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 14th 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.
Labour News Network 