential for huge wage adjustments for women, but especially in long-term care where the vast majority of workers are women. The devil will be in the details though, so stay tuned.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was yet another disturbing piece of legislation from the government of Quebec. The latest, an omnibus bill, has buried within it an attack on public sector health and safety programmes.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Palestine and it’s a shot of Israeli security forces raiding and trashing the offices of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade unions. The raid was condemned by, among others, Luc Triangle, the General-Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation as “a serious violation of international law and of the fundamental right to freedom of association … an assault on a legitimate, democratic, representative institution of working people.”
This week we published a new podcast, an interview with Solong Senohe, General Secretary of UNITE in
Lesotho. In this interview, Solong tells us about a whole series of abusive (and illegal) practices at the company, including forced over-time, short-term contracts and union-busting. It’s an eye-opening introduction to how the clothes most of us wear are made and the price the workers who make them pay.
The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:
In 1972 feminist workers in Vancouver, founded SORWUC – the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada. They sought to represent workers in marginalised, low-paying, largely female-dominated sectors that weren’t high priorities for established unions.
And in 1996, when General Motors tried to break a Canadian Autoworkers strike by removing equipment, union members occupied the corporations Oshawa plants.
There are lots more labour history items like this to be found at the bottom of our Canadian news pages.
And speaking of inspiration, we are currently campaigning on behalf of Serbian air traffic controllers whose union’s leadership was sacked after a legal, not that it matters, strike. The strike was a clear win for the workers. Shortly afterwards the security clearances of the union’s officers was lifted and their employment terminated.
And of course, we have an online action running on behalf of the garment workers union in Lesotho for the reasons outlined in our latest podcast episode.
Responding to the appeals for solidarity from these unions will take no more than a few seconds out of your busy day but it will mean a lot to these workers and, as many of our past campaigns have proven, can make a very real difference in these struggles.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 