The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/child-care-radiolabour/
This week the top stories sections on our Canadian French- and English-language pages included the lead-up to the CLC convention in Winnipeg, the AFL’s reaction to the voting doxxing scandal in Alberta, and how employers are using AI to disguise call centres.
But my favourite item, among our Canadian stories at least, is going to seem a bit repetitive. Because it is.
This week two more CUPE locals at LTC facilities in Nova Scotia joined their sisters on the line. By my count this means the total now is over 30 locals. Support from the public, from residents and from residents’ families is strong and growing. The strike hasn’t been won yet but the state of LTC in the province hasn’t received this kind of sustained public attention in a very long time, if ever.
If you want to follow the story more closely just find a item with a highlighted ‘Nova Scotia’ in the lead and click on it. You’ll be taken to our Nova Scotia union news pages.
As LabourStart is a global organization I like to highlight at least one non-Canadian story for you. This week I have to mention two good news stories. The first, from the BWI, that’s the global union federation for construction and building materials workers, brings the news that globally this years International Workers Memorial Day (as the Day of Mourning is known in many places), set new records for the number of events held and the number of workers attending.
The second is the very, very good news that after 17 before the courts, 14 Turkish women union activists have been acquitted of a grab-bag of nonsense criminal charges that boil down to the Turkish government finding women organizing more than a bit scary.
As it should.
The women and their union credit international solidarity and the attention it focussed on their plight for winning them their acquittals.
Think about that for the eight seconds it will take you to join our two active online actions in solidarity with other union activists in Türkiye. Follow the links for each from our main page.
Speaking of union women, over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included the heart-warming to labour history buffs news, in the form of a video report from CTV news, that Ontario’s Blyth Festival has begun rehearsals for a play about the Fleck strike.
The Fleck workers, almost all women, hung in there for five months and won not just their strike but changes to labour laws across the country. The photo and film records of the walkout are iconic. 80 women facing down five times as many police in riot gear escorting scabs into the plant. Or trying to.
Sisters of 78 opens on 12 June if you are looking for a reason to visit the Huron Peninsula. If you have other plans for your summer holidays, spend some time with the strike’s Wikipedia entry.
On our health and safety page and newswire this week was a report from CUPE on the perhaps surprisingly nasty workplace that is the Timmy’s at the Peterborough hospital, and another on what education workers in Saskatchewan are doing to make their workplaces safe.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Rome. It is one of dozens we could have run this week as workers flooded streets around the world, just not in Norther America, to mark May Day with demand for economic equality and peace.
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 1952 more than 1,000 retail employees, most of them women, began a strike at Dupuis Frères, a major department store in Montréal. It took three months, but support for the new militancy among Catholic unions helped the workers win a collective agreement.
In 1887 British Columbia’s worst mine disaster took 150 lives after an explosion in a deep underground mine at Nanaimo. The casualties included 53 Chinese labourers, whose names were not recorded by the company employing them.
And in 1972 Saskatchewan brought in an Occupational Health (and Safety) Act, the first of its kind in North America. It included the right to information about workplace hazards, to participate in safety decisions and the right to refuse unsafe work.
There are lots more labour history items like this to be found at the bottom of our Canadian news pages.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
Labour News Network 