The Dominion - Labour

The Case for Permanent Free Public Transit

Miles — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:32:19 +0000

HALIFAX—Public transit will be running again in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) this week, and until the end of March transit users will enjoy unlimited free rides on buses and ferries.

Metro Transit says the free fares are a way to “welcome our customers back on board and thank everyone for their patience” during the 41-day strike. The Coast, Halifax's alt-weekly, also reports that free fares may be a way to protect drivers from angry riders.

While there’s been no shortage of criticism of city council and Metro Transit management recently, the city does deserve credit for this rather enlightened decision. Besides giving bus riders a break from searching for exact change or buying tickets or passes, the move creates space to discuss what might seem like an out-there idea—moving to a permanent zero-fare public transit system.

Of course, as HRM councillors are fond of reminding us, running a public transit system isn’t truly “free.” Fares account for 37 per cent of the cost of running Halifax’s buses and ferries, according to soon-to-be ex-mayor Peter Kelly; the rest comes from general tax revenue. Kevin Lacey of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation apparently opposes the current no-fare deal, tweeting that “there’s no free ride your [sic] paying for it anyway!”

Still, an impressive handful of small to mid-sized cities around the world have deemed it worthwhile to implement some degree of free transit for commuters.

Removing fares from public transit encourages more people to use it, and more people riding buses, ferries, and streetcars is undoubtedly a good thing. Transporting 40 people on a bus is much more efficient than transporting those people in private cars, meaning less traffic congestion, less air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and less public spending on road infrastructure and parking lots.

Presumably, Metro Transit is aiming to stem a decline in bus ridership, which is a typical consequence of a transit strike. Ridership declined four per cent after the last bus strike ended in Halifax 14 years ago, according to Metro Transit’s own figures.

Indeed, long-term zero-fare transit systems have been shown to increase ridership by up to 50 per cent, according to a 2002 study by the US Department of Transportation (DOT).

Of course, notes the study, removing fares on its own likely doesn’t result in fewer motorists on the road. Where public transit is slow, inconvenient, or unavailable, commuters stick to their cars—ridership increases in fare-free zones are partly due to people taking the bus when they otherwise might have walked or cycled. Transit consultant Jarrett Walker told Halifax Magazine recently that when Metro Transit increased the frequency of the number 1 bus, ridership increased 17 per cent.

“Frequency is freedom,” Walker said.

It’s important to note that going fare-free can also save money for public transit systems, who no longer have to pay for ticket printing; farebox collection, maintenance and personnel costs; and insurance.

The DOT study says that fare-free systems can work especially well in smaller transit systems, and lists several success stories from around the U.S.; other lists of cities can be found on Wikipedia and at http://freepublictransports.com (a list that includes Halifax for its summer FRED service).

Interestingly, the DOT study recommends against free fares for larger centres, noting that zero-fare experiments in the 1970s led to “dramatic rates of vandalism, graffiti, and rowdiness due to younger passengers who could ride the system for free,” and the “presence of vagrants on board buses [who] also discouraged choice riders and caused increased complaints from long-time passengers.”

Putting aside the offensive question of who the study considers a "choice rider," it’s true that a poorly implemented free-fare plan might be worse than none at all. (The study notes that some free-fare experiments caused a backlash from drivers experiencing more difficult working conditions, and ended up driving away customers.) That doesn’t mean it can’t, or shouldn’t, be done. There are movements toward free public transit in Toronto and New York (mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently supports the idea in principle), and just last week the idea was raised at a talk sponsored by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.

Should we be talking about it in Halifax too? Don’t forget that car travel is heavily subsidized as a matter of course, with governments across the country spending billions each year on highways, bridges, tax breaks for car companies and business that use vehicles, and the like. Construction of the Halifax Washmill Lake Underpass was approved by council last year even though it was $8 million over budget—$2.4 million more than the net increase to Metro Transit’s budget over the next five years, after the new contract negotiated with the transit workers’ union.

Let's keep free transit on the agenda after March 31.

Ben Sichel is a teacher and writer in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Burning transit ticket

Hogtown, Manitoba

stephlaw — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:03:13 +0000

An investigation into one factory's radical impact on labour and the environment in a prairie town

SASKATOON—The meatpacking industry once provided thousands of Canadian workers with a decent living wage. Thanks in part to globalization the industry now employs far fewer people at wages that have essentially been frozen since the mid-1980s. These days, many meatpacking employees are temporary foreign workers who must sign restrictive contracts with their employer for a chance at attaining Canadian citizenship.

Maple Leaf Consumer Foods’ hog processing plant in Brandon, MB, is the largest such plant in Canada. Employing over 2,200 people, it is the primary economic driver for the booming “Wheat City.” By all accounts, Maple Leaf's facility, opened in 1999, is a modern, world-class processing plant. The facility expanded in 2008 increasing its processing capacity to over 85,000 hogs a week, totaling over 4 million annually. Yet despite its impressive size and modernity, the facility has struggled with retaining workers as the work is hard, repetitive and undesirable for many.

In 2003, the annual turnover rate at Maple Leaf was well over 100 per cent. To satisfy its need for labourers and to reduce turnover, the plant began recruiting workers from abroad. Maple Leaf’s Brandon facility now employs over 2,200 hourly, unionized workers, the majority of whom are either temporary foreign workers or new residents who have passed through the foreign worker program.

“When the turnover was really high, my understanding is that it was in the early stages of the plant, and there’s a lot of growing pains that happen with that,” explains Blake Caruthers, Communications Officer with UFCW Local 832, representing the workers at Maple Leaf. “Once they started using the temporary foreign worker program, people were staying and making Brandon their home.”

The annual turnover rate has been reduced to below 100 per cent, due in part to the hiring contracts that temporary foreign workers and many immigrant workers are required to sign. In order to qualify for fast-tracked landed immigrant status, temporary foreign workers must agree to extend their six month contracts for another two years at Maple Leaf.

“You have a more or less captive labour force, based on immigration,” says Joe Dolecki, Professor of environment and economics at Brandon University. “It [is] much the same as the old indentured servitude model.” Many of the jobs at Maple Leaf in Brandon are unskilled positions, with starting wages hovering around a dollar or two above the provincial minimum of $10 per hour, totalling approximately $19,000 a year. According to Caruthers, skilled labourers at the plant can earn as much as $18 to start, not including shift premiums offered to employees.

In addition to the relatively low wages, the work conditions are far from ideal. “The work is not only hard,” says Dolecki, “it’s physically debilitating for people.”

“It was pretty shitty work conditions,” says Geoff Mann, a former line worker at Maple Leaf in Brandon. “I would stand in one spot, literally, for two hours, then get a coffee break, then stand in the same spot again for two hours, and so forth. A pig leg, a loin, would come down the line, and I would turn it,” he explains. “Turn, turn, turn. It was coming lengthwise, so I would turn it the other way, and it would move on to the next person, who had to do a specific cut.” Mann, who is now 32, kept the job for three months in 2002 before finally quitting to attend Brandon University. “Your feet would just freeze,” Mann recalls as the factory is temperature-controlled to prevent meat from spoiling. “It didn’t matter what kind of socks I wore, my feet would freeze, standing in one spot all the time. You couldn’t walk around to warm them up, you could rock or maybe take one step to the side and back.”

Mann remembers shift premiums being used at the plant as incentives to combat absenteeism. If a worker showed up on time every day for an entire month, they would receive an extra dollar per hour worked. Shift premiums still exist but Mann sees the terms for getting this financial bonus as unrealistic for most workers, especially those with young families or those who are single parents. “Say if you missed one day or [were late for] 15 minutes one day because your kid had a doctor’s appointment, then you’re losing out on that one dollar an hour for 80 hours a pay-cheque, for a whole month,” he said.

Martyn Conrad, who worked at the plant between 2002 and 2003 as a wash bay attendant, recalls a lack of employees and workers not showing up on time or at all. “It was my job to clean and return large, bloodied metal bins that once contained various pig parts, back to the production line,” Conrad explained via email. Conrad kept the job, working from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday to Friday, for almost a year before finally quitting.

In the early 1980s, managers of many Albertan meatpacking plants aimed to drastically increase profits on the backs of unionized workers. Plant owners followed the lead of their US counterparts, who—through reorganization, hostile takeovers and other extreme tactics—reduced or eliminated many of the gains made by workers since the Second World War. Albertan meatpackers responded with a series of strikes which lec to job cuts, lowered wages and reduced benefits.

In 1986, Peter Pocklington, former owner of Gainers meatpacking and the Edmonton Oilers, told Alberta Report, “The unions are very self-serving.” At a time when union workers were paid around $1800 a month he said, “In Taiwan, workers get $300 a month for the same job. And Taiwan isn’t that far away by air. [Unions] need to find out what the new realities of business are.”

