labour

By Carmelle Wolfson
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2008

“The Internet now is what TV was 20 years ago,” says Mike Thomas, Recreation Committee Chair of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 424. “I don’t go home and sit down and watch four hours of television. I’ll go home and spend four hours catching up on messages, chatting with friends all over the world, watching videos, reading papers, doing research on subjects of interest.”

Thomas is not alone. Recent trends suggest that Canadians are spending increasingly more time online and less time in front of the TV. According to Statistics Canada, Internet use in households with children under 18 has risen from 50 per cent in 1999 to 82 per cent in 2004. During the same time period, TV watching went down by three hours a week amongst the same age group.

This shift in people’s media habits away from top-down broadcast media like television towards more interactive network media opens up interesting possibilities for grassroots democracy and political organizing. Labour unions are increasingly taking notice, and beginning to adapt the technologies to their own uses.

In particular, social networking sites and other online innovations that facilitate user-generated content and peer-to-peer information sharing (collectively known as “Web 2.0″ technologies) have changed the way people use online media, encouraging active collaboration among users in a way that our televisions never could. Union organizers, originally frightened by the security risks of the virtual world, have shifted to publicly advocating that unions make better use of the Internet. Workers may not be able to organize using their television sets. They can, however, discuss workplace issues on the web. For this reason, unions of all varieties are now making use of Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook. It’s free, it’s popular and it’s user-friendly.

But is it union-friendly?

Dave Malka, a member of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada Local 777 in Edmonton, thinks so. He sees Facebook as a great tool for union organizing. “I usually sent out a lot of emails, but I think people ignore the emails, or it goes into their bulk email,” he explains. “I understand that happens with Facebook too,” he concedes, but Facebook is an additional way of getting information out, particularly to younger people and others outside the labour movement. Malka has spoken with many people he never would have reached before, he says. This has given the movement, which desperately needs to make inroads into the youth demographic and the service sector, a much-needed boost of energy.

UNITE HERE (a merger of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union) organizes many young service-sector workers. The union represents 450,000 workers across North America. UNITE HERE Canada co-director Alex Dagg says she probably first got the idea to use Facebook as an organizing tool from her 14-year-old son. “He doesn’t even talk on the phone anymore,” she says.

Since plugging into Facebook, UNITE HERE has used the site to organize young concession-stand workers and successfully recruited student organizations for a boycott campaign against a large American retailer - a boycott they settled last fall in what Dagg describes as “a huge win.” She stresses that Facebook was just one aspect of the campaign, though the other aspects she cites - their extensive email list and their website - are hardly traditional organizing methods either.

Rebecca Rose, the VP of Education at the Ryerson Students’ Union, also points to Facebook as the primary focus of her outreach efforts. “[At] university, Facebook is probably one of the most useful tools in organizing because just about everyone and their dog has a Facebook account, which means that that’s almost their primary way of communicating at this point.” Former Simon Fraser Student Society president Derrick Harder agrees. His student union discovered through an exit poll that about half the students who voted in a referendum on a universal bus pass heard about the vote through Facebook. The vote passed with over 90 per cent voting in favour of extending the U-Pass until 2011.

Facebook lets users self-identify as members of particular groups or networks (for instance a specific workplace or a university), which is very useful for organizers, points out Harder, who may not have a list of their membership or may not have the resources to reach them by other means. This is true for student unions and labour unions alike. A Facebook group can also act as a gauge of support during a campaign. You can tell which networks you’ve tapped into by looking at who has joined.

More importantly, Facebook allows members to self-organize. “Members take it and do their own thing. We’re not leading it and planning it all,” says UNITE HERE’s Dagg. Mike Thomas, who coordinates pool tournaments, bar nights and volunteer groups over Facebook, emphasizes the importance of the space Facebook has opened for grassroots organizing. “We’re organizing ourselves on Facebook within our union. And that’s the most important thing we can do in this horrific climate that unions are in in the province [of Alberta] right now. The way the government is actively seeking to destroy us, we need a way to be together. And this is what Facebook is allowing us to have without any need for infrastructure.”

“The U.S. National Security Agency is becoming increasingly interested in collecting user data off social networking sites.”

Derek Blackadder is a CUPE National representative. Outside his day job, Blackadder is the senior Canadian correspondent for LabourStart.org, an international organization that disseminates labour news over the Internet and encourages unions to make more effective use of online technologies. He believes that the utility of Facebook is its ability to attract people who are joining workplace-related groups for practical reasons. These people are from a much broader demographic than the typical under-35 Facebook crowd. With an estimated 40 per cent of Canadians on Facebook, the site is no longer just a youth phenomenon.

Blackadder gives the example of a hypothetical 50-year-old nursing-home employee who takes notice of her child using Facebook and, over a lunchtime conversation with co-workers, realizes it may be a useful way to start organizing around workplace issues. This worker probably wouldn’t have decided to join Facebook otherwise, but after observing what her kid is doing, it makes some sense. If users can participate in something relevant to their lives by joining Facebook, Blackadder says, they‘ll do it. “It won’t matter what their age is and it won’t matter what their gender is,” he adds. “All the demographic crap just goes out the window.”

While testing out the value of Facebook for unionists, Blackadder found the social networking site does have some restrictions. He was banned from the site not once, but twice - first for adding too many friends and then for sending too many messages. What was his response? Blackadder and his friends used Facebook to campaign to get him reinstated, of course.

Blackadder says he was becoming so addicted to Facebook that the second time his account was cancelled it came as a relief. “It gave me back about an hour a day - an hour a day I now spend reading the paper and drinking the first couple cups of coffee . . . rather than sitting in front of my computer checking Facebook to see who of all my contacts has been doing what.”

Blackadder isn’t the only labour activist to run afoul of Facebook. Malka was also cut off from the site for sending out too many messages. He has since set up a new account attached to a separate email address.

Outside of having your account deactivated, there are other, more serious concerns. A big one is a fear of surveillance by police, government or employers. Blackadder reports that in Australia it’s standard practice when hiring people into sensitive positions or workplaces to check out prospective employees on Facebook to get a sense of their politics. Blackadder also points to Facebook taking down the page for a Service Employees International Union group who were trying to organize Halifax casino workers. Their cited reason? Only individuals could set up Facebook pages.

