The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/taxing-canadas-ultra-wealthy/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included reactions to the Tumbler Ridge shooting from education unions around the world. At a time when workplace violence is a growing concern, schools and the staff and students in them stand out as targets for this kind of horror.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted were announcements with few details about the arbitrated new collective agreement for the CUPE members working as flight attendants at air Canada, some good news about Amazon for a change as the BC Labour Board nailed it for extending raises to all its employees in BC save for those Unifor had organized, and also from BC, the news that another bunch of CUPE members, the province’s ambulance workers, brought home a 97% strike vote.
But my favourite item among our Canadian stories was Steel’s announcement that it and US and Mexican unions will be meeting in a kind of alternative to the CUSMA review discussions to which no workers’ representatives were invited.
This week’s international story I want to flog is from Belarus, where Gennady Fedynich, a recently released and then exiled trade union activist, summed-up his years in prison this way: “I was not a prisoner, I was hostage of the system”.
The latest episode in our podcast series is a doozy. Eric Lee managed an interview with two global union federation leaders whose attempt to meet with Palestinian unions in the Occupied West Bank was frustrated by the Israeli army. Ambet Yuson from Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) and David Edwards from the Education International (EI) — were there, leading delegations. Together these two GUFs as they are known, have affiliated unions with a total of 45,000,000 members, including affiliates in both Israel and Palestine.
If you only listen to one of our pods this month, this is the one to look for.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included background, the how and the why, to PSAC’s claim that the federal government’s decision to force a return to the office and end working at home will disproportionately affect women.
Another was from CUPW which wins the prize this year for being the first Canadian union website with an International Women’s Day statement out.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was another first-past-the-post item from CUPW, this one a Pink Shirt anti-bullying statement.
And we also, sadly, carried a number of stories about the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg where more than 1600 weapons were taken from members of the public entering the hospital in just 8 months. The icing on this nasty news was a similar statement from the children’s hospital where in the same period 300 weapons were confiscated.
Manitoba healthcare workers will soon resemble Nova Scotia teachers in that they’ll all be wearing Kevlar vests.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from India where last week 300 million workers organized by several major union centres, some of which don’t normally get along terribly well, struck in a protest against the far-right Modi government’s policies and new labour laws that attack labour rights including the right to strike.
The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:
In 1949 n defiance of provincial laws, asbestos workers in Québec began a four-month strike for better wages and workplace safety. With strong public support for the miners’ cause, the strike became a forerunner of the province’s Quiet Revolution.
In 1912 male garment workers at the Eaton’s factory in Toronto were locked out when they protested changes that deprived women workers of jobs. More than a thousand employees joined the protest. Solidarity marches and public boycotts continued for several months.
If you’re in Newfoundland and Labrador you may have attended the annual remembrance of the 1982 Ocean Ranger sinking. All 84 crew on board were lost when the oil-drilling rig capsized and sank in a storm on the Grand Banks. The Ocean Ranger disaster is attributed to failures in structural design and inadequate safety measures.
And in 1944 wartime labour unrest convinced the federal government to bring in an emergency order, P.C. 1003, which required employers to recognize and bargain with unions supported by the majority of employees. This breakthrough set the standard for postwar labour relations.
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 emerg nurses at the Rimouski hospital. Tired of having their concerns about working short, workplace violence, mandatory overtime and cancelled time off, ignored or minimized, they and their union, the FIQ, have started filing grievances on larger and larger sheets of paper. The latest is over a metre tall and 80cm wide. Their media-savvy logic is that if the grievance forms get to be as big as the issues, management will have to start paying attention.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
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