The “new realities” of globalized business are clear to unions in Canada today, as wages and benefits have been scaled back dramatically since the 1980s. The strike-breaking tactics used by Peter Pocklington and the management at Gainers forced the UFCW to accept major concessions at the bargaining table for years to come.

In 1986, hourly wages were between $8 and $12 for meatpackers. Today, at Maple Leaf, hourly wages start at $12 and go to a maximum of $18 for skilled positions. Taking inflation into account, wages are lower now than they were in 1986.

The meatpacking industry itself, like many other industries in Canada, has turned to globalization to fill demand for workers. Since the introduction of the “temporary foreign worker program,” Maple Leaf has successfully recruited workers abroad by offering “fast-tracked” immigrant status to temporary workers who complete their initial contract with the company, and who agree to sign on to a contract extension as landed immigrants.

To accommodate these new workers, UFCW Local 832 has pushed to have the collective bargaining agreement and workplace information available to workers in four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Ukrainian. “It was the first of its kind in Canada,” Caruthers says of the collective agreement. “You’ve got to give Maple Leaf credit for that, because it was not a hard bargaining issue with them. They understand the value of keeping their employees, our members, informed of their rights, and they realized that the better everybody understands the collective agreement, the better the workforce.”

While the UFCW has been successful — and groundbreaking — in securing rights for its foreign members, temporary foreign workers at other work places in Canada are still without the rights and protections of Maple Leaf employees. Apart from rights to translators, temporary foreign workers only recently secured the right to an expedited arbitration process in cases where they have been terminated, allowing them to remain in Manitoba until the issue is resolved. Agricultural foreign workers in southern Ontario and foreign workers in northern Alberta’s oil patch are often lacking information about worker's rights and without many of the benefits included in the collective bargaining agreement between Maple Leaf and the UFCW.

For the first time in years, Brandon's schools are filling up, houses are being built and new businesses are opening their doors. It is clear that Maple Leaf Commercial Foods’ Brandon plant has positively increased population growth in the community, which has in turn spurred the economy forward at a rate unseen for decades. The vacancy rate in Brandon is now less than 0.5 per cent and the unemployment rate sits at about 2.8 per cent.

Growth comes at a cost that is more difficult to quantify. The success of Intensive Livestock Operations (ILOs) — often disparagingly referred to as “factory farms” — that feed the processing plant in Brandon comes on the backs of small, rural communities already struggling with demographic change and losses of basic services.

Of the 85,000 hogs processed weekly in Brandon, over 60,000 are sourced from hog producers in Manitoba, while the rest come from eastern Saskatchewan. Only Quebec produces more hogs annually than Manitoba. Today, only 10 to 15 per cent of hogs produced in Manitoba are by small-scale “traditional” livestock operators producing less than 1,000 hogs. A transition from small-scale hog production to ILOs began in the 1990s, and has continued to the point where over 50 per cent of hogs in the province come from massive ILOs that house 5,000 or more hogs.

Critics of ILOs charge that such large-scale operations have negative social and environmental impacts on rural communities. Farmers and rural residents in south western Manitoba were concerned about the shift towards ILOs that taking place as early as 1999, presenting arguments before the Citizen’s Hearing on Hog Production and the Environment. Residents had organized the hearing in anticipation of the opening of Brandon’s Maple Leaf plant, the results being presented to the province in early 2000.

“Often you’ll find in rural Manitoba, when ILOs are proposed, a great deal of hype about contributing to the growth of small communities that have experienced population declines,” explains Dolecki, who has written repeatedly on the subject of ILOs. “Almost none of that stuff pans out, almost none of those spin-off benefits pan out.”

Dolecki argues that large-scale operations tend to replace smaller independent operators. This puts further negative pressure on rural communities, which are already struggling to survive. Before the policy landscape shifted to favour ILOs in the 1990s, there were upwards of 4,000 hog producers in the province. Today there are fewer than 800. “Large barns can be run be with only a few people,” says Dolecki, “because they’re so heavily mechanized and computerized. This does not enhance the possibilities of using that as a catalyst for the restoration of rural populations.”

Maple Leaf isn’t the only large-scale hog processing plant in Manitoba. Hytek’s plant in Neepawa processes over 900,000 hogs annually, the bulk of which are Manitoba-raised. In order to process such high numbers of hogs, large meatpacking plants require a constant and reliable supply of animals. By dealing with large-scale producers, hog processors like Maple Leaf are able to guarantee their production goals. However, ILOs, along with other intensive agricultural practices, have been blamed for much of Lake Winnipeg’s current pollution problems, as well as pollution in southern Manitoba and the Interlake region, where intensive hog operations are common.

Since the early 1990s, Lake Winnipeg — Canada’s eighth largest freshwater lake — has faced increasing problems with algal blooms. Algal blooms are fueled by high availability of nitrogen and phosphorus in the aquatic environment. These substances can be introduced into the waters through the addition of sewage and fertilizers in a process known as eutrophication. At the height of summer, many beaches at the south end of the lake are closed due to health concerns related to the algal blooms. Further to the north, fisheries are negatively impacted when eutrophication runs rampant, as it has been in Lake Winnipeg for the past twenty years.

Degradation of the environment as a result of industrial agricultural practices is difficult, if not impossible, to put a price tag on. While the full cost of remediation at this point is unknown, it will undoubtedly be borne by tax payers for years to come.

Currently, the Manitoba government offers up to $26 million annually directly to hog farmers to improve manure management, and to reduce the risk of contaminating water with excess phosphorus and other pollutants, explained Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Initiatives in an email. This is provided through the Manure Management Financial Assistance Program.

“I did an estimate for the Clean Environment Commission on the environmental subsidy that was involved in hog production as of 2005,” recalls Dolecki, who totaled the estimated cost of clean-up and site reclamation required to deal with the pollution caused by ILOs in Manitoba. “In 2004, I estimated it to be between $125 and $140 million dollars a year, while the net income for the hog production side was about $100 million a year. So, if you made the hog industry pay the full cost of clean up and waste disposal, the industry would have imploded.”

Although The Dominion contacted the senior Human Resources manager at Maple Leaf’s Brandon plant to comment, Maple Leaf refused to participate in an interview.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and song & dance man living in Winnipeg, MB.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Maple Leaf Flag

Freezing Feet

Lighter Wallet? Low Wages, Not High Taxes, To Blame

stephlaw — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:46:03 +0000

Analysts say "bracket creep" much less of a concern than stagnant wages

HALIFAX—Nova Scotians are going to feel their belts get a little bit tighter this year. And according to some experts, stagnant wages—and not tax increases—are to blame.

“[P]eople can't make ends meet because wages are too low in this province,” said Christine Saulnier, the Nova Scotia director at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

Saulnier pointed to a recent study released by the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council that showed that Atlantic Canada created four times as many low-wage jobs (defined as jobs paying less than $40,000 a year) than high-wage jobs in the past decade.

Saulnier also noted that Canadians’ real purchasing power is down—average yearly wages increased by 2.7 per cent in the past year, which was slightly less than the inflation rate of three per cent.

The plunge in real purchasing power was worse for Nova Scotians than the average Canadian. Their wages increased by just 0.4 per cent, while inflation was four per cent—meaning that buying power actually fell 3.6 per cent, points out Larry Haiven, professor of management at St. Mary’s University.

“The average Canadian earned 15.8 per cent more than the average Bluenoser,” Haiven said.

Some groups, including the Nova Scotia Chambers of Commerce, have been calling for tax cuts to make the province "more competitive" for businesses.

But Saulnier disagrees.

“Cutting taxes by adjusting for inflation or raising the personal exemption or otherwise tinkering with the progressive tax system (making it less progressive), is not the answer,” she said.

Saulnier was responding to recent comments from anti-tax activists like Kevin Lacey of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation about “bracket creep,” the phenomenon whereby workers receive wage increases tied to inflation, but then enter a higher income tax bracket as a result.

“Any such initiatives that are across the board benefit the wealthiest the most,” Saulnier said. “Adjusting for inflation would not benefit those who are far under the bottom tax rate—the same people who need it the most and those who are the most likely to spend it, thus stimulating the economy.”

At a recent public lecture organized by the CCPA, tax specialist Neil Brooks of Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto noted that Nova Scotia currently has the most progressive income tax system in Canada, meaning that the highest-income earners are taxed at a higher rate.

Low wages, and consequent low tax revenues, are also a reason why “the government struggles to pay for needed services” in Nova Scotia, Saulnier said.

“Plus, given how little workers have actually seen their wages increase, I am not sure who we are worried about moving into a higher tax bracket,” he added.

Professor Larry Haiven acknowledged that “as real earnings drop, a cut in taxes starts to look good.”

But tax reductions are a low-hanging fruit that fails to get to the crux of the problem, he said.

“[P]eople don’t immediately think ‘what services will I lose?’”

Haiven co-authored a 2008 study that suggests rising inequality should be of far greater concern than tax increases to Nova Scotians struggling to make ends meet.