LabourStart’s founding editor Eric Lee, doesn’t buy that, pointing out that many companies are allowed to keep Facebook pages. The real motivation, says Lee, was a lawyer for the casino complaining to Facebook about the group. It’s clear from the SEIU example that relying on sites like Facebook also makes unions susceptible to the whims of that site.

Lee feels Facebook is just another soon-to-pass fad. He thinks creating an online petition where the union retains the contact information of everyone signing it would be a more effective way of campaigning. “Imagine if Facebook had existed five years ago and if we had tried to campaign using it,” Lee wrote recently on his blog. “We wouldn’t have a mailing list today and we certainly wouldn’t be able to send out more than 50,000 emails a week.”

Another serious concern with Facebook is how it normalizes surveillance by allowing everyone to view personal information like your name, your birthdate, your friends, photos of you and even your personal conversations. “It amazed me how many people put their names and their complete dates of birth out there. The things that someone could do with that kind of information are quite impressive,” laments Blackadder. Facebook’s privacy policy states that they may share information “with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.” And according to a June 10, 2006, article in New Scientist, the U.S. National Security Agency is becoming increasingly interested in collecting user data off social networking sites.

“I’m sure there are police and other folks looking at that,” Malka responds when I ask him if he’s worried about having his name, contact info and a list of all his friends in full view. “That doesn’t bother me.” Malka does, however, plan to transfer all the information he’s collected on Facebook into his email account in the event that he loses his account again or Facebook changes the rules.

Thomas doesn’t worry about the downsides to Facebook organizing. “I don’t put anything about myself online that I don’t feel is for public consumption. And if I do I run the risk of it coming back to me. It’s just the same as if you were to tell someone something around the water cooler - it’s just a very big water cooler.” He admits he doesn’t know much about the “political leanings” of Facebook. You’re fine if you follow Facebook’s rules, he says. The way he sees it, “it’s something that you can control to a certain extent and the rest you just have to accept.”

If organizers accept a playing field where they can’t set the rules themselves, though, they must remember that at some point there may be a game over. While Facebook can be useful for seeking out people and making initial contact, users will have to find ways of retaining the contacts made through Facebook outside of the site. For Blackadder, it’s more a matter of making good use of the older web technologies available to us - like email and blogs - than jumping on board new ones like YouTube or Facebook. Plus, there is always something to be said for good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.

Carmelle Wolfson is a copy editor for Briarpatch and a freelance writer based in Toronto. When she isn’t making media she works as an outreach organizer for the Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students at the University of Toronto. You won’t find her on Facebook.

Sidebar: Beyond Facebook?
By Carmelle Wolfson

CUPE representative and LabourStart correspondent Derek Blackadder says that ideally he’d like to see progressive organizations work towards creating an alternative to Facebook “which doesn’t have all the downsides to Facebook, including the privacy issues and the fact that it’s an organization that’s far more sensitive to employers than it will ever be to unions or to workers or to other progressive organizations.”

Unfortunately something like this doesn’t yet exist in cyberspace. But it seems we’re on our way there. Blackadder reports that LabourStart, along with the global union of hospitality workers and the International Union of Foodworkers, will soon launch a global social networking site for McDonald’s workers at www.McJobs.org. And in the Netherlands, the biggest trade union confederation has already started a site for young workers called JobCircle.

The difficulty with such sites is that they won’t be viewed by users as non-partisan. The advantage of Facebook is that it reaches out to a large population outside of the labour movement. McJobs could never gain as much popularity as Facebook.

IBEW member Mike Thomas says he wouldn’t switch over completely from Facebook to another site, but he sees a union-made site as an added opportunity. He believes people are on Facebook for many other reasons than to organize: to play games, chat with their friends and family and make plans to go for drinks with their buddies. When asked about the idea of a union-friendly alternative to Facebook he says that instead of trying to lure people to a new online destination, “why not use where they’re going anyways. You’re already in their home. You’re already hanging out with them. You might as well put it right there in front of them where they can use it as they see fit.”

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By Erinn White & Dayn Gray
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2008

You arrive at an annual meeting with other union members from your industry. It includes representatives from every university in Ontario that has a Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) presence. They hand you a name tag and two drink tickets, and escort you to a room with no chairs. There are no prepared documents. There’s no agenda. Your job, along with the other hundred front-line members of the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC), is to set priorities for the sector for the next three years, to tackle obstacles to that work, and to look for concrete ways to build the group’s capacity.

No small feat, but this particular group seems to have pulled it off at their meeting in February.

The Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee steers a voluntary association of CUPE locals totalling more than 20,000 members working in the university sector. The committee’s activities include coordinating university bargaining and province-wide campaigns, political action on university issues, and facilitating information sharing between locals. It is made up of elected representatives from each campus as well as staff support and representatives from constituency groups.

The group used a facilitation process called “The Art of Hosting.” The process relies on conversations rather than structured agendas, allows participants to identify key issues of interest or concern, and emphasizes relationship building as part of the work. It’s a process that invites diverse perspectives and outside-the-box thinking. Teams of CUPE staff and members who have been trained in the method hosted the meeting.

“People realized very quickly that they had complete control over where it was going to end, and the power to identify the issues they see as important,” says Dave Michor, the national union staff person who supports the work of the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee. The Art of Hosting “gave people the opportunity to talk about issues, target methods of finding solutions or developing an action to help them find the solution.”

What flowed from that planning conference in February 2008 set the course for CUPE Ontario’s university sector until 2010. The OUWCC is working to develop the capacity of every local and to increase their strength at the bargaining table.

What the OUWCC is proving is that taking risks and thinking big are powerful ways to organize from the bottom up - relying on the expertise and strengths of rank-and-file members. These members are developing their own skills and abilities as labour leaders. Maybe more importantly, they are seeing the results of working together towards common goals.

The OUWCC is one of five industry-based sectors in CUPE - its others are municipalities, hospitals, school boards and social services. Each has an elected leadership charged with the task of improving working conditions and building better public services. The leaders of the OUWCC have been talking about coordinating their bargaining for ten years in the belief that combining their efforts would give them stronger bargaining positions than going it alone. Although the goal has been clear for a long time, transforming it into action has been a slow process. Weighed against the possibility of failure is the possibility that members will embrace the project and move forward with new energy.

Eggheads and scrambled brains

CUPE’s university sector has about 23,000 members. They do every job on campus from teaching courses to washing floors and fixing the plumbing. The two branches of the union affectionately refer to one another as “eggheads” (the academic workers) and “scrambled brains” (the tradespeople and support staff).

