The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/how-labour-in-minnesota-is-protecting-people-from-ice/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included the PSAC announcement that 8,000 of its members have now been targeted for layoff. Other unions in the federal public service like PIPSC, CAPE and others, are reporting proportionate numbers.
We also carried a statement from the ITUC condemning the anti-union legislation in play and soon to be passed by the CAQ government of Quebec. That’s a bit odd and worth noting. Odd not because the iTUC is on side but because what’s happening in Quebec is at least as over the top as anything the UCP have done in Alberta, but because it’s getting more attention outside the country than in. Which in turn is odd on its own given that bad ideas like an end to the Rand Formula are not going to be turned back by provincial boundaries.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted were less depressing. We covered the push by the Northern Territories Federation of Labour to end contracting-out of healthcare workers positions and there were a number of organizing victories to report.
And as the deadline for taking out a NDP membership to participate in their federal leadership race passed, we started to see more unions endorse one of the candidates. Steel has been out there for Ashton for quite a while and this week CUPE Saskatchewan joined it while just a few days later we saw CUPE’s Ontario Division come out for Lewis.
But my favourite story, stories really, came from across the country where nurses and nursing students, following the call from the CFNU, came out to mourn and remember the life of USian ICU nurse Alex Pretti following his extra-judicial execution in Minneapolis
This week’s story from outside the country is from Myanmar. Or, rather, from outside Myanmar looking in. Research into the country’s factories producing garments and other goods for global brands since the military coup there has pretty definitively proved that factory owners and the military are working closely to suppress anything resembling worker organizing. Often violently.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included a call from UFCW to strengthen pay transparency legislation in Ontario and PSAC’s renewed call for the federal government to act on the principles set out by Beth Bilson back in the early 2000s when she headed the federal Pay Equity Task Force. The Alliance’s pay equity efforts have been continually stymied by successive governments’ commitment to fighting women workers equality demands tooth and nail, to the very last lawyer.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was coverage of Steel’s problems with the safety culture at a copper mine in BC.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Minneapolis where on 23 January unions and the rest of civil society, and I mean civil in both senses of the word, organized a huge protest demanding an end to the occupation of that city by Trump’s militia.
The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:
In 1988 members of the United Nurses of Alberta defied a ban on strike action and began a province-wide strike against cutbacks in health care. They win their case, and a better contract follows two years later.
Continuing on the healthcare theme, this week in 1981 saw 16,000 Ontario hospital workers, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, take part in an illegal strike. CUPE President Grace Hartman later goes to jail for supporting her members.
In 1872 a public meeting at the Mechanics’ Institute in Hamilton, Ontario adopted resolutions to reduce the normal six-day working week from 60 to 54 hours. When the creation of the Nine Hour League is announced, support grows in a dozen industrial centres, from Sarnia to Montréal.
And this week in 1980 Jean-Claude Parrot, president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, began a three-month jail sentence for defying a back-to-work law that ended a legal strike by postal workers in 1978.
If you didn’t understand the reference to Quebec’s attack on union security in the news summary a few minutes ago, it was this week in 1946 that Supreme Court Justice Ivan C. Rand released his report on the Ford strike and imposed the Rand Formula to promote union security.
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.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 