The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/the-five-ndp-leadership-candidates-tell-why-theyre-running/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included the news that the CUPW national executive has split on the ratification of the tentative agreement the union negotiated with Canada Post. The split became very public this week when the Posties’s National President, Jean Simpson, released a letter urging members to vote no in the coming ratification vote.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted were a call from the CLC for major and overdue revisions to the federal Employment Equity Act, panicking items from the mainstream media in Nova Scotia as CUPE prepares for a province-wide strike in long-term care, and the Manitoba movement’s response to the NDP government’s budget.
My favourite item among our Canadian stories was from the Steelworkers and it wasn’t so much a news item as an invitation to us all, or at least all of us in or near Toronto, to attend the fortieth anniversary of the union’s Humanity Fund. After an afternoon of reflection on the SHF’s history, its role within the labour movement to date, and the future of international solidarity, there’s a dinner followed by a party. It’s all happening on 26 June. There’s an RSVP form for tickets on the Steelworkers website or you can click through from the story on LabourStart.
This week’s stand-out news item from abroad comes to us from Hong Kong where the imprisoned former General-Secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, Lee Cheuk-yan, appeared in court last week. He pled not guilty to inciting subversion under Hong Kong’s national security law, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Lee has already spent almost five years in prison.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included the rollout of CUPE’s new Women in Leadership Development programme or WILD, a piece from the International Federation of Journalists exposing the harassment by white nationalists of Rachel Gilmore, a Canadian journo whose work has put the Frontenac Active Club in Montreal under the microscope. And we carried a few stories about the toxic workplace experienced by women working for the Canadian Border Services Agency.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was an item from PSAC, which last week released a report calling for more and improved rehabilitation programmes in Canadian prisons as a way of, among other good things, improving the health and safety of prison staff, statements from a number of unions regarding the death of two Jazz workers in New York, and an attempt by the Coke bottler in Alberta to fire an injured worker who had a long history of complaining to management about the machine that eventually almost killed him
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Switzerland where the labour movement is mobilizing to resist a huge cut to that country’s federal budget, despite a substantial budget surplus for this year.
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 2006 an accounting instructor died from injuries received on the picket line at Centennial College in Toronto during a province-wide strike. John Stammers, 62, was a member of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
And in 1912 thousands of workers started to walk out of railway construction camps on the Fraser River in British Columbia in a strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World. When Joe Hill visits, he writes a song about the strike for the Wobbly song book.
LabourStart is also a campaigning website. One of our active campaigns is in solidarity with Algerian trade unionist Ali Mammeri, President of the National Union of Public Service Employees in the Culture and Arts Sector (SNFC). He has just been sentenced to ten years in prison in a case directly linked to his union activities. This campaign is sponsored by his union, and by the global union federations PSI, that’s the Public Services International, and the IUF or International Union of Foodworkers.
UN officials have expressed concern about his case, highlighting violations of fundamental freedoms and the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation against trade union rights.
Look for the prominent link on our main page and click through. Protest and solidarity messages are prepped and waiting for you. It’ll take just seconds to add your voice to the demand for Mammeri’s release.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 