The diversity within the sector is a strength and a challenge. Fifty-five per cent of members are academic workers - teaching assistants and sessional faculty. The other 45 per cent are support workers. Bringing so many different classifications of members together and meeting their needs is ambitious, to say the least.

The leaders of the OUWCC know that using The Art of Hosting, a process that’s entirely directed by members, is a huge risk. “It’s a process of self-awareness and self-development, and it can very quickly fall flat. If there’s no buy-in, it will fall flat. We had a serious concern about that. We thought that academic workers might be intrigued by that challenge, but 45 per cent of the members have a more traditional local structure, and could have said they didn’t want to participate,” says Michor.

Action plans developed by the steering committee are sent back to individual member locals for approval - and so far, there’s been widespread buy-in. Each campus has a representative participating in the planning process, helping members see their personal issues addressed in the action plan. Priorities like wages, health and safety and protections against violence in the workplace were among those chosen this year as target areas for locals to negotiate improvements.

The great divide

A number of years ago, the geographic separation of university workers posed a challenge for organizing the sector. It was hard to provide members from all across Ontario with meaningful opportunities to communicate. Increasingly, though, members are making effective use of technology to stay connected. Regular conference calls, email lists, and social media like Facebook have helped shrink the province and keep everyone informed and connected.

Trying to deal with geographic challenges has always been difficult for unions in Canada. But the OUWCC has seemingly found a balance between centralization and the silo effect that plagues many other labour movement organizations. That’s why involving and motivating rank-and-file members is so important to the OUWCC. Membership in OUWCC is voluntary - locals choose whether or not to belong and contribute a voluntary levy to financially support the group’s work. Currently, 92 per cent of university locals have chosen to affiliate themselves with the group and its goal of provincially coordinated bargaining by 2010.

CUPE’s structure is based on the concept of local autonomy, where locals are given space within the larger organization to develop their own cultures and priorities and to negotiate their own collective agreements. Coordinating over 20 different locals within that environment has obviously been challenging. But the high rate of affiliation shows that it’s possible to work alongside and within existing structures to organize for concrete improvements to both the working conditions of members and the learning conditions of students.

Common issues

OUWCC members have common work environments - a link to each other that helps to make coordinated bargaining practical. Coordinated bargaining can take many forms - some unions have a common bargaining table. In this case, the OUWCC chooses to identify target issues, and locals can tailor their approaches to best meet their needs.

The OUWCC hopes that their pooled efforts will convince the government that the trend of funding cuts for universities needs to change. Their workplace conditions are also dependent on how much public funding is put into the system. The funding to universities, like most public institutions, is controlled by the provincial government.

“The shift toward neo-liberal public policies and the reorganization of government apparatuses has had major effects on working conditions across the province - indeed, throughout the country. In every sector it’s reduced the quality of public services,” says Dan Crow, the university sector’s vice-chair.

This is most immediately visible on campuses in the forms of increased tuition fees and growing debt for students, deferred building maintenance, contracting out of “non-core” functions such as food services and research, and the casualization of work. These changes have had major negative effects on the overall quality of education at Ontario’s universities.

Meanwhile, for non-academic and support workers, job security is taking a hit. Fewer new workers are hired to replace those who retire, which both increases workloads and allows universities to contract out services.

“Universities have the ability to threaten further contracting out and restructuring as a means to pressure locals on campuses to accept concessions in bargaining,” says Crow.

For academic workers, the results of underfunding are largely the same. As faculty members retire, universities are replacing them with sessional instructors who work on a contract basis. Sessionals do much of the same work as faculty: lecturing, marking, meeting with students, running seminars and preparing materials. For this, they receive a fraction of what their counterparts on faculty receive.

“This is forcing sessionals to piece together short-term work across departments and often across universities. For sessionals, job security is virtually non-existent,” says Crow. “Coordinating our bargaining efforts across the province is the key to reversing this trend. The Ontario government needs to put resources toward making our working and learning environments work for us again.”

Coalition building is becoming central to this union campaign. For a labour movement that can no longer afford to address its issues in isolation, part of the group’s strength is working with community partners and student groups. Compelling the government to act is a difficult task for any one union or community group to achieve on its own. Raising public awareness is one way to put pressure on the government to increase funding for universities and reverse the privatization trend.

Members’ voices, members’ power

Members say that one of the best things about being a part of the OUWCC is the new energy and empowerment that it gives to activists. These activists are tradespeople, support workers and teachers. As part of the committee, they sit on working groups, direct and implement campaigns and run province-wide outreach tours of campuses.

Lianne Dubreuil, support staff at Carleton University in Ottawa, speaks of the personal change she has experienced since becoming involved in 2007. When she thinks about the goal of coordinated bargaining, she says: “It’s really exciting, but it’s really scary. I have to learn how to motivate my executive and membership. We’re on the cusp of a history-making moment. It’s challenging, but I feel proud, and honoured, to be a part of it.”

“Gaining knowledge is a key reason for doing this. When we coordinate our bargaining, we’re banding together. The issues that are important to us on our campus are important on all campuses. It empowers all of us,” Dubreuil adds.

Promoting coordinated bargaining - where various locals negotiate on common timelines and focus on a fixed set of priority issues - is important to the OUWCC’s success. But it isn’t an automatic sell. Across the province, there are some significant disparities between collective agreements. Graduate teaching assistants at Brock University, for instance, are paid a considerably lower rate than those at larger comprehensive schools.

Where locals have managed to negotiate strong collective agreements, coordination has been less attractive to members because it’s more difficult to see what they can gain from their participation. But in true social-unionist style (and thanks to the hard work of both the eggheads and scrambled brains), almost every local has seen the advantages of coordinating efforts.

Long road to go

The group of activist members that make up this sector know that they’re making progress, but there’s still much more work to be done. Choosing central issues that matter to members is key to getting buy-in, especially from members who have felt disempowered by traditional representative structures of trade unions. The OUWCC knows that they have an uphill struggle to convince individuals that it’s worthwhile.

“There’s somebody reporting to the locals, so people are starting to understand why coordination is an advantage,” says Ajamu Nangwaya, an OUWCC member. “But there’s still a lot of work to do involving membership at our base level.”

Building solidarity among members who aren’t a part of the steering committee or working groups is a goal that the OUWCC will have to keep squarely in their sights if they’re going to succeed, Nangwaya adds.