Governments “have been cutting taxes frenetically, frantically, for the past 25 years. Governments across Canada are taking in about $250 billion less than they did 15 years ago,” Haiven told the Media Co-op in 2009.

And while Nova Scotia’s economy grew by 62 per cent between 1981 and 2006, according to the report, average weekly earnings actually declined five per cent.

“Where is that money going? It’s obviously going into the hands of a few,” Haiven said.

The CCPA’s national office recently released its annual report on compensation of the 100 richest CEOs in Canada, who last year saw a 27 per cent increase in their average earnings from the previous year. The report notes that this means Canada’s top CEOs made 189 times more than the average worker, and by noon on January 3 that year, had earned as much as the average worker’s annual salary.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Ben Sichel is a teacher and a writer and editor with the Halifax Media Co-op.

Empty wallet

Outsourcing Community

hillarybain — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:59:34 +0000

Divisions of class and labour on King’s College University campus

HALIFAX—Zona Roberts is looking for a way to get her motorbike to Newfoundland. After a frustrating summer of disputes with her employers at King’s College University in Halifax, Roberts quit. This fall, for the first time in 11 years, she has not resumed her position as King’s' most beloved canteen attendant. Instead, she is heading to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to find work and spend time with her son and daughter-in-law, who are about to have their first child. Though Roberts is excited about becoming a grandmother, her departure is bittersweet. She loved the job and hoped to leave the college on more amicable terms.

“I planned to work there until I was 95,” Roberts explains. For over a decade, Roberts has been a fixture at King’s. If you spent any time in the Day Students' Lounge, you knew her. At the canteen, she knows most of the “kiddies” by name and greets them all with affection. When I talked with Roberts about her situation, we were standing outside the campus bar on the night of her goodbye party. She is a short, sinewy, almost ageless woman. At work, her grey hair is always pulled back in a hair net. Today, it is down around her shoulders and I am struck for the first time by how pretty she is. As we talk, students stream past us, stopping to kiss and hug Roberts before going down into the basement bar. From the turnout it is clear that Roberts is well loved. The students buzz around her to say their goodbyes and she makes every one promise to come visit Newfoundland and sleep on her couch. For 11 years, she has taken care of these people: she is a friend and a valued member of the King’s community.

“I know what it was like when my kids went to school,” Roberts explains, “and so I treat these kids the way I would want to have my kids treated.” Something like the mother’s golden rule, I suppose. Roberts is one of the nicest women you will ever meet. If you don’t have a reusable coffee cup, she’ll give you an earful but you’ll also get to borrow one of hers. If you don’t have enough for lunch, she’ll make up the difference by fishing quarters out of her tip jar.

“If I’m at school, I have to go to the Wardroom and visit Zona,” one student tells me, “even if I’m not buying anything.” One would think that having these sorts of relationships with her customers would make Roberts the ideal service employee. Yet, it is precisely this sort of “unprofessional” behaviour that got Roberts into trouble with her employers at King’s.

Last spring, Roberts found out that she would not be working in the canteen during the following school year. She was moved to the kitchen, where she could no longer interact with the students she loved. Though Roberts was not fired, she feels that being moved from the canteen to the kitchen was a punitive measure. For the duration of the summer, she fought to maintain her post at the canteen. She received support from then university president, William Barker, as well as the King’s Student Union, but to no avail. Finally exhausted with what she perceived to be a hostile and frustrating work environment, Roberts quit. Though she is reluctant to discuss the details of her situation, she makes it clear that she is not happy to be leaving her job.

***

Like most Canadian universities, King’s has adopted the practice of outsourcing its food and cleaning services in order to reduce costs. The multinational food and cleaning services company, Sodexo Inc, employs all kitchen personnel on campus. The company is based in Paris but employs over 330,000 workers in over 80 countries (of which only 13 per cent are unionized), and makes roughly $7.9 billion in annual revenue. Until a month ago, Sodexo had a monopoly on food distribution on campus. The kitchen staff at King’s is not unionized and never has been.

Outraged at the conditions of Roberts’s departure, the King’s Student Union (KSU) organized a boycott of Sodexo. “I knew that this wasn’t something that students would be okay with,” says Student Union President Gabe Hoogers. “Sodexo’s seemingly arbitrary removal of Zona from the job she worked for 11 years was completely unjust in my view and the more I spoke to students over the summer, the more I became aware of the vast support that Zona has.”

On most campuses where food services are outsourced, the food is notoriously lousy. As local and ethical food movements continue to grow, it becomes more and more apparent how out of touch service providers like Sodexo are with the student bodies they serve. However, the nature of the outsourcing contract is such that, though students and faculty are by and large the ones who consume food on campus, they are not the direct clients of the food service providers. Sodexo’s contract is with the University; their client is the administration and that is whom the company aims to please. For the most part, this means providing a no-hassle service at the lowest possible price. However, the goal of the university is to provide satisfactory services to its students, whose tuition fees and attendance are the institution’s raison d'etre.

On September 5, 2011, the boycott officially began. The KSU issued a press release and sent a letter with demands to the new University President, Anne Leavitt, and to Sodexo’s District Manager, Anne McFeteridge. Roberts became the face of the boycott, serving coffee from a rogue canteen set up in the KSU office. The KSU had two chief demands: that a student committee be implemented to give students more say in food service contracts, and that the Day Students' Lounge canteen be managed by students to “reflect students’ needs and wants, namely ethical and sustainable food.” Effectively, the KSU wanted mechanisms put in place to ensure that future students would have input into how food services are run on campus. Hopefully this would guarantee that student demands for more ethical working standards for campus employees would not be made in vain.

“We have a lot of sway with the administration,” says Hoogers. “When I advocate to the board, I advocate with thousands of students behind me.” It is a testament to the influence of students and the potential of student-based movements that the KSU’s demands were met less than two weeks after the boycott started. The KSU is now working to create a food advisory panel to oversee the 2013 renewal of Sodexo’s food service contract, and a business plan to take over the canteen is being formulated. Sadly, Roberts will not be returning to King’s. Even before the boycott began she had decided she no longer felt comfortable in the Sodexo work environment. Hoogers is optimistic that the guarantees won by the KSU will ensure that what happened to Roberts will not happen again.

****

This was not the first time that students have supported King’s staff in their struggle for better working conditions. However, not much has changed at the school in terms of labour practices. As I discovered, the university has a disappointing history of anti-unionism, though it is not a widely publicized one. In particular, what happened to Roberts echoes another incident that took place roughly 10 years ago, in which Sodexo staff were penalized for organizing themselves and getting too close to students.

I spoke with Darlene McNeil, who was employed as a custodial worker at King’s between 1999 and 2004. At that time, Sodexo held both the cleaning and the food services contracts at the university. When Darlene began work at King’s, there were no unionized employees on campus. She was one of eleven workers responsible for cleaning all academic buildings and dormitories, making a starting wage of roughly six dollars an hour. She described Sodexo as a “mean” employer with insidious intimidation practices. Darlene says that it wasn’t uncommon for people to cry in the workplace because of the verbal abuse they’d received from their superiors. Darlene explained that Sodexo employees receive pay increases on an individual basis, as opposed to having wages rise in yearly increments. As she explained, this allowed management to play favoritism or settle scores with workers.

The work was physically strenuous and the pay was lousy, but there were other reasons to like the job.

Like Roberts, Darlene explains that she and the other mostly female custodians were in it for the students. In those days the cleaners were still responsible for tidying dormitory rooms. This made for a lot more contact between cleaners and students and bonds inevitably formed. Echoing Roberts almost word for word, Darlene explained that she tried to treat the students the way she wanted her kids to be treated in their first year away from home. She says she can’t remember the number of times she brought students soup when they were sick or listened to them recount their problems. The relationship was reciprocal: students would bake her a cake on her birthday, and invited her to meet their parents and attend their graduation ceremonies.

The students were also supportive of the cleaners when they began to speak out against the unfair treatment they received in the workplace. In November 2001, The Watch, King’s campus magazine, published an expose on Sodexo’s mistreatment of their workers and encouraged students to take action. “Stifling unionization, strategically laying off workers, and paying disgracefully low wages—these are not practices that King’s students should be supporting—but we do...As students, we are the clients of Sodexo, and we have a right and an obligation to ensure that their employment practices reflect our values.”

“We must take responsibility,” reads an open letter from the editor, “They need our support.” The student union executive echoed this sentiment and quickly began organizing in support of the cleaning staff. According to an anonymous Sodexo worker quoted in one Watch article from November 2001, Sodexo managers were worried by the mounting student support and told cleaning staff not to speak to students, in order to prevent things from getting “blown out of proportion.” That spring, when Darlene and some of the other cleaning staff started a union drive at King’s, the student body mobilized to support them, even going so far as to contact a union on their behalf. The cleaners also received support from some faculty members and residence advisors, including one man who allowed them to host organizing meetings in his dormitory apartment.

