Month: April 2026

LabourStart Segment Script for RadioLabour Episode of 24-04-2026.

The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at:  https://rabble.ca/podcast/labour-fights-for-25-per-cent-global-minimum-tax/

Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included calls from several unions, including CUPE, Steel and the PSAC, for the federal government to do more to counteract the effects of the tightening USian blockade of Cuba, coverage from the mainstream media of the split in the Posties’ leadership as voting continues on the union’s tentative agreement with Canada Post, and lots of statements from lots of unions about the privatization crisis in the healthcare system.  Those statements all end with the unions calling for the feds to enforce the Canada Health Act.

Other stories our volunteers found and posted were about organizing victories by workers in Alberta and Ontario and announcements from CUPE that more long-term care workers in Nova Scotia are joining the provincial walkout. 

My favourite item among our Canadian stories was from the Steelworkers, a union with a very long, very deep and very profound commitment to international solidarity.  The piece from their website marks the 13^th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in which at least 1134 workers died and over 3500 were seriously injured.  The vast majority of the dead and injured were young women employed making clothing for global brands like Loblaws’ Joe Fresh.

Rana Plaza is the largest industrial homicide in modern history.

Steel has been active in holding Canadian brands to account for their role in squeezing every last cent of profit from their suppliers in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and other countries where the clothing they sell is made.  Pressing suppliers to minimize costs without regard to the working conditions this generates makes the brands directly responsible for Rana Plaza and for hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries every year.

This week’s international story of note is from the Netherlands where one of LabourStart’s campaigns contributed to a big win for the labour movement there and for union organizer Pawel Rudzki.  

Pawel has been reinstated by a Dutch retail chain with five years worth of back pay and the lives thousands of contract agency workers in the Netherlands have been transformed.  It’s currently our latest top story so it’s easy to find and well worth reading.

Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included a piece from the picket lines in Nova Scotia where long-term care workers are off the job demanding a living wage and a modicum of respect. 

What most striking about the strike, sorry, I couldn’t resist, is that the workers, almost all of them women, are so committed not just to their strike but to the residents they would normally be caring for.  It must have taken a lot of abuse and a complete lack of respect for them, their work and the patients they care for to push them out onto the street.

Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week were a number of Day of Mourning statements in the lead-up to the 28^th, ongoing concerns about asbestos exposure in a federal government building in Montreal, and some good news for BC building trades workers dealing with chronic pain.

LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from France where poster-sized photos of Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris on display outside a union office.  Cecile and Jacques are French teachers and union activists who were arbitrarily detained in Iran for nearly four years. After intense campaigning by their union and by Education International, they were released and arrived back in Paris on 8 April 2026.

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 1872 Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald announced a Trade Union Act that legalizes unions. This happens two days after leaders of the Toronto printers, who enjoyed strong public support in their strike for a nine-hour day, were arrested for common conspiracy.

Also in 1872 the first issue of the Ontario Workman appears, with the slogan “The equalization of all elements of society in the social scale should be the true aim of civilization.” The first issue of the paper also publishes an excerpt on “the normal working day” from Karl Marx’s Capital.

In 1974 in a targeted campaign for pay equity, postal workers began a seven-day illegal strike that won women postal code machine operators the same pay as male postal clerks.

And finally, in 1956 more than 1600 delegates attended the founding convention of the Canadian Labour Congress, a merger of the Trades and Labour Congress and the Canadian Congress of Labour. They called for a national health plan, full employment and a guaranteed annual wage.

LabourStart is also a campaigning website and we currently have four active online solidarity actions, two from Türkiye and one each sponsored by unions in Algeria and Malaysia.

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 those of thousands of trade unionists around the world who have already taken action.This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.

The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at:  https://rabble.ca/podcast/the-unifor-and-steelworkers-fight-back-agenda/

Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included one that is definitely labour news but maybe not in Canada. 

Our volunteers in Mexico are following allegations that a Canadian mining company operating in Mexico has been using an organized crime cartel to back a yellow union over Los Mineros, an independent, militant union whose national president spent years in exile in Canada, with the support of the Steelworkers.

Check out https://miningwatch.ca for too many more examples of how Canadian mining companies are giving us all a bad name around the world.

Other stories our volunteers found and posted were a summary of CUPE’s pitch to a Senate committee on the need for regulation of artificial intelligence, so-called, in Canadian workplaces, and, of course, we had lots of coverage of CUPE’s province-wide long-term care walkout in Nova Scotia.

But as inspiring as the Nova Scotia strike is, my favourite item among our Canadian stories was from Jamaica.  Unlike the Mexico-connected item, this one will perk you up and the Canadian involved is one of the good guys.

It’s from Brock University where Simon Black of the Labour Studies programme there is just back from events marking the Jamaica Household Workers’ Union’s 35th anniversary.  Black has been involved in providing research support to the union for years. 

This week’s international story of note is from the dumpster fire down below where the aptly-named War Department has moved to terminate the bargaining rights of all the unions representing people employed there.

Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included coverage of Equal Pay Day, which this year fell on 14 April.  The 14^th was when the average Canadian woman finally earned, in 2025 and up to 13 April, as much as the average man did in 2025.

That’s three and a half whole months of work just to earn what men did last year.