In the long term, empowering individual members and locals and democratizing union structures engenders higher expectations for working conditions and a better connection to fellow workers and communities. The OUWCC is about building working-class power. Through coordination and solidarity, workers aim to win gains at the bargaining table. Whether or not they succeed in doing so, the time and effort invested in developing the capacity of activists, union locals and communities will undoubtedly produce dividends in the future.

Erinn White is a co-producer of the Labour Show on the rabble.ca podcast network. She’s also a member of the OUWCC steering committee and an active member of the Guelph and District Labour Council. Dayn Gray is a health and safety activist and a member of the OUWCC steering committee. He currently works as a union organizer.

John Peters is a political scientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He is currently studying the impacts of globalization on labour movements and public policy in North America and Western Europe.

By John Peters
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2008

Standing in a crowd of a few thousand auto workers, their families, and union and community allies rallying outside General Motors’ Oshawa truck plant in June, I couldn’t help but think, “Way too little. Way too ineffective. Probably way too late.”

In my more pessimistic moments, I wonder if this isn’t true of the situation facing the labour movement as a whole. Canadian labour leaders and activists will need to be proactive and creative in the coming months and years if they hope to avoid the fate of those Oshawa auto workers.

The auto workers’ rally followed a valiant two-week blockade by CAW Local 222 of the automaker’s head office after GM announced the plant would close, putting 2,600 people out of work. Local union leaders speaking at the rally railed against their double-crossing employer, which just two weeks before had inked a new contract that included wage, benefit and other concessions from the CAW on the promise of new investment in the Oshawa plant.

But despite much tough talk and the well-publicized rally, the union was never able to make the blockade anything more than symbolic. A court injunction filed by GM ended it, and the ordeal left the majority of workers frustrated, bitter, and angry - hardly results that anyone in the labour movement could spin as positive.

Lacking the militancy that empowered auto workers in the past, and now with an all-too-often compliant relationship with employers - in addition to far too few organizing gains in an increasingly non-unionized auto sector - the CAW has lost much of its ability to maintain industry wage standards and has forfeited a good deal of its clout with the big three auto employers; Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

What CAW members are learning the hard way is that their recent embrace of concessions, labour-management co-operation, and political lobbying for subsidies and competitive business supports does not add up to a winning approach for working people.

The CAW’s troubles, though, are only symptoms of much bigger problems for organized labour. Throughout North American and Western European labour movements today, unions face an ever-growing list of challenges, from increasing financial globalization and industrial competition, to ever more frequent lay offs in unionized manufacturing, to the expansion of low-wage, non-standard, non-unionized jobs. Unfortunately, the outcome is always the same: organized labour loses the battle. Now, the movement is in serious retreat.

Even if there are small victories - and there are some - unions in Canada and abroad have given up many of their best means for protecting workers. Organizing - the hard work of bringing the benefits of unionization to unrepresented workers - has fallen off the map. Militancy is more often than not spoken of as ancient history. Partnership deals with employers are now regularly sold to members as the only solution. Too often, unions are now using concessions as the default position in their efforts to keep companies from closing workplaces entirely.

As a result, workers perpetually find themselves on the losing end of an economic conflict that sees business reap record profits in boom times while workers feel the pain in times of crisis.

Many things will have to change. But the basic facts are clear: unless unions tack in a different direction and begin making changes to everything - how they organize to the focus of their education programs to how they mobilize politically - rolling defeats like the one in Oshawa will continue to lay the groundwork for even greater losses in the future.

How bad is it?

How bad is it? For unions and working people here in Canada, pretty bad. It’s even worse in countries like the United States and Great Britain. Over the past 30 years, the rise of global finance and the spread of shareholder capitalism into ever larger transnational corporations has forced labour into retreat.

Twenty years ago, business used to finance itself from commercial bank loans. Now with governments reforming financial and corporate governance systems, business has taken the bulk of its financing from bond and stock markets - the new “shareholders” in global capitalism.

The results have been disastrous. Focused on driving down costs and maximizing the flow of profits to stockholders, multinational corporations have sought to put the brakes on labour rights, and to push back any and all gains labour made in the post-war period.

International operations like General Motors have used debt to finance takeovers the world over, and then engaged in massive cost-cutting through shutting plants, laying off workers, and cutting wages, all the while opening more non-union operations in cheaper regions around the globe.

Other multinationals such as Mittal Steel, the world’s largest steelmaker, under pressure to meet market expectations for better profits and burdened with heavy financial obligations because of their thirst for global mergers and acquisitions, have sought to restrict union organizing and strikes in many countries or sought to bypass unions altogether, using lay offs, short-term contracts and outsourcing to maximize profit.

Unions have not been able to put up much of a fight. If weighted for size of the workforce across North America and Western Europe, union coverage of workers has declined from some 33 per cent of the workforce in the early 1980s to less than 21 per cent today.

In the U.S. and the U.K., the numbers are even more abysmal. American unions lost more than nine million members over the past 30 years, with union density slipping to 12.5 per cent overall and a measly 7.4 per cent in the private sector. In the U.K., meanwhile, unions saw their numbers decline by over six million and union density fall by almost half to 29 per cent over the past 25 years. In both countries organizing is at a standstill, with certification of new workers at less than 20 per cent of the number required even for unions to maintain their current numbers.

In Canada, while officially unions do not appear to be in a similar crisis, the situation is far from rosy. The loss of hundreds of thousands of unionized manufacturing jobs, along with manufacturing restructuring, lay offs and outsourcing, has driven private-sector union density over the past few years to Depression-era lows of 15 per cent - less than half of the 34 per cent reached in the early 1970s.

In auto manufacturing, primary metals, forestry, and textiles, plant closures and workforce reductions have ravaged unionized workplaces. In Ontario, the manufacturing sector eliminated 32,000 jobs this past July alone. Since November 2002, a total of 375,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared, the majority in unionized manufacturing.

If not for organized labour’s public-sector expansion in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia, the prospects for organized labour in Canada would appear even more dismal, as unionized jobs in education, health, and social services jobs accounted for close to 70 per cent of all growth in the unionized workforce over the past decade.

Unsurprisingly, as organized labour has lost ground, working people have seen their economic fortunes decline as well. Today in Canada, 51 per cent of workers are either in non-standard jobs or in low-paid full-time jobs.

