The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/creating-indigenous-ai/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included the movement’s reactions to the vile threatening display by white suprematists near Kamloops.
I dunno what to say about this except that it made me proud to see the speed and vigor with which unions responded. I know what to say about the racist display itself but that would be both off-topic and not fit to be heard by any children who might be listening.
Media coverage of the ITUC’s, that’s the International Trade Union Confederation, reaction to the proposed restriction on the right to strike in federally-regulated workplaces that the Grits are pitching was a big one as well. It’s a bit odd to see the extent to which the ITUC’s, and the global union federations, get respect from the mainstream media in ways the domestic movement doesn’t.
And we carried mebbe 200 items from Canadian unions on the same nasty subject.
Hope you’re all paying attention, even if you aren’t in a workplace to which the Canada Labour Code applies, cause this is an idea that is soon going to replicated by the provinces. Perhaps not in BC and Manitoba, but the rest for sure, with Alberta likely leading the charge.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted were about the 100 days-long strike at the Bank of Canada, signs that CUPE may be joining ONA, that’s the Ontario Nurses Association, in challenging the denial of healthcare workers right to strike, and how the Fishers, Food and Allied Workers in NL is reacting to the possible creation of a snow crab fishery based on the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.
My favourite item among our Canadian stories was a heart-warming piece from Unifor about the solidarity being extended to workers on the line in Ontario.
This week’s international story of note, I can’t really call it my favourite, came from Honduras where employers have been handed a carte blanche to attack the labour movement. Since the most recent election, which saw a right-wing President and his supporters elected, over 500 union leaders have been sacked and blacklisted and violence is increasingly a response to any organizing.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included coverage of IAM Union’s women and young workers conference. My favourite though is the coverage and reviews of “Sisters of 78”, the play now on at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton. Here’s hoping the company takes it on the road. Specifically, to Cobourg Ontario.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week were the welcome if tardy news that the BC construction crane industry will be receiving more attention over ongoing safety problems, frightening stats about the violence faced by healthcare workers in Alberta, the same experienced by library workers in Ontario and by teachers in Nova Scotia.
Pop over to our French-language version of the health and safety page and you’ll see more stories about attacks on public-facing workers in schools, retail and government services by members of the public in Quebec who are frustrated by the effects of cuts to services, or affected by the lack of mental health supports, or who just think that a gas station attendant is somehow more responsible for rising fuel prices than is Trump and his war.
But the big one was the coverage we saw of the report on the myriad ways in which Cargill workers in Alberta were hung out to dry by their employer and by the provincial government during the worst of COVID.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Germany where 175,000 IG Metall members were out on the streets on 21 September in a show of defiance against concession demands by the major German vehicle manufacturers.
Podcast-wise this week Eric Lee interviewed Christopher Mung about the current situation in Hong Kong following the sentencing of union leader Lee Cheuk-yan. Christopher is the executive director of the Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor and was previously chief executive of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. He spoke about the attempts by the state to crush the once-vibrant trade union movement in Hong Kong, the ongoing resistance by workers, and the international campaign demanding the release of Lee Cheuk-yan.
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 1900 250 soldiers were called out by the mayor of Valleyfield, Québec when striking workers block access to the Montreal Cotton Company mill. The soldiers opened fire and more than a dozen workers are wounded.
Legendary labour activist Kent Rowley, was born in Montreal this week in 1917. He became Canadian director of the United Textile Workers of America in the 1940s and a founder of the Confederation of Canadian Unions in 1968.
In 1997 more than 125,000 Ontario teachers walked out to protest the province’s plans to cut school budgets and centralize control over education. The two-week protest affected two million students and is still the largest teachers’ strike in North American history.
And, finally, in 1971 a protest against a lockout at the daily La Presse in Montreal ended in a street battle between thousands of workers and police. When tear gas was used, student activist Michele Gauthier, an expectant mother, dies of suffocation.
LabourStart is also a campaigning website and we currently have XXX active online solidarity actions. The most recent to launch is a protest and solidarity campaign on behalf of Lee Cheuk-yan. Listen to our most recent podcast for the whys and the wherefores. Or don’t. But either way click through from our main page. A solidarity message is 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.
