The RadioLabour episode that carried this report can be found at: https://rabble.ca/podcast/bill-c-39-the-whole-world-is-watching/
Top stories on our Canadian French- and English-language pages this week were a joint statement from the CLC and the ETUC on the Canada-EU talks on associate membership or whatever it is being called this week, CUPE’s decision to make the coming Monday the strike deadline for support staff in Nove Scotia’s schools, and the labour movement’s reaction to BC’s election results.
Other stories our volunteers found and posted included advance notice of the Labour Arts Awards in Toronto, the CLC’s call for an end to arms exports to Israel, and the start of the process leading to a strike vote by 120,000 PSAC members in the federal public service.
This week’s international story of note came to us from the USA and it was the sad news that legendary farmworkers organizer Dolores Huerta has died, age 96. Her achievements and her influence as a Latina workers advocate and union leader would take too long to even just summarize here. Follow the link on our main page to a lengthy obituary in The Guardian to get a sense of her accomplishments.
Over on LabourStart’s Working Women pages stories from Canada included alarm bells being run by CUPE about the state of the early childhood education workforce as CUPE members marked, celebrated is not the word, ECE Workers Day on a picket line in Toronto after they were locked-out, and NUPGE’s announcement of the start of the second-ever national domestic violence at work.
Among the Canadian items appearing on our health and safety page and newswire this week were the death of a Toronto traffic agent, a member of CUPE local 79, increased workplace violence at a psych hospital in Quebec after the elimination of conflict-reduction worker positions, and the ongoing push by the BCGEU to have wildland firefighters classified as just that: firefighters instead of forestry workers, in part because of the risks they face.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Week, which you can catch on our main page until Monday, is from Portugal where on 17 October the CGTP organized a national one-day warning strike by public sector workers. The issue is a familiar one these days: Wages that are not keeping pace with increasing costs.
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 1917 saw the birth of labour activist Kent Rowley, in Montreal. He went on to become Canadian director of the United Textile Workers of America in the 1940s and a founder of the Confederation of Canadian Unions in 1968.
In 1900 some 250 soldiers were called out by the mayor of Valleyfield, Québec when striking workers blocked access to the Montreal Cotton Company mill. The soldiers opened fire and more than a dozen workers are wounded.
This week in 1997 saw more than 125,000 Ontario teachers walk 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 the largest teachers’ strike in North American history.
In 1971 a protest against a lockout at the daily newspaper La Presse in Montreal ends in a street battle between thousands of workers and police. After tear gas was used, student activist Michele Gauthier, an expectant mother, died of suffocation.
And, last but not least, in 1999 the Public Service Alliance of Canada won a long-running battle with the federal government over pay equity for workers in the public service.
This is Derek Blackadder from LabourStart reporting for RadioLabour.
