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 13th 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 28th, 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.
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