The majority of immigrants today earn less than a third of what most white workers make, and most Statistics Canada estimates of “low income” status (i.e. serious poverty and really bad jobs) for recent immigrants exceed 40 per cent. Young workers face similar obstacles. In 2005 in Ontario, for instance, 94 per cent of all jobs for workers between the age of 15 and 24 paid less than $20,000 annually and 90 per cent of jobs for young workers were part-time, temporary, or non-standard.

Schooled by the public sector

What has organized labour in Canada done to stem these reversals? In the public sector, quite a bit. Throughout much of the private sector, not nearly enough.

Selectively using strikes to win and preserve principles essential to their collective agreements, some public-sector unions have galvanized their memberships to engage in widespread public advocacy for better public services, community-sustaining public-sector jobs, and publicly accountable management. In doing so, they have often garnered broad public support.

Last fall, for instance, city workers in Vancouver rejected contracting-out and refused to back down on demands for pay equity. Five thousand CUPE-represented workers went out on strike for three months and avoided major concessions.

Similarly, in 2004, after the Campbell government ripped up collective agreements and contracted out work, the B.C. Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU - a division of CUPE) launched a week-long strike with over 40,000 health care workers. Supported by many other trade unions, they too used a strike to garner wide support and then challenged the Campbell government in court - and recently won. Indeed, nurses across the country have also regularly used strikes, both legal and illegal, to protect jobs, wages, and working conditions.

In the face of these attempts, governments have legislated public-sector unions back to work, frozen wages, forced workers to accept privatization of public infrastructure and public jobs and arbitrarily extended contracts. Provincial governments from Newfoundland to B.C. have also threatened public-sector unions with further draconian actions such as essential service legislation that removes the right to strike and bills like B.C.’s Bill 29 and Saskatchewan’s Bill 5 that removed the right to unionize for thousands of workers.

Yet the numbers suggest that such public-sector workers have been better able to fight back than have unions in the private sector.

Sticking to a form of unionism that combines militancy with bargaining, and public advocacy with member education and mobilization, public-sector unions have been able to stave off concessions and in many cases make steady gains. Public-sector unions have also continued to work with a host of community groups to advocate against the privatization of services from health care to water, social work to pension financing - something that most private-sector unions are not doing.

Many such public campaigns, as in Hamilton, Edmonton, and Nova Scotia, have even reversed earlier privatizations of water utilities, recreation facilities and schools. Meanwhile, in Montreal on May 3, 50,000 workers came out in protest of planned further privatizations of Quebec health care.

Moreover, this past spring, a recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal challenge launched by the HEU declared that provincial governments do not have the right to exclude workers - like those in health and community social services - from constitutionally protected rights to freedom of association and to form unions, and ordered the provincial government in B.C. to pay $75 million for compensation and retraining.

By holding to traditional tactics like strikes, mobilization and advocacy, a number of public-sector unions have protected and improved wages and working conditions. In health care, long-term care, and nursing, many provincial public-sector unions have gone even further, using coordinated and centralized styles of bargaining to lift all members to the best level possible.

By way of contrast, the gains won by private-sector unions have been smaller. Few have systematically combined organizing, militancy and effective public advocacy in order to win concrete victories.

A good example of effective private-sector union activism has been the United Food and Commercial Workers’ decade-long fight to improve the conditions of foreign agricultural workers, most notably in southern Ontario. Through a court challenge on the constitutional right of farm workers to unionize and the founding of migrant worker support centres as well as provincial advocacy, the UFCW has forced industrial farmers to provide basic necessities like clean water and bathrooms. The union has had some success in making the Canadian, Mexican, and various provincial governments uphold the bare minimum of standards, and has recently launched organizing drives on four farms. Just this past June the first contract for 14 migrant agricultural workers was certified in Manitoba.

But for all the UFCW’s efforts, though, foreign agricultural workers in Ontario still only have the right to “associate” - not unionize - and across Canada, agricultural workers are still exploited with impunity. Many face daily threats of firing and deportation, while working on farms that do not extend even the basic provision of drinkable water and adequate shelter. But major improvements in the situation of migrant farm workers in Canada will require both renewed energy by the UFCW and a strategy of broad coalition building across and beyond the labour movement.

The same is true for the growing thousands of low-paid workers in precarious employment. In Toronto, some of the largest public- and private-sector locals in Toronto have chipped in to support a Workers’ Centre geared to helping and educating workers about their rights at work. Led by one of the toughest, streetwise organizers around - Deena Ladd, a one-time UNITE organizer and long-time community activist - the centre has had some success not only in mobilizing workers to bring bad employers to heel, but also in bringing much-needed media attention to the extent to which low wages and poor working conditions are prevalent throughout the greater Toronto area.

But for the six million plus workers across Canada who are stuck in bad jobs, this is little more than the proverbial drop in the ocean - good intentions to be sure, but hardly strong or effective enough to shift the balance of power in favour of workers.

Retaking the initiative

The facts are pretty plain: within Canadian unions today, there is too little organizing, too few strikes, too many management-partnership deals, and little strategic thinking or member mobilizing.

Despite much talk and countless resolutions over the past decade, the majority of Canadian unions have failed to make organizing a priority. Attempts to organize new workers have fallen by 25 per cent over the past decade. At the same time, new certifications of workers have fallen to record lows of 40,000 per year, down from 100,000 plus in the 1990s.

During the last national survey in 2001, it was discovered that only 6 per cent of Canadian unions spent more than 20 per cent of their revenues each year on organizing new workplaces that lack union representation. Over one-fifth did not spend anything at all, and almost half spent less than five per cent on organizing. If this were not bad enough, approximately half of Canadian unions have no dedicated staff organizers exclusively responsible for organizing, and set no specific organizing targets.

Even more disturbing is the fact that internal numbers at two of the largest unions reveal that fewer than half of new certifications are actually new union members. Rather, these certifications are simply the result of representation votes among competing unions in the wake of sector or employer restructuring or mergers - the labour movement effectively cannibalizing itself - or simply due to internal growth in a bargaining unit within a workplace.

The effective use of strikes to make real gains is also on the wane. In the 1960s and 1970s, union leaders along with rank-and-file militants were hardly afraid of using strikes to spur union growth and win organizing drives. This is no longer the case.

Work stoppages due to strikes and lockouts in Canada fell from an annual average of 754 in the 1980s, to 394 in the 1990s, to 319 in the 2000s. Workdays lost from strikes have fallen from highs of 11 million in the late 1970s to 5.5 million annually in the 1980s, to no more than 2.6 million over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s. Where close to 20 per cent of workers would be involved in at least one strike a year in the mid-1970s, at best no more than one per cent are today.