Before an official vote could be made, a certain percentage of union cards would need to be signed, at which point the prospective union could present the demand for unionization before the Department of Labour, where it would be put to vote. Darlene recalls that it took some convincing before all 11 cleaners signed their cards. Many of the women had worked at King’s for 20 or more years and feared the loss of their livelihoods.

At the time, Darlene worked both in the kitchen and as a custodial worker. As the drive gained momentum, she says that she started to be assigned the worst jobs in the kitchen, such as cleaning the floors on her hands and knees. She describes this as a common tactic used by Sodexo to break union drives. The managers would get more neutral employees to assign punitive tasks to those who were seen as troublemaking. Darlene and the other cleaners tried to get the kitchen workers to sign union cards, but she says there was a culture of fear there too strong to penetrate. Darlene recalls that the head chef and kitchen manager at the time had a way of playing favourites and pitting workers against each other. Workers were threatened with termination during the drive, and Sodexo brought in “a guy from Toronto,” as Darlene described him, to stand over them as they punched in and out of work. Those who did sign cards were ostracized, while others were rewarded for siding with management. Darlene recalls that Roberts, for example, was supportive of the organizers but feared losing her job and would not sign a card. Sadly, she would later be subject to these same intimidation tactics, which ultimately forced her to leave the job she loved.

Despite all this, the cleaners persisted and eventually won. On January 11, 2002, after the 11 workers voted unanimously in favour of the union, Sodexo sent a letter to the union stating its recognition of the house-cleaners as members of Local 968 of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). From 2002 until the spring of 2004, the Sodexo cleaners won some wage increases (the starting wage increased from six to nine dollars) and job quality guarantees. During that time only one grievance was filed, in regard to wage disparities amongst the workers. Other than that, things were pretty quiet.

In the spring of 2004 however, the short-lived union experiment came to an end at King’s, when Sodexo lost the cleaning contract and the entire cleaning staff was laid off.

What exactly happened with the Sodexo contract, and whether or not this was an intentional attempt to squash the spirit of unionism on campus, is subject to some debate. Antioni Wysocki was one of the cleaners who lost his job that spring. He now works at Dalhousie and is president of NSUPE Local 21, which represents all custodial, trades and security employees on campus. He suspects that Sodexo’s loss of the cleaning contract resulted from some collusion between the company’s management and King’s administration. Wysocki explained that Sodexo had always lost money on cleaning contracts. He says it was common knowledge at the time that Sodexo had been unofficially bound to take the contract because it came bundled with the more lucrative food contract. Thus, it would be doubly beneficial for Sodexo to lose the contract: they would no longer have to provide a low revenue-grossing service and could eradicate the trouble-making union presence on campus.

It was customary for Sodexo to lay off its employees over Christmas and summer vacations. They might keep a couple of people on for basic maintenance, but the staff was significantly downsized. Though there was no promise that they would be rehired when school resumed, many of the staff had operated on that assumption for years. Now the cleaning staff, some of whom had been working at King’s for over 20 years, were told that there were no longer jobs for them at King’s.

It just so happens that this incident coincided with Spring graduation ceremonies. The KSU offered to organize a demonstration in support of the house-cleaners. It would have been a perfect time to draw attention to the issue, since campus would be buzzing with students and their parents. However, McNeil says that she and the other house-cleaners were unwilling to disturb the ceremonies. “It was their big day,” says McNeil warmly. McNeil attended the graduation ceremonies and says she was touched to see at least one faculty member sporting a “We support the House-Cleaners” pin. Other than that the issue was sidelined.

Both Wysocki and McNeil expressed dissatisfaction with the way the IUOE handled the incident at King’s. She says that she would not necessarily have chosen to organize with the IUOE, but that it wouldn’t have been right to reject the union that the KSU had contacted on the cleaners’ behalf. Wysocki explains that a big international union like the IUOE, whose membership consists mostly of skilled trade and craft workers, would not necessarily be invested in the struggle of 11 untrained blue-collar workers. Wysocki feels that the union failed the King’s cleaners just when it was most needed. He believes that more could have been done for the workers who lost their jobs but that, for whatever reason, the union was not willing to fight for them. That summer, everything lost momentum. With students no longer around to make a fuss, the issue receded from the public eye.

The IUOE did attempt to speak with Sodexo, but Darlene says the company would not return their calls. Then, following up on a promise made by President Barker that the old Sodexo employees would be first in line for jobs with the new cleaning company, Darlene tried contacting Sodexo, but they wouldn’t return her calls either. McNeil says she cried for weeks after losing her job. She felt terrible for encouraging her fellow-workers to unionize, since it had now cost them their jobs. She was also heartbroken to be leaving the students she loved, and says “it felt like losing a family.”

While it is clear how Sodexo could have benefited from losing the contract, the more difficult question is why King’s would want to do away with such valued and dedicated employees. In response to student backlash, the school administration claimed that it was not their responsibility to enforce employment standards on the companies they outsourced to. At the time, the university had a contractual obligation to its board of governors to choose the lowest-cost solutions with regard to service provision. Following this practice, called “tendering,” the university reviews a series of proposals before signing a contract with the most cost-efficient bidder. In the past, Sodexo had been all but guaranteed the contract. However, now that Sodexo had to pay unionized employees, they could no longer offer cleaning services at a low enough price.

University President William Barker was quoted in a September 2004 issue of The Watch, saying, “The reason that the company can offer [its services] at a lower price is because they do business their way...it’s not up to us to dictate conditions of employment.” Essentially, the administration was happy to relinquish responsibility for any employee mistreatment that took place on campus, so long as services continued to be delivered at the lowest possible costs.

However, soon after the 2004 incident, King’s changed its tendering policies. According to one King’s employee who asked to remain anonymous, the university realized it had to change its “race to the bottom” policy after the company hired to replace Sodexo provided such unsatisfactory services. According to this source, the current contract criteria favours environmentally-friendly cleaning services. This source also wondered why, if the university was willing to impose its environmental ethics on outsourcing companies, King’s would not hold its business partners to ethical standards when it comes to labour practices.

Although the university does not have an explicit anti-union policy, they support anti-union practices by refusing to hold their subcontractors accountable to decent employment standards. As it happens, Novacos, the company that secured the cleaning contract in 2004, rotated their employees to different locations throughout Halifax, making it difficult for them to organize or become acquainted with other workers or students at King’s. Despite this obstacle, the Novacos workers did organize with the Service Employees International Union. And yet again, King’s chose not renew its contract with Novacos and terminated all unionized employees.

What it comes down to is a question of community. In the same Watch article quoted above, King’s Bursar Gerry Smith is quoted saying, “What we’re seeing is a lobbying for people whom [faculty and staff] see to be in relationship with King’s, when actually they were in relationship with Sodexo.” What Smith articulates is a vision of the King’s community divided on the basis of who employs who. Though campus food providers and custodial workers spend as much or more time on campus than students and faculty, they are often overlooked when considering who makes up the “we” of the university. Like the administration Smith represents, he sees only contractual relationships and overlooks the genuine connections that develop between people who live and work beside each other on a day-to-day basis. In order to continue mistreating their workers, Sodexo relies on the fact that most of their business partners are, like Smith, willing to deny or overlook outsourced workers.

But the King’s cleaners and food services employees are part of the university community, regardless of who employs them. The reason students are willing to rally around Zona Roberts is because they love and know her. The same was true of the custodial workers from 2004.

Darlene loves working with students, at King’s and at her current position at Saint Mary’s University. She says being exposed to so many young people from such diverse backgrounds “keeps you young.” She can’t understand why Sodexo would want to punish employees for forming these relationships. “I don’t see a damn thing wrong with that, I don’t see what they’re afraid of.”

Perhaps it’s that they recognize the strength in numbers.

“As the Zona example illustrates,” Hoogers says, “it’s best when people have your back.”

With the significant exception of food service employees, all campus employees at Dalhousie University are employed directly by the university and are also unionized. King’s faculty and facilities workers are not unionized but are promised the same wage and benefit terms offered to employees working their equivalent position at Dalhousie. However, this means that King’s workers did not have recourse to collective bargaining or grievance processes.

McNeil and others hope that King’s will reconsider hiring in-house cleaning staff. In the past, the university claimed that size is what prevents them from hiring in-house workers. Indeed, King’s has recently been in serious financial trouble, running an almost $1 million deficit in 2009. But does this justify small-scale austerity measures such as union busting?

“There has been a culture that really attempts to break unions on campus,” says Hoogers. “It’s hard to say what Sodexo workers will want to do now. I think with the boycott it is made clear that Sodexo workers have the support of students. We think they do an excellent job. And if they do decide to unionize they will have the full support of students. We will do everything in our power to ensure that their rights are protected.”