Also up on our pages were a piece about an event celebrating the history of union women’s activism in Cornwall Ontario, and an analytical piece from Canadian Dimension on the structure of care work in this country and how dependent we are on migrant workers, the vast majority of them women, to provide that care.

Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week were more workplace violence stories than we should be seeing, including one from The Pas where an emergency room nurse was punched in the face.

On a slightly more positive note, we’re also starting to see announcements of planned Day of Mourning events right across the country.  The CLC maintains a regularly updated list of them all.  You’ll find it on their website.  Look for and attend an event close to you.

We also covered the reaction of the movement in Ontario to recent changes to the workers compensation system there.  Ontario still has far more workers without WSIB coverage than all other provinces combined; approximately 60% of the 2.5 million Canadian workers without workplace liability insurance are in Ontario.

“This isn’t about resources – it’s a political choice to leave 1.56 million workers without protection, and it’s simply not right,” said Harry Goslin, president of CUPE Local 1750, the Ontario Compensation Employees Union (OCEU).

LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Lisbon where the CGTP, like unions around the world, has been joining demonstrations in support of an end to the wars in the Middle East.

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 1872 Toronto printers attracted a massive crowd of 10,000 people to Queen’s Park in support of their strike for the nine-hour day. Union leaders were arrested for conspiracy the next day.

In 1937 more than 5,000 Montreal “midinettes”, most of them French Canadian women, surprised garment factory owners by going on strike for shorter hours and overtime pay. Within weeks they won a victory for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

And in 1903 British Columbia union organizer Frank Rogers, a longshoreman, dies after he is shot while supporting clerical workers on strike against the Canadian Pacific Railway in Vancouver.  If ever you’re in Vancouver be sure and visit his grave in the Mountain View Cemetery.

This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.

The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at:  https://rabble.ca/podcast/the-ontario-government-plans-to-put-police-in-schools/

Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included fears that the federal government’s early retirement push as it reduces the size of the public service is placing pressure on pension plans, denying workers the information they need to make an informed decision about their continued employment and is going to leave behind many fewer public sector workers doing much more work. 

Also amongst our top stories were NUPGE’s Cuba solidarity work, a number of AI-related job security items and of course a few crystal ball pieces that examine the future of the movement’s relationship with the NDP in light of Avi Lewis’ election as federal leader.

Other stories our volunteers found and posted were CUPE’s claim that the employers are driving the federal government’s look at unpaid labour in the airline industry, and a possible strike by long-term care workers, also CUPE, in Nova Scotia.

My favourite item among our Canadian stories was from the moon, sort of.  Inevitably, the Artemis II space mission had some maple syrup aboard.  I suppose we should be grateful that Hanson wasn’t forced to wear a plaid shirt to and from the moon.

But as it turns out, the Quebec supplier of the syrup is an organized workplace and the Steelworkers who produce the stuff have been on strike since the middle of March.

Steel jumped on the story and is managing to grab a fair bit of attention with statements like this one from Steel’s Quebec Director Nicolas Lapierre:

The “workers are not asking for the moon. They are asking for respect”.

This week’s international story of note is from Hong Kong where the China-imposed National Security Law continues to constrain trade union activism.  The continuing imprisonment of trade union leaders like Lee Cheuk-yan is just the tip of the iceberg.

Sweeping changes to the Trade Unions Ordinance, the law governing unions in the territory, have recently resulted in the de-registration of the Professional Teachers Union after 50 years of militant organizing.  Fully 10% of Hong Kong’s unions have been de-registered since 2021.  As well, the registration of new unions continues to decline year after year as the national security noose tightens.

Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included coverage of the first Women of Steel conference since the union elected Roxanne Brown as its first women international president.

And we had a really disturbing piece from the FIQ, Quebec’s nursing union, about the impact on its members, who are still mostly women, of Bill 28.  The Bill, which recently gained royal assent, excludes healthcare, social services and education, all predominantly female workplaces, from important provisions of Quebec’s health and safety laws.

The FIQ has joined with other unions to mount a constitutional challenge to the law.  It’s important to note that the FIQ, like all nurses unions in Canada, is deeply concerned by increasing levels of violence in healthcare workplaces.

Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week was some mainstream media coverage of the safety concerns expressed by SEIU members who clean BC’s Skytrains.  Just as scary a workplace is the federal government building in Montreal where a member of the Association of Justice Counsel recently fell ill as a result of asbestos exposure.

LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from the Philippines the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) is actively campaigning for a ₱1,200 national minimum wage to address the rising cost of living and stagnant wages.

The labour movement’s history is what our current struggles are built on and this week we marked the anniversaries of these events:

In 1980 the Canadian Farmworkers Union held its founding convention at Douglas College in Vancouver. Delegates elected Raj Chouhan as president of the CFU, Canada’s first union of agricultural workers.

In 1937 In Oshawa, Ontario, 4,000 workers went on strike at the General Motors plant for recognition of the United Auto Workers. They won major concessions, and the strike is often considered the birth of industrial unionism in Canada.

And in 1983 a tractor trailer drove through a picket line at a strikebound Alcan plant in Scarborough, Ontario, causing the death of Claude Dougdeen, 51, a Trinidad immigrant and father of seven. Outraged union leaders unsuccessfully called on the province to bring in anti-scab laws.

LabourStart is also a campaigning website and 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.