Such a reversal is part of a larger shift in unions. Leaders and staff have moved from an offensive to defensive posture, focusing less on expanding the frontiers of labour’s power in the workplace and simply trying to defend what has already been won. When doing so appears impossible, unions are then resorting to concessions. Union after union has abandoned the selective use of strikes to make gains or to preserve things once thought essential to collective bargaining, and instead seeks simply to sign agreements with employers, while doing no public advocacy at all.

On top of this, some in union leadership are promoting new business-oriented strategies - employer partnerships - ostensibly to bolster declining numbers and to protect jobs. The CAW’s recent joint labour-management agreement is the most well-known of these. The Magna agreement signed away the right to strike and the shop-steward system for the promise of an arbitration system and further organizing in Magna’s plants.

Such agreements are, in fact, increasingly common throughout the private sector. In everything from long-term care to low-end manufacturing and forestry, Canadian unions have signed partnership agreements that impose wage and benefit concessions with the hope of holding onto unionized jobs.

Early results show the risks of this conciliatory approach to be far higher than the rewards. For in adopting partnership strategies, too many union leaders have sold collective agreements to members on the basis that the interests of union and management are the same - when they are not, as manufacturing plant closures like that in Oshawa have emphatically showed.

Wake up? Stand up?

The easy response to all this would be to say that union leaders need to stand up and lead, and workers need to wake up and take action before a century’s worth of victories are swept away.

But things are not so simple. Many leaders are old, as are their memberships, and too few are willing to change direction and take the high-stakes risks necessary to move forward. Too few union staff have the educational opportunities required to learn how to deal effectively with global consulting and law firms that now regularly advise transnationals and governments alike.

Too many unions lack the basic talent to weave bargaining with sophisticated communication strategies and political advocacy. And outside of some labour councils - such as in Toronto and Montreal - there are simply far too few activists in positions of leadership. Within unions, there are even fewer with the gumption to make substantive changes.

Politically, the problems are just as large. Traditionally, unions have tried to influence elections, legislation and policy through backing social democratic and, in Western Europe, socialist parties.

In Canada, unions joined the political left and formed the NDP in 1961 to fight for basic universal rights and equality. Added to this were Quebec unions that formed the Parti Québécois and pushed for public-sector unionism, universal public services and provincial control of finance and industrial development.

But over the past 20 years, union enthusiasm for the NDP and the PQ has given way to frustration and ennui.

Few unions have been happy when the political parties that are supposed to be the “friends of labour” turn to “third way” politics that say little about regulating finance and protecting working people, and have too often led to accommodating business interests at the expense of better wages and jobs.

The majority of unions remain affiliated with the NDP and the PQ. But NDP support for back-to-work legislation and public-sector cutbacks, and PQ support for free trade, has led unions like the CAW to break ranks and turn to strategic voting and issue campaigns in lieu of political support and the political education of members on the importance of parties of the Left.

Today, only roughly a quarter of union households vote for the NDP in federal elections (only slightly better during provincial elections); in Quebec, only a bit better than a third do so. The large majority of workers vote for the Liberals and the Conservatives and in Quebec today, the Action Démocratique du Québec.

If nothing else is clear, an agenda for change is more necessary than ever for the labour movement. But what any agenda for change requires is a template for how to make reforms within unions themselves as well as how to move forward politically.

Putting class and capitalism back into the equation would be one good place for unions to start. More education and social movement mobilizing for global equality and environmentally sustainable politics are two others.

The problems beg for solutions. One can only hope that activists and union leaders will begin to take the necessary steps to go beyond “far too little” and “far too ineffective” before it is, in fact, far too late.

John Peters is a political scientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He is currently studying the impacts of globalization on labour movements and public policy in North America and Western Europe.

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By John Peters
Socialist Project
E-Bulletin No. 114
June 17, 2008

There is always something unsettling about people who say one thing and do another. There is for one thing the hypocrisy. Then, there is the uncertainty.

It only takes a few disappointments to sow the seeds of doubt about whether you can ever trust a person’s judgement again or whether you can ever expect them to fulfill their responsibilities in the future.

These problems become even greater when those in leadership positions engage in such ’shambolic’ efforts that involve saying much and doing little, while rejecting all criticism. Couple this with trying to shut down any hints of debate or questioning of decisions or strategies, and what you end up with is a sort of variation on the ‘Emperor has no clothes’ fable.

All these problems were very much in evidence at the recent Canadian Labour Congress Convention in Toronto (May 26-30, 2008) and all of these problems raise serious red flags about the state of the Canadian labour movement today. But in a variation of the story, there was something even more staged and more malevolent about the Congress - more an event of the ‘Leader has no clothes, but I dare anyone to say anything about it.’

Even though there were many good resolutions dealing with renewing organizing, fighting privatization, establishing a national pharmacare program, and protecting and renewing good, unionized manufacturing jobs, there was very little to suggest that the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) would play any effective role in pushing these policies forward.

Many of the final CLC resolutions suggested nothing more than future meetings with union staff to discuss options. Others only broached the importance of raising issues. Few detailed how a campaign would actually be launched. None made the promise that any money would be devoted to these causes.

Even more worrisome was that in the floor debates, there was a good deal of evidence that the CLC and many in leadership positions were more interested in trying to shut down discussion and shut down the kind of activism necessary to move progressive ideas forward, rather than trying to stir passions, raise public awareness, and mobilize workers across Canada.

The Canadian Labour Congress - Yesterday and Today

Outside of organized labour, the Canadian Labour Congress is a generally unknown entity to most Canadians. Established in 1956, its basic functions were to operate as a central public communication body for labour, lobby government behind the scenes, conduct research, and help educate workers in local and provincial labour councils across Canada.

The CLC was also established as the key fundraising arm and supporter for the NDP, something it continued to do until 2003, when federal financing laws cut at labour donations, while leaving large loopholes for corporate donations through individual and diffuse political action committees.

The CLC had a number of useful secondary functions. Among the most effective was organizing new members where it was most difficult to do so and where unions had less influence. Also important was the role the CLC played in the mid-1970s helping coordinate and organize a national general strike against wage and price controls, as well as strikes against inadequate economic policy and draconian public sector legislation.