In the past, every attempt made to change the way that outsourced services are provided at King’s has lost momentum, largely due to student turnover. One year there might be an active student union dedicated to progressive issues, but when they step down there is no guarantee that their successors will pursue these issues with the same dedication. The hope is that if the administration makes good on its promise to the KSU, then the infrastructure will be put in place to ensure that students have more say when it comes to food and cleaning services. If students prioritize workers’ rights as something they want to pressure the administration to improve, then this can lead to better working conditions at King’s. But without being certain that student support is there and that the administration is listening, we can’t blame the Sodexo workers for not wanting to speak out against their lousy employer. McNeil says that the 2004 incident made her all the more aware of what was at stake when organizing in the workplace. She works three jobs and understands what a crippling blow it can be to lose one’s livelihood.

But perhaps there are reasons to be hopeful about the labour situation at King’s. This past year, a new union was ratified on campus, the first since 2002. The King’s Tutors and Teaching Fellows, most of whom run tutorials with first-year students in King’s Foundation Year Program, are now organized with the Canadian Association of University Teachers. I spoke with Cory Stockwell, a tutor at King’s who was active in organizing the union at King’s. The tutors did not invite faculty to join their union because they felt that as contract workers, the tutors would have different employment concerns than permanent faculty. He says that for the most part, the tutors love their jobs but decided to organize on principle.

“The desire to unionize came from a basic belief that we should have a say in the terms of our employment,” says Stockwell. Right now, they are the only union on campus, but perhaps they will be able to foster more labour consciousness amongst students and faculty, in order to pressure the administration into amending its practices.

Ella Bedard is a recent graduate of King’s.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

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Occupons Edmundston

hillarybain — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:10:10 +0000

Edmundston workers, pensioners and students have many reasons to occupy

EDMUNDSTON, NB—The Occupy movement has spread to the small, francophone city of Edmundston, in northern New Brunswick. Occupations of public spaces have been ongoing since October 15 in cities across North America, but many smaller cities and towns have now joined in.

Around 50 people, mostly students but also workers and retirees, demonstrated in front of Edmundston City Hall on October 29.

"I'm here today because of social and economic inequality," said Nicole Ouellet, a caregiver for the elderly who is making the same salary today in Edmundston that she made 30 years ago in Montreal. "Food prices are going up all the time but not our salaries," remarked Ouellet.

At an age when she should be planning her retirement and enjoying time with her grandchildren, Ouellet has gone back to work in caregiving, a sector traditionally dominated by women that is today considered underpaid by pay equity advocates. Caregivers like Ouellet and her male co-worker, who also participated in Occupons Edmundston, would benefit from long-awaited pay equity legislation in the province. Pay equity is equal pay for work of equal or comparable value. Skill, responsibility, effort and working conditions are factors long ignored in jobs predominately done by women.

"My husband must work in Alberta. One of our kids is forced to work outside the province. We wish we could live near our kids so that we could get to know our grandkids," said Ouellet.

France Ritchie, a friend of Ouellet's, said, "They take $30 away from the poor all the time instead of ending the war. I'm old enough so it doesn't affect me to protest. A lot of people are afraid to lose their jobs or their reputation and that's why they're not out in the streets. We're here to support the people occupying Wall Street. We will not take it anymore. It started in Egypt. I knew it was only a matter of time before it spread here."

André Charest, who came out because his 15-year-old son, Emmanuel, felt it important to attend, said, "I'm against the model we have. The majority pays while a minority puts it in their pockets." The father and son held signs that conveyed this message. They were greeted with many honks of support from passing motorists. "I may be young but I'm going to feel the consequences," said Emmanuel.

The majority of the people who participated in the Occupons Edmundston protest were students from the Edmundston campus of Université de Moncton. They sang protest songs that warmed the crowd during what was a chilly October afternoon.

Two targets of protest have appeared at most Occupy sites: one being corporate greed and the banks, with the other being the system, namely capitalism. Opponents of the latter target argue that equality will not result from tweaking the system, regulating the banks or policy reform. They point out that the oppression of workers and crises are inherent to capitalism. The latest crisis, its effect on workers, and now the Occupy movement have created opportunities to question capitalism and discuss another form of economic and social relations where in which every worker is able to control their lives and realize their full potential, dreams and capacities.

"I'm here to protest against capitalism," said Sebastien Levesque, one of the university students studying philosophy, politics and history. "It's an important contemporary problem. The system is destroying everything including the environment." Étienne Rousseau, another university student, who held a sign with the popular Occupy slogan, "Capitalism isn't broken, it was built that way," agreed with Levesque. "I hate the system. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. It's expensive to study right now. We are the next generation. We have to do something," said Rousseau.

Dominic Duval, an arts and social sciences student, organized Occupons Edmundston after waiting for someone to organize it and no one did. "The Occupy movement has spread to over 80 countries and 1,600 cities. It is important for Edmundston to do its part. We don't want to promote the status quo. We want change. We need change," said Duval.

Nicole Ouellet said the Fraser Papers' pensioners in Edmundston who lost about 35 per cent of the benefits in their pensions are part of their movement. When Fraser Papers received protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act in 2009, Brookfield Asset Management, its controlling shareholder, sold part of the company to itself and divested itself of pension obligations for all their pensioners and current workers.

Brookfield Asset Management, with former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna on its board, came under fire recently at the original Occupy Wall Street location for threatening to evict Occupy participants in Zucotti Park. Brookfield owns Zucotti Park. The company had called for protesters to be removed so that it could clean the park, but its efforts were unsuccessful and the occupation continues.

Like Nicole Ouellet, some of the pensioners have been forced to return to work to pay the bills. In an open letter published October 27, Jacques Sarlabous, a Fraser Papers' mill pensioner, said he sent 134 resumes over a five month period and got three part-time jobs at minimum wage. Sarlabous said he had to take the jobs because he and his wife suffer from serious health conditions that require costly medications.

Sarlabous wrote, "I worked at the Fraser Papers' mill in Edmundston, New Brunswick, for 36 years. On each pay cheque, I contributed a portion of my wages to the pension fund, which I believed would be a guaranteed investment. In 2009, with talks of a potential bankruptcy at Fraser, I decided to withdraw my pension plan with the aim of securing my assets. I signed documents and withdrew the first pension payment that I was entitled to. Unfortunately, I was able to benefit from my full pension for only three months. Having given 36 years of my life to Fraser Papers, I got a full pension for three months. In other words, one month of pension for every 10 years of service!"

Edmundston pensioners were among the first to participate in Occupy actions in Canada. Organized as the Victims of Brookfield Association, with a membership of 800 retirees, four Edmundston pensioners and two Thurso, Quebec, pensioners participated in Occupy Toronto and demonstrated in front of the Toronto offices of Brookfield Asset Management on October 15. They shared their stories of losing their hard-earned pensions.

It's not the first time that the pensioners occupied Brookfield Asset Management's head offices in Toronto. On January 2010, union leader Gaétan Ménard and Fraser Papers’ pensioners occupied the company's office. According to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers' Union, the union representing the pensioners and workers, Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt was “not concerned” that pensioners could lose 40 per cent of their pensions as a result of the company’s restructuring plan. A year later, the pensioners and union leaders occupied the office again in an attempt to have the company reinstate the workers' pensions. The workers were escorted out of the office both times.

"Why the Occupy movement? Because too many laws in this country are about protecting big corporations, not workers," wrote Sarlabous.

Tracy Glynn gets to bash capitalism as a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. She does reporting for the New Brunswick Media Co-op, where this article was originally posted.

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A Town Without Poverty?

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:08:24 +0000

Canada's only experiment in guaranteed income finally gets reckoning

WHITEHORSE, YK—Try to imagine a town where the government paid each of the residents a living income, regardless of who they were and what they did, and a Soviet hamlet in the early 1980s may come to mind.

But this experiment happened much closer to home. For a four-year period in the '70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments. Thirty-five years later all that remains of the experiment are 2,000 boxes of documents that have gathered dust in the Canadian archives building in Winnipeg.

Until now little has been known about what unfolded over those four years in the small rural town, since the government locked away the data that had been collected and prevented it from being analyzed.

But after a five year struggle, Evelyn Forget, a professor of health sciences at the University of Manitoba, secured access to those boxes in 2009. Until the data is computerized, any systematic analysis is impossible. Undeterred, Forget has begun to piece together the story by using the census, health records, and the testimony of the program's participants. What is now emerging reveals that the program could have counted many successes.

Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and Manitoba's first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program—called “Mincome”—about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.

Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone. It was the first—and to this day, only—time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.

In today’s conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren't scrambling to pay the rent each month.

For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.

The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year.

“The extra money meant that I was also able to give my kids something I wouldn't ordinarily be able to, like taking them to a show or some small luxury like that,” said Richardson, now 84, who spoke to The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

As part of the experiment, an army of researchers were sent to Dauphin to interview the Mincome families. Residents in nearby rural towns who didn't receive Mincome were also surveyed so their statistics could be compared against those from Dauphin. But after the government cut the program in 1978, they simply warehoused the data and never bothered to analyze it.

