The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/protecting-the-right-to-strike-in-canada/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week included a rally by hundreds of Registered Nurses Union members at the civic centre in Corner Brook. The rally was their response to the city’s decision to lockout the CUPE members who normally work there. The RNU had planned its annual meeting for the civic centre.
Speaking as the son of a nurses’ union steward, I have some advice for the City: End the lockout. You don’t want to mess with the nurses. They stick needles into people for a living.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted were about the bill C-39 presentations made by a number of unions to the Commons committee reviewing the latest attack on the right to strike, calls from BC unions for the province’s next government to build future ferries in British Columbia, not China, and, perhaps bizarrely, one of the best analyses of C-39 that I have read, from Norway, in Norwegian.
My favourite item among our Canadian stories was from the Steelworkers detailing the international solidarity that is deepening the relationship between unions in Canada, the US, and Mexico.
This week’s international story of note came from Brazil, where a number of unions, led by the bank workers, are challenging Meta’s attempt to undermine Lula’s re-election campaign. Lula, a former metalworkers union president, has been campaigning against not just the far-right candidate but the Trump administration and its tech bro allies.
The Brazilian labour movement supports Lula and as a result many unions there have lost access to their social media accounts.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included a report from CUPE’s first-ever Saskatchewan women’s conference.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week were a CUPE piece detailing the impact of over-work on healthcare workers in Newfoundland and Labrador and what the MGEU calls, rightly, a “jaw-dropping” increase in violent attacks on Winnipeg education workers.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Mozambique, where two decades of mobilization and advocacy by the National Union of Domestic Workers paid off this month as the national government enacted legal protections for domestic workers in line with ILO Convention No. 189.
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 1935 farm labourer Nicholas Schaack, 51, died in hospital following head injuries received on Market Square in Regina on Dominion Day, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police brought the On to Ottawa Trek of unemployed workers to a violent end.
This week in 1958 in Springhill, Nova Scotia, 75 men were killed in a mine disaster. A group of twelve miners were rescued on 30 October and a final group of seven were located and brought to the surface on 1 November.
This week in 1996, General Motors tried to break a Canadian Autoworkers strike by removing equipment, union members then occupied the company’s Oshawa plants.
A personal favourite, in part because it is so little-studied by labour historians, is the creation, in 1972, by feminists in Vancouver, of the SORWUC – the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada. They aimed to represent workers in marginalised, low-paying, largely female-dominated sectors that were not priorities for established unions.
LabourStart is also a campaigning website and we currently have two active online solidarity actions. One pushing the Chinese and Hong Kong governments to release Lee Cheuk-yan, the imprisoned General-Secretary of the HKCTU, the other in solidarity with six jailed journalist union members in Egypt.
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.