Today, the CLC is a much more circumscribed organization, and it has more often than not accommodated to liberal market political reforms instead of actively trying to change them for the better.

The CLC no longer organizes workers, nor does it provide financing or political direction for union members across the country. Over the past ten years, under the leadership of Ken Georgetti, public campaigns have taken a backseat to attempts at lobbying parliamentary committees and house members to change a select few pieces of legislation. Attempts at organizing national strikes or national demonstrations have all but vanished.

To its credit, many of the CLC’s researchers do produce some of the best material on labour markets and economics around. But little of this material makes its way to members, and to the general public. It is almost wholly invisible.

‘Unions Now More than Ever?’

These changes have not been for the better, and it showed at the most recent convention in Toronto.

Ostensibly organized around the theme, ‘Unions! Now More than Ever!,’ on major debates, national union leaders were often missing. On other issues like national pharmacare or workers’ centres for agricultural workers, leaders and staff alike were busier with their Blackberries than with the events unfolding on the convention floor. Throughout the entire convention, most staff complained miserably that the congress was a complete waste of time, and left at the earliest possible time or for any modestly convenient reason.

The CLC also made nothing more than a blip in Canada’s biggest media market over an entire week - a mention in the National Post no less that Ken Georgetti was re-elected as president. This is more than a bit odd for a central labour body that claims to represent some three million unionized workers across Canada, with annual revenues of twenty million and a good-sized staff, and more than a few employed in communications and media relations.

Even more troubling were the actions of the three-time incumbent CLC President Ken Georgetti, who again ran uncontested for the president’s job. Whenever the debate took a turn Georgetti disliked, the speaker’s microphone was cut off. Whenever attempts were made to amend resolutions, he conveniently forgot all procedures for doing so. Whenever, questions began to be raised, he would move to cut off debate. Georgetti acted more like a leader under threat of an unseen conspiracy than the head of a democratic union organization.

For a labour leader, whose job it is to inspire and educate members, his performance was a curious mix - think Stéphane Dion channelling Mike Harris. It was hardly a demonstration of confident and assured leadership, and hardly a presentation of vision and charisma that most rational union delegates would think worthy of re-election for a fourth time.

Still, there were highlights. Laudable speeches by some of the most powerful and respected voices in labour such as by Paul Forder of the Canadian Auto Workers on organizing and the need for solidarity, toughmindedness and the will required for unions and the labour movement to grow in a way that benefits all, raised everyone to their feet.

Sid Ryan of the Canadian Union of Public Employees also perked up everyone’s ears with his speech about strikes and the right to strike, and how unions have had to use this basic tool of collective action, time and again to win the most minor as well as most major of gains, often in the face of police, repression, and arrest.

Also noteworthy was the Canadian Labour Congress giving Dr. Henry Morgentaler its highest honour, the Award for Outstanding Service to Humanity, for his contribution to the cause of equality and choice in reproductive rights for women. Less praiseworthy was the way in how the CLC handed out the award - in complete media lockdown that effectively barred any wider public comment or discussion.

Labour’s Problems

But if the week long convention did little to leave an impression that the current generation of leaders is up to the task of revitalizing unions, in discussions with workers and staff around the country, at least something of a picture is emerging in people’s minds of key problems facing the labour movement that have to be tackled now.

Chief among these is the growth in cheap labour. Today, across Canada, only fifty-four percent of jobs are full-time and full-year, and more than forty percent of all jobs can be classified as ‘low-wage’ - this includes part-time, temporary, and contract employment, as well as workers making less than fifty percent of the median wage. As disturbing are the forty-three hundred temp agencies currently set up in Canada, many of which employ people well below baseline employment standards of wages, hours, and basic benefits.

There are also now hundreds of thousands of workers on temporary work permits - all without the right to unionize. These workers are typically unprotected by basic employment standards, and the vast majority have little protection against accidents or sickness, and no access to any social programs - like health and unemployment assistance - despite paying taxes and EI premiums.

The second biggest problem facing the labour movement is closely related: the decline in union organizing and the failure of unions to adequately deal with increasingly restrictive, neoliberal legislation.

Over the past decade, union organizing in Canada has fallen off the map. The organizing of new union members has hit record fifty-year lows of 40,000 or so in over the past few years, less than a third of what is required if unions even want to tread water and keep up with employment growth. As a result, today only fifteen percent of those in private sector across Canada have union representation and protection. And with fewer members, there are of course, fewer resources for organizing.

A few workers and staff are beginning to realize the depth of the problem, and also the fact that as their unions decline, so too do their prospects for better wages and better deals from governments. But how to make this shift in resources and staff is a key political question, and one not easily answered because of the internal barriers internal many union activists face.

A third problem follows from this: political impasse: the lack of fresh thinking and the turn by many union leaders and staff to partnership deals with employers, usually based on giving concessions at the bargaining table in return for tissue-thin employer promises for jobs.

These problems have been prevalent throughout private sector industrial unions over the past few decades, but have been given even more prominence of late by the Canadian Auto Workers and their unprecedented deal with Frank Stronach and Magna auto parts.

In signing a deal that relinquishes the right to strike, bars the union from educating new members, and prevents the union from bargaining on workplace issues, the CAW has essentially ceded the tools needed for unions to improve wages and working conditions at Magna, and undercut any hope that future Magna agreements will lead to improvements elsewhere in Magna or in the auto parts sector.

More disquieting still is the very strong possibility that CAW’s Magna deal will set the new benchmark for all industrial employers, who will use the deal to seek more concessions from workers in everything from manufacturing to mining, transport to long-term care.

And when this isn’t enough, as GM showed last week, it is very easy indeed to pressure governments into coughing up millions of dollars, and then simply pocket the cash when you shut down a plant, saving millions in wages and capital costs.

Finally, the Canadian labour movement faces a fourth problem: the reality that workers deal with inside their own unions today of undemocratic structures and bureaucratic obstacles. These pose huge difficulties to overcome before any progressive action can be taken.

A common occurrence, for example, is that union leaders are opting for partnership deals with employers rather than effective mobilization and fight back strategies. More and more often, to sell these deals, union staff and leaders now regularly resort to fear tactics in their attempts to force through acceptance, telling members that unless they accept concessions they will lose their jobs. Globalization - the tale is commonly told - is the ogre in the room, and it brooks no dissent.

When this fails to convince, union leaders then move on to limiting debate at microphones, councils, and meetings, and all the while cutting education programs, and having staff ‘weed out the bad apples’ of those who speak out from union activities. These are tactics that are not all that different from what was in evidence throughout last week’s CLC convention.