“When the government introduced the program they really thought it would be a pilot project and that by the end of the decade they would roll this out and everybody would participate,” said Forget. “They thought it would become a universal program. But of course, the idea eventually just died off.”

During the Mincome program, the federal and provincial governments collectively spent $17 million, though it was initially supposed to have cost only a few million.

Meant to last several more years, the program came to a quick halt in 1978 when an economic recession hit Canada. The recession had caused prices to increase 10 per cent each year, so payouts to families under Mincome had increased accordingly.

Trudeau's Liberals, already on the defensive for an overhaul of Canada's employment insurance system, killed the program and withheld any additional money to analyze the data that had been amassed.

“It's hugely unfortunate and typical of the strange ways in which government works that the data was never analyzed,” says Ron Hikel who coordinated the Mincome program. Hikel now works in the United States to promote universal healthcare reform.

“Government officials opposed [to Mincome] didn't want to spend more money to analyze the data and show what they already thought: that it didn't work,” says Hikel, who remains a strong proponent of guaranteed income programs.

“And the people who were in favour of Mincome were worried because if the analysis was done and the data wasn't favourable then they would have just spent another million dollars on analysis and be even more embarrassed.”

But Forget has culled some useful info from Manitoba labour data. Her research confirms numerous positive consequences of the program.

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.

“People didn't have to take the first job that came along,” says Hikel. “They could wait for something better that suited them.”

For some, it meant the opportunity to land a job to help them get by.

When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren't any better.

“My husband didn't have a very good job and I couldn't find work,” she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.

“I don't know how we would have lived without [Mincome],” said Doreen.“I don't know if we would have stayed in Dauphin.”

Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people's well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

It's not hard to see why, says Forget.

“When you walk around a hospital, it's pretty clear that a lot of the time what we're treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today's terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Having analyzed the health data, Forget is now working on a cost-benefit analysis to see what a guaranteed income program might save the federal government if it were implemented today. She’s already worked with a Senate committee investigating a guaranteed income program for all low-income Canadians.

The Canadian government's sudden interest in guaranteed income programs doesn't surprise Forget.

Every 10 or 15 years there seems to be a renewed interest in getting Guaranteed Income (GI) programs off the ground, according to Saskatchewan social work professor James Mulvale. He's researched and written extensively about guaranteed income programs and is also part the Canadian chapter of the Basic Income Earth Network, a worldwide organization that advocates for guaranteed income.

GI programs exist in countries like Brazil, Mexico, France and even the state of Alaska.

Although people may not recognize it, subtle forms of guaranteed income already exist in Canada, says Mulvale, pointing to the child benefit tax, guaranteed income for seniors and the modest GST/HST rebate program for low-income earners.

However, a wider-reaching guaranteed income program would go a long way in decreasing poverty, he says.

Mulvale is in favour of a “demo-grant” model of GI that would give automatic cash transfers to everybody in Canada. This kind of plan would also provide the option of taxing higher-income earners at the end of the year so poorer people receive benefits.

A model such as this has a higher chance of broad support because it goes out to everybody, according to Mulvale. GI can also be administered as a negative income tax to the poor, meaning they'd receive an amount of money back directly in proportion to what they make each year.

“GI by itself wouldn't eliminate poverty but it would go a heck of a long way to decrease the extent of poverty in this country,” says Mulvale.

Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.

It would also mean that anybody could apply for support. Many people fall through the cracks under the current welfare system, says Forget. Not everybody can access welfare and those who can are penalized for going to school or for working a job since the money they receive from welfare is then clawed back.

If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn't Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There's very strong feelings out there that we shouldn't give people money for nothing,” Mulvale says.

Guaranteed income proponents aren't holding their breaths that they'll see such a program here anytime soon, but they are hopeful that one day Canada will consider the merits of guaranteed income.

The cost would be "not nearly as prohibitive to do as people imagine it is," says Forget. “A guaranteed minimum income program is a superior way of delivering social assistance. The only thing is that it's of course politically difficult to implement.”

Vivian Belik is a freelance journalist based in the frozen northlands of Whitehorse, Yukon. She was, however, raised in Manitoba where she has spotted many of the provinces small-town statues including the giant beaver in Dauphin.

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SFU Student Government Moves to Displace Progressive Groups

Tim McSorley — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:06:22 +0000

PIRG faces eviction, lockout targets campus orgs, union workers

BURNABY—Midway through the summer, life got turned upside down for campus and community groups on SFU's Burnaby Campus.

On July 7, the members of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3338 were given notice that after two years of contract negotiations they would be locked out of their offices. The move by the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) impacts 15 permanent staff and five student employees who work for the society. The lockout took effect Sunday, July 10, and picket lines went up in front of the SFU Women's Centre and Out on Campus (OoC) spaces Monday morning where some of the locked-out employees work. At the time of print, the lock-out was ongoing.

The day after the Student Society walked away from contract talks, its Space Oversight Committee recommended terminating the lease of the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group's (SFPIRG) space in the Rotunda, an area popular with students. SFPIRG has been in the Rotunda for 30 years, but the recommendation, which still needs approval before it goes into force, came as a complete surprise to SFPIRG members.

Following the lock-out, there was a flurry of activity on campus as supporters of the Women's Centre, Out on Campus, and SFPIRG held a demonstration and march against the Student Society's actions. Later, they got to work making buttons, preparing leaflets and exchanging notes on resisting what many are calling a targeted political attack on campus organizations that don't fit the "old boys' club" mold.

SFSS student board members are currently staffing Out on Campus and the Women's Centre. Posters all over campus put up by the SFSS student board declare, "Funding! Food! Spaces! Come in, we're open!" and claim CUPE workers' wages are too high.

"I'm operating as if I'm at work," said Samonte Cruz, the coordinator of Out on Campus and a CUPE 3338 member. Out on Campus runs a library and a lounge where staff and volunteers work hard to create an inclusive, accessible environment for queer students, faculty, staff and their allies. But in a strange role reversal, since the start of the lock-out Cruz and other OoC volunteers have been asking students not to enter the student lounge. "As far as I'm concerned, the lounge is outside right now," said Cruz, as he bit into a sandwich and tried to make himself comfortable on a hard plastic chair surrounded by picket signs.

"The problem with the SFSS board saying the space is open is that it's not open in the same capacity it was established to be open as," said Darren Ho, a second-year linguistics student and Out on Campus volunteer. Ho was busy pressing buttons in support of SFSS staff. Referring to the SFSS student board members who have been operating the space, he said, "It is a trespass of safe space, in that we don't know if they even know what safe space means."

Ho expressed concern that community members who call or email for advice or referrals might not know that the qualified staff has been replaced by untrained SFSS board members.

The Women's Centre lounge is open 24 hours as a safe space for self-identified women, providing, for example, a place to rest for someone who misses the last bus home, or a shelf to refrigerate breast milk for a new mom rushing between classes. The centre also offers peer support, referrals, a work experience program, a library, and a comfortable environment for folks who might not otherwise find a space on campus where they feel at home.

"Their rhetoric is that it is just a space—that no staff hours are needed," said Nadine Chambers, who serves as the coordinator of the Women's Centre. "But every day we have teaching opportunities around the complexity of gender."

Chambers was walking me through the multitude of ways the Women's Centre supports students and community members when Jeff McCann, President of the SFSS, walked into the SFPIRG office. With the air of an impatient manager, he interrupted our interview, demanding to know when the Women's Centre collective was to meet.

McCann is a business student and former football player who previously served as SFSS treasurer. He was elected president in March, and began his term in May, promising to "increase efficiencies." He has since led the SFSS into what CUPE 3338 calls an "ideological move against the union" and put the Student Society on a collision course with SFPIRG.

At the afternoon rally, there was no shortage of people whose university experience has been enriched by the resource groups in the Rotunda. "I felt that these spaces, the people here, and the staff in particular, helped me get through my economics degree," said Amber Louie, the Student Convocation Speaker of the class of 2003. Louie made the trip up Burnaby Mountain specifically to show solidarity with the locked-out workers. "They really supported me in getting to where I am today," she explained.

This isn't the first time the SFSS has tried to undermine the work of progressive groups on campus.

"In 2006, the rhetorical justification was fiduciary responsibility to the society," wrote Joel Block, chief steward of SFU's Teaching Support Staff Union. "This summer, it’s financial responsibility to the student members."

The other poster posted by the SFSS student board this week claims that $748,911 paid out to SFSS staff is inflated compared to the $115,908 transferred to clubs and student union funding. The SFSS directors' Twitter account is replete with claims of how much the Student Union is saving by locking out its staff. Not mentioned is the $831,000 the SFSS spent last year renovating the pub. Then again, that is where the old boys are more likely to hang out.

