The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/rob-ashton-canada-needs-bold-action-for-workers-now/
This week the top stories sections on our Canadian French- and English-language pages were swamped with news about the Alberta government decision to go nuclear and use the ‘notwithstanding clause’ against the province’s teachers and the Alberta Teachers Association.
Other stories included the start of Unifor-Amazon bargaining in BC and the 90-days anniversary of the CUPE water workers strike in Charlottetown.
But my favourite item, among our Canadian stories at least, was an update on one of the many really quite unusual and innovative ‘post-career preparation’ programmes created by the CFL Players Association.
This week’s international story that I want to highlight for you is from Sweden where the IF Metall strike against Tesla motors on. Sorry, couldn’t resist. The issue is a fundamental one for not just the workers, not just for their union, nor for the Swedish labour movement as a whole: it’s a direct challenge to the Swedish model of social dialogue and it is authored by Elon Musk.
And so watching and learning from this develops is critical if only because it’s coming to a labour market near you.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included a convention announcement from the Novia Scotia Federation of Labour which this elected, for the first time, two women to lead the Fed. Melissa Marsman has been elected President, while Tammy Gillis will serve as Secretary-Treasurer. Marsman is also the first person of colour to serve as President.
On a less positive note, we also carried news of a report from Labourers 506 in Ontario that too convincingly makes the case that a major deterrent to women entering the building trades is a lack of daycare. This would be old news in many other sectors but will, hopefully, attract the attention of employers and governments making noise about the shortage of skilled tradies.
Even further down or even completely off the good news scale is yet another call for an effective response to workplace violence directed at nurses and other healthcare workers. One of our volunteers picked up a piece from the Cdn. Federation of Nurses Unions that every provincial minister of health should be reading.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was the horrific story of a Winnipeg bus operator who was shot in the hand at work and effect this is having not just on them but on all their co-workers.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Belgium where on 14 October 120,000 members of unions affiliated with the front commun marched through Brussels to show their opposition to government austerity polices.
The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:
In 1997 more than 125,000 Ontario teachers walked out to protest the province’s plans to cut school budgets and centralize control over education. The two-week protest affected two million students and is the largest teachers’ strike in North American history.
And in 1917 labour activist Kent Rowley was born in Montreal. He later becomes Canadian director of the United Textile Workers of America in the 1940s and a founder of the Confederation of Canadian Unions in 1968.
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.
Speaking of inspiration, we are currently campaigning on behalf of workers in need of international solidarity in Serbia, Lesotho, Turkiye, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
All these workers and their unions ask is that we take a few seconds out of our busy days and send a prepared solidarity message. All these campaigns appear at the top of our main page.
Finally, a bit of a shout-out to Montreal’s public transit workers as they ramp up the pressure with escalating warning strikes and to the Posties as their rotating strikes continue in the run-up to the Christmas rush.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 