Younger workers especially are beginning to realize that the undemocratic practice of shutting down debate solves nothing. At convention after union convention over the past few years, whether in the public or private sector you can meet young, energized, men and women interested in turning around their unions, and widening the public arena for debate and discussion on alternative mobilizing and organizing strategies.

This is a cause for optimism. For despite the extent of problems that many workers talk privately about, the fact remains that recognition is the first step towards dealing with the problems. It is also the case that when enough people want to do something to better, sooner or later a critical mass emerges to force the issues home.

An Action Agenda

John Cartwright might be one such labour leader who can provide a reason to think a better day might yet come to pass. Prior to the CLC convention, Cartwright - President of the Toronto and York District Labour Council - criss-crossed the country talking about the need for a new ‘Action Agenda.’

Recognizing the need for a plan that workers can get behind, Cartwright spoke eloquently of the need for real commitments to organizing, public campaigns to stop privatization, and the need for organized labour to lead rather than follow the debate for environmental sustainability.

His was an articulate and stirring message that can and should provide a starting point for debate. But it is also an agenda that too few have heard about and that many in the upper levels of the labour movement find challenging. It will also require many more to join in. Unfortunately, Cartwright had little impact in getting current union leadership to make real commitments to work for solutions at the CLC.

An agenda for change is more necessary than ever today. But what any agenda for change also requires is a template for how to make reforms within unions themselves as well as within union bodies like the CLC. In the long-run, it will not be enough to simply organize new members and launch more public campaigns. Rather what will be most important are the kinds of unions and the kinds of political party that workers and young activists can build and lead.

Throughout the post-war period, the growth of unions depended on strong parties of the left as well as unions expanding the number of political and educational opportunities so that workers could apply their learning for the collective good. Social equality depended on unions and left parties keeping capital in check and improving public services that benefited all. Political success depended on hard work, cooperation, and basic strategic focus.

In theory, these political principles are still easily enough learned and agreed to. In practice, as the CLC convention so painfully demonstrated, they face innumerable obstacles. In the problems lie the solutions. One can only hope that those who want change in the Canadian labour movement can find the solutions in time.

Yet, as the old fable and a good deal of recent history reminds us, a start might be made simply by speaking up - because as more than a few leaders have discovered, it has often only taken a comment and some further activist organizing to start the ball rolling for political reform.

John Peters is a political scientist at Laurentian University. He is currently writing about labour market deregulation in North America and Western Europe, and its impacts on unions and jobs. He can be reached at jpeters@laurentian.ca.

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By Todd Gordon
The Bullet #112
SocialistProject.ca

What’s the monetary value of a Colombian trade unionist’s life? As it turns out, it depends on how many are killed in a given year since the potential fines the Colombian government will have to pay as penalty under its free trade agreement (FTA) with Canada whenever a union activist is killed is capped at $15 million. If this sounds like a sick joke I apologize, but this is in effect what the Canadian government actually negotiated.

On June 7th, Canada proudly proclaimed that it had successfully concluded its trade deal with the human rights-troubled Andean country. Negotiated with an efficiency that must make the Bush administration - whose own trade agreement with Colombia has stalled because of Congressional opposition - jealous, the deal was concluded less than a year after negotiations began.

With four Canadian cabinet ministers visiting Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and other members of his cabinet between July 2007 and February 2008, it’s clear the Harper Tories had made the trade deal a major priority despite Colombia’s appalling human rights record (see, for example, my article on Canada and Colombia). As new Foreign Affairs minister (and ex-Liberal), David Emerson, declared, “The Government of Canada is delivering on its commitment to open up opportunities for Canadian business in the Americas and around the world.”

The agreement, which still hasn’t been made public, will now undergo a legal review by Canadian and Colombian lawyers. After the review is completed, it’ll be brought to the House of Commons for ratification, which should not be a problem for the Tories despite their minority government since the Liberals have said they’ll support it if it contains language on human rights. It does - but I’ll come back to that in a moment.

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Squeezing the American Dream

A review of The Big Squeeze: Tough times for the American worker

By Nicholas von Hoffman, Truthdig
June 9, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/87405/

You may be surprised to learn that the pleasant person from FedEx Ground delivering your package owns the truck which he or she has parked in front of your house. FedEx Ground drivers, you will find out in Steven Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, are not FedEx employees.

They are what are called independent contractors, although it demands no little effort to discern what about their position is independent. If they do not do what they are told, their contracts are abrogated forthwith. They are required to buy their own truck with 60 monthly installments of $781.12, which comes to $46,867.20. Plus there is a final kicker payment of $8,000, all of which adds up to a grand total of almost $55,000. On top of this, as an independent business person, the driver must bear the costs of insurance, maintenance, fuel, repairs and the fee for the FedEx uniform rental.

FedEx Ground drivers who want to take vacations must hire their own replacements to cover the routes while they are gone. If a FedEx Ground independent contractor can afford it, he should take a vacation because the hours are long, the work is hard and the compensation is less than princely. A driver will take home between $25,000 and $35,000 a year.

One of the strengths of Greenhouse’s book is that it puts the meat of specificity on the bones of labor statistics. The Big Squeeze is salted with interviews and biographies of people in dozens of occupations. It is instructive to read the statistics concerning highly trained people losing their jobs to people in low-wage countries, but the numbers take on painful significance when you are introduced to an electrical engineer named Myra Bronstein, working for Watchmark, a Bellevue, Wash., firm which develops software used by cell phone companies.

One day Bronstein and 17 of her colleagues got an e-mail asking them to report to Watchmark’s boardroom the following morning. As Myra and the other quality assurance engineers gathered in the boardroom, the director of human resources began giving out large manila envelopes. Once everyone was there, Myra recalled, “The head of HR said, ‘Unfortunately, we’re having layoffs, and you’re in the room because you’re being impacted by the layoffs.’” The 18 engineers were dumbstruck, but the head of human resources pressed on. “‘Your replacements,’” she continued, “‘are flying in from India, and you’re expected to train them if you are going to receive severance.’”

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By Dave Hall
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
July 12, 2007

It has been a good summer for workers’ rights in Manitoba – at least on the legal front. On June 26th, the Manitoba Labour Board (MLB) issued a groundbreaking ruling on seasonal agricultural workers at Mayfair Farms.

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