Dawn Paley is a Vancouver-based journalist.

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Sincerely, the Working Class

Moira Peters — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:32:01 +0000

Postal workers supported across Canada

"We want this for all Canadians; that's what this should be about for people."

Nadine Kays, who worked for four years as a casual letter carrier part-time on the midnight shift before she moved up in the ranks at Canada Post, was talking about the strike action taken by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) early this month. The union's actions—insisting on fair, equitable and living wages for postal workers in Canada—are part of a larger labour movement in Canada.

Public criticism directed at the union for its insistence on maintaining a living wage for its workers, she said, is an unfortunate reflection of a society whose expectations as a workforce are too low.

"No-one should live paycheck-to-paycheck. What's wrong with making a living wage coming out of high school or university?" she said.

CUPW began a 24-hour strike in Winnipeg on June 3, rotating the strike to other locations.

In early June, CUPW National President Denis Lemelin said the union had been trying to get Canada Post to deal with service and health and safety problems for more than three years but management refused.

Consequently, the union was forced to bring these issues to the bargaining table.

“We have a dangerous workplace that needs to be fixed but Canada Post won’t listen to us,” said Lemelin in a press release.

“The strike's purpose is to create leverage in order to encourage Canada Post to abandon its dangerous approach to modernization and their many concessions. The goal is still the same. We want to negotiate solutions [but] we cannot accept unsafe and unfair conditions."

CUPW's attempts to negotiate on the issues of pensions, workplace health and safety and sick leave have been blocked by Canada Post. After eight months in negotiations, Canada Post has made no concessions.

On June 14, Canada Post locked out its nearly 50,000 urban postal operations employees after 12 days of rotating strikes organized by the union.

On June 20, Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt introduced back-to-work legislation to force locked-out Canada Post employees back to work.

All the while, community rallies, sit-ins, lock-outs and other public support actions have been organized across Canada in solidarity with postal workers' right to collective bargaining.

“[CUPW] stood next to me and my causes and beliefs in so many demonstrations” said Ottawa activist Kevin Donaghy explaining his presence at a local rally. “The public at large and the public sector is under attack. This is the beginning of the onslaught over the next four years with the Harper majority.”

Guy Laflamme of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 1979 said his union supports CUPW because it has been at the forefront of social justice struggles from maternity leave, to rights for gays and lesbians and rights for immigrant workers.

“This is the first big challenge for social and labour movements since the election of the Harper government. I think it is even more important that we be present and show that we will not let ourselves be trampled,” he said.

The base of public support across Canada for postal workers' right to strike is wide, as these images show. Canadians across the country stand with postal workers and their union's fundamental right to collectively negotiate the terms and conditions of employment on behalf of its 48,000 postal worker members.

The Dominion Editorial Collective, along with several other independent Canadian magazines, responded yesterday to a letter issued by Magazines Canada supporting Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt's introduction of back-to-work legislation. The Dominion is a member publication of Magazines Canada, a distributor of Canadian magazines.

For more breaking grassroots coverage of working class issues, visit the Media Co-op. For local coverage of postal workers' resistance to back-to-work legislation and public support for CUPW, visit the Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver Media Co-ops, as well as our sister organization, the NB Media Co-op.

Photo essay compiled by Moira Peters of the Dominion Editorial Collective, with files from Murray Bush, Sebastien Labelle and Melissa Albiani. Thanks to the artists who donated these images. moira@mediacoop.ca

postal workers.winnipeg

postal workers.jugglers

postal workers.sydney march

postal workers.halifax picket

postal workers.ottawa

postal workers.gatineau

postal workers.fredericton students

postal workers.halifax students

postal workers.edmonton stop

postal workers.montreal banner

postal workers.sydney slumber

postal workers.stu faculty

postal workers.edmonton

postal workers.Vancouver

postal workers.working class

Weathering the Storm

dru — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:44:08 +0000

Cooperative Quebec sawmill thrives despite forestry crisis

MONTREAL—Quebec's forestry industry has seen regular, predictable slumps (recent downturns happened in 1974, 1982-3, and 1991-4), each accompanied by a round of layoffs in the province’s mill towns and forestry sector. Between the softwood lumber crisis in 2000 and the US housing collapse of 2006, 26,000 millworkers and loggers have lost their livelihoods.

In one corner of Quebec, communities have used a cooperative business model to defy the boom-bust cycles and short-term thinking that characterize much of the forestry sector.

For tourists, as well as for many urban Quebecers, the province’s effective eastern boundary lies at Tadoussac. Beyond here, on the north side of the St. Lawrence, extends a rugged territory where snow squalls in October are frequent, communities are sparse, and the expense of transport can make commerce difficult. Returns on investment are often modest, and in the days before the provincial government re-ordered and centralized the economy in the 1960s, locally-owned cooperatives brought electricity as well as grocery stores to many a North Shore town where private entrepreneurs did not see enough of a profit opportunity to attract their interest.

Sacre-Coeur, with a population of 2000, located fifteen kilometers from Tadoussac, is in most ways a typical North Shore community. The town depended on forestry for several generations, but by 1984, in the wake of one of the cyclical slumps, the local sawmill had undergone its third consecutive bankruptcy in ten years under three separate managements, and seemed set to close for good.

“We had a reputation as the [forestry] plant that had lost the most money in Quebec,” recalls Marc Gilbert, who was an employee at the sawmill at the time. “Nobody wanted to touch us.”

Ultimately the facility, which constituted the town's main industry, was to remain shuttered for two and a half years.

The town’s residents might have given in to fatalism; but instead, after the bank that held the mill's mortgage was unable to find a buyer and offered to sell the plant at liquidation prices, locals decided to undertake a ground-breaking initiative. Banding together to form the Sacre-Coeur Development Corporation [Societe d'Exploitation de Sacre-Coeur], they secured the support of a credit union as well as a provincial government subsidy, and bought the mill for $1.2 million.

According to those who know the local history, the motive in doing this was to forestall the flight of young people to the city and the slow death which is the bane of so many single-resource communities in unfavourable times.

After studying various models, the interested parties decided to constitute themselves as a single company called Boisaco Inc, owned in three equal parts by a loggers' cooperative, (Cofor) a millworkers' cooperative (Unisaco), and a consortium of local businesses.

An advantage of this structure, according to Marc Gilbert, who was one of the project’s founders and until recently served as company president, is that it allows the workers, as majority shareholders, to benefit from the management experience of the members of the business consortium.

Gilbert says that decision-making is rarely adversarial.

"We adopted a shareholder's charter that gave everyone [all three parties] a veto right on all big decisions," says Gilbert. "This forced us [to seek] a working consensus."

The model is superior to what typically prevails on shop floors, says Gilbert, where management squares off with unions and the need to explain (or debate) procedures slows down productivity.

Three months after its reopening in 1985, the combined advantages of a market recovery and the new management allowed the Boisaco sawmill to generate enough revenue to pay off all its debts.

Since then, the company has divided profit according to a formula that would seem out of place in the corporate world. Twenty-seven per cent is shared equally as dividends among the three shareholders; eighteen per cent goes to workers' bonuses, while fifty-five per cent (an unusually high proportion, according to Gilbert) is targeted—once taxes have been paid—to research and development. Part of this fifty-five per cent is also allocated to a rainy-day fund.

Sarah Toulouse, a recent Masters graduate in cooperative management from the University of Sherbrooke, has studied Boisaco. I asked her why the consortium of business shareholders would agree to finance Boisaco when they could have obtained a higher return on their investment elsewhere.

“In Sacre-Coeur the [business] shareholders are mostly...folks from the region,” she says. “Their priority is to keep the region alive.”

Today, Boisaco provides employment to about two hundred workers as members of one of the two founding co-ops.

Moreover, over the last twenty-five years as Boisaco has thrived, it has used part of its profits to acquire shares in diverse companies in the region with which it has then signed supply contracts.

In one such case, Boisaco provides lumber to Sacopan, a one-hundred-worker company founded in 1999 that operates out of the same lot as Boisaco in Sacré-Coeur. Sacopan sells fibrewood doorskins within Canada and to the USA. In the wake of the American subprime crisis, Sacpan's sales have helped keep Boisaco afloat.

“Historically, whenever [home] construction flags, [home] renovation takes up the slack,” says Gilbert, explaining a strong American niche market for the product.

Once the affiliated companies like Sacopan are factored in, Boisaco can be said to secure employment for six hundred forestry sector workers throughout the Upper North Shore.

It is source of pride to the company that it has come through the forestry crisis, now seen to be ending, without a high level of debt, and that it accepted a deficit situation rather than shut temporarily or resort to lay-offs.

And from conversation it is clear that the management sees this decision as rooted both in sound business sense as well as in Boisaco’s original social mandate.

