The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/35-long-term-care-locals-in-nova-scotia-vote-to-strike/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included coverage of what seems to be a new and developing legal definition of our Charter right to collective bargaining as the Ontario Court of Appeal issued a decision on CUPW’s challenge to the latest back-to-work legislation that union has been subjected to.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted were
But my favourite was the announcement that CUPE, Unifor and Steel, are banding together as an alliance of telecommunications workers’ unions to fight the offshoring of telcom work. Over the last ten years, almost 20,000 jobs in the telecommunications sector have been outsourced abroad to the United States, India, the Philippines, Egypt, and others.
The alliance intends to stop the outflow of jobs and ensure the protection of Canadians’ data.
This week’s international story is from Spain where rail workers struck over safety issues after years of complaints and warnings resulted in 47 deaths and countless injuries in the past four weeks. After just one day of a national rail system shutdown, UGT and CCOO won an historic safety agreement.
We didn’t have a new podcast episode for you but it’s worth reminding new listeners that all our past episodes are available to download or to stream. Just follow the link on our main page.
And be sure and check our site on Monday as by then a new pod that will knock your socks off is about to be published.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included news from the line in an Ontario care home strike. OPSEU members, the workers haven’t seen a raise since 2020 while this year the agency’s CEO managed to subsist with the help of a 9.9% raise.
After their employer pitched a ‘raise’ of 1.38% over six years the workers walked and have been picketing for 12 weeks.
Another was from AUPE’s provincial women’s committee as it announced this year’s winners of its Dove Award. The award recognizes women whose compassion, courage, and leadership have created lasting change for women, AUPE members, and all Albertans.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was CUPE’s denunciations of the toxic working environment at the SQI, Quebec public infrastructure agency and a CTF item spelling out the impact on teachers of increasingly complex curriculums.
And, of course, we carried a bunch of stories about the rising levels of violence workers who interact with the public are facing. They are all worth noting but as time is limited and we don’t get stories from PEI as often as we would like, I will mention just one: a warning and a demand for change from the PEI nurses union.
The hazards it describes and the impact on healthcare workers that it details could be seamlessly transposed to Nunavut, BC or any other province and territory.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from the US. It’s a shot of activists with Students for International Labour Solidarity as they go public with their campaign to shame the Gap retail chain into pushing one of its suppliers to reinstate Haitian garment workers terminated for being pregnant and for attempting to organize.
The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:
This week in 2012 eleven farmworkers, including nine migrant workers from Peru, were killed in a highway crash at Hampstead, Ontario. The tragedy highlighted and exposed unsafe conditions in the sector and the exploitation of seasonal workers.
In 1869 James Bryson McLachlan was born at Ecclefechan, Scotland. As a union leader in Canada he became the champion of the Nova Scotia coal miners and a leading spokesman for the cause of labour radicalism.
And in 1963 At Reesor Siding, near Kapuskasing, Ontario, eleven union members were shot, three of them fatally, in a confrontation over pulpwood supplies for a strikebound mill. Three of the attackers are later fined for possessing dangerous firearms.
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 an occupation that’s new to us: the military.
Soldiers and civilian employees in the Serbian armed forces are organizing! But they face an escalating campaign of repression, intimidation, and retaliation for exercising their fundamental right to organize. Leaders of the Military Trade Union including President Ljubiša Milošević and General Secretary Dragan Simonović, have been subjected to disciplinary proceedings, transfers, demotions, surveillance, and arrest following their efforts to defend workers’ rights and report irregularities within the Ministry of Defence.
Here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor in a kind of labour rights campaign we don’t often see, though of course unions representing members of the military are far more common around the world than most Canadian trade unionists might think.
Finally, a bit of a shout-out to
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 