“If we had stopped, we would have lost our best workers,” says Marc Gilbert, in response to my unstated question. “All those folks couldn't have waited four years. They would have lost their equipment. And when we wanted to start up again, how much would it have cost us to recreate all of it, and all that expertise?”

Chris Scott is a Montreal-based writer, researcher and activist who makes regular visits to eastern Quebec.

Boisaco

Raising the Flag for Union Rights in Guatemala

Moira Peters — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:54:43 +0000

Bottle distributors trying to unionize face 2-year strike, 2 assassinations

GUATEMALA CITY—Guatemalan bottle distributors fired for trying to organize a union are in their second year of protest, camped out in a tent outside Guatemala's National Palace.

According to Edwin Alvarez Guevara, Secretary General of the Peten Distributors Union (SITRAPETEN), Agua Pura Salvavidas employees wanted fair working conditions so they decided to organize a union in 2007. In response, their employer used classic union-busting tactics: the company temporarily closed the factory, declared bankruptcy, then opened new subsidiary companies.

Thirteen bottle distributor workers filed a union application with the Department of Labour in February 2007. That same day, the Department of Labour notified the company, which immediately fired the 13 workers.

Three days later, the remaining workers decided to strike. Later that day, at about 6:00 pm, the company said they would re-hire the workers. The company then sued the 13 workers for Q400,000 (approximately CAD$52,100) in lost revenue from the one-day strike.

The workers tried six more times to unionize. "We contacted the Minister of Labour to find out the status of our last union application and we were told that the Department meant to tell us that our union application was successful but they said it did not matter now because the company no longer exists," said Alvarez. "They are not supposed to fire workers during a union application but that is what they did. They just changed the name of the company to avoid having to deal with a union."

Alvarez worked as a bottle distributor for Agua Pura Salvavidas for 13 years. He worked an average of 14-15 hours a day in order to meet the quota set by the company. Salvavidas delivery workers are paid on commission. Workers are not paid overtime for double and triple shifts, which occur when the workers are not able to meet their quota.

In February 2009, a judge ruled that the workers be reinstated but an appeal overturned that decision. The workers have taken their case to the Supreme Court of Justice and are currently waiting for its decision. They are worried the outcome will not be in their favour since one of the judges on the Supreme Court is a well-known legal counsel for the country's business elite. The workers have vowed to take their case to the Inter-American Court if they cannot get justice in Guatemala.

SITRAPETEN initially protested the firing of workers by setting up a camp in front of the Salvavidas plant in Guatemala City for four months. Forty-one workers took shifts living under the tent. The workers demanded their reinstatement, a raise in commission, and a just and realistic daily bottle distribution quota.

Because of constant harassment, they moved their tent to the front of the Guatemalan National Palace, where they have been for the past two years. They got a permit to be there but according to Alvarez, Guatemala does not want them outside the National Palace because they are a constant reminder that the State does not protect workers.

Alvarez says the strike is not just about quotas, it is about job security, worker health and safety, and the right to organize a union. SITRAPETEN, whose members are currently under human rights accompaniment, points to two assassinations of their members and numerous death threats from company supervisors and thugs. Of the 638 Agua Pura Salvavidas workers in Guatemala, 114 workers signed up to unionize but many have dropped out due to either fear of the consequences—including assassination—or the company coercing workers to accept severance packages.

The workers are up against the largest purified water distributor in the country, Agua Pura Salvavidas, owned by the powerful Castillo Brothers Corporation. The company has a monopoly over the country's entertainment and food and beverage industries, including the Gallo Brewery.

On December 10—International Human Rights Day—SITRAPETEN's camps were violently cleared for the filming of Mexico's version of "American Idol."

"It is ironic that while Canada's Governor General Michaelle Jean was replacing the white rose to commemorate 24 hours of 'peace' in Guatemala inside the country's Constitutional Palace, 150 national civil police agents were outside violently evicting the SITRAPETEN workers from their makeshift homes in the Central Plaza," wrote Jackie McVicar, Breaking the Silence's Guatemala-based coordinator who witnessed the incident.

SITRAPETEN has filed two charges related to the eviction—one against the municipal judge who issued the eviction order and one against the Police Director. SITRAPETEN is arguing that the judge did not have the authority to issue such an eviction order and that the Police Director did not follow proper procedures.

On May 14, Alvarez spoke to a delegation of the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network. The delegation included union representatives from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) and the Public Service Alliance of Canada as well as university students and professors.

Before coming to Guatemala, the two delegates with the CUPW, Darrell Kelly of Woodstock, NB, and Nicola Boone of Westville, NS, raised money to give to an organization in Guatemala. After learning of the workers' struggle, they decided to give that money to SITRAPETEN.

"As members of CUPW we have a constitutional obligation to support international solidarity movements," said Nicola Boone.

Alvarez said the economic solidarity is important and that the money will be spent on food and maybe transportation to meetings, since many of their organizers have not been able to work since they were fired two years ago.

"I have always said that what is happening here isn't just a blow to our union but a blow to the international labour movement," said Alvarez in a 2008 interview with Upside Down World. "From all sides the labour movement is suffering a number of threats. So, in whatever way possible we are asking for international organizations to help us maintain the struggle."

"Supporting SITRAPETEN is important because an injury to one union is an injury to all unionized workers," said Kelly. "The world is now a global marketplace controlled by corporations seeking the cheapest place to do business. We're all workers struggling for the right to work in a healthy and safe environment with reasonable wages and benefits. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has been supporting international solidarity work for over twenty years...SITRAPETEN is the face of the union struggle in Guatemala and we're proud to support our brothers and sisters in any way we can."

Tracy Glynn sits on the Board of the Dominion/Media Co-op and is an organizer of the New Brunswick Media Co-op. An original version of this article was published by the New Brunswick Media Co-op.

Guate Salvavidas Strike

"There Is No Neutral"

Tim McSorley — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:59:17 +0000

Striking Vale Inco workers push for local politicians, residents to back anti-scab legislation

SUDBURY—As the longest strike in Sudbury’s history rolls on, United Steelworkers union organizers are calling for an end to the use of replacement workers, blaming the practice for prolonging the strike.

“If there was anti-scab legislation in place, this strike would’ve been over months ago," Bernie Arsenault told The Dominion. Arsenault, a member of Steelworkers Local 6500, added that the use of replacement workers is new in the experience of the Steelworkers.

Three-thousand three-hundred Steelworkers from locals 6500 in Sudbury and 6200 in Port Colborne have been on strike against mining giant Vale Inco since July 13, 2009, in what has become the longest strike in the history of all three parties. Central issues in the contract bargaining process are pension plans, workers’ nickel bonuses, seniority transfer rights, the contracting out of jobs and the reinstatement of nine activists who were fired during the course of the strike.

To increase pressure, United Steelworkers Local 6500 declared May “anti-scab month,” distributing flyers to homes around the Sudbury area appealing to citizens to support proposed provincial anti-replacement worker legislation.

The Steelworkers union also convinced Sudbury city council to adopt a symbolic motion in support of anti-replacement worker legislation. At the end of May, 10 months and one week into the strike, the Local 6500 held a rally in front of Sudbury Member of Provincial Parliament Rick Bartolucci’s office, calling on him to end his neutrality on the subject of replacement workers.

“When you sit on the fence, your backside is facing somebody, and I think we all know who that somebody is,” rally organizer Jamie West said through a megaphone. “There is no neutral. When you’re silent, when you refuse to take a stand and you hold office, you automatically take the side that has the most money.”

A release from Bartolucci’s office stated "Mr. Bartolucci has and will continue to oppose the use of replacement workers.” Yet Bartolucci remained silent when the anti-replacement worker bill passed its first reading in provincial parliament.

Such legislation existed for a brief period in the 1990s after being introduced by Bob Rae's NDP government, but was scrapped by Mike Harris' Conservatives.

A group called CANARYS (Community Activists Need Answers Regarding Your Safety) formed in response to the strike, and has supported the push to end the practice of hiring replacement workers.

“Of course the scabs have a huge effect on the Sudbury community, from dividing the community to the implications that they will have on safety,” explains Laurie McGauley, a founder of CANARYS and long-time community activist.

“A lot of work has gone into making things safer at the mine over the decades, and the union has been intrinsic to this" continued McGauley. "Now we have people coming from other communities, who are not trained and who do not have experience with the mine, operating without a union that has experience in a mine, which is a very dangerous operation."

McGauley’s concern over safety mixes with her sobering vision of what a defeat of the strike could mean: “If [Vale Inco] manages to break this strike, that would have huge repercussions for all workers in Ontario, all over North America, because it would be a signal to everybody that replacement workers can be used to bust a union. To bust a historically-strong union like [United Steelworkers Local] 6500 is a huge symbolic loss for all unions in Canada as well as in north America.”

The proposed anti-replacement worker bill is expected to go through its second reading in November. In the meantime, intermittent talks between Vale Inco and Steelworker Locals 6500 and 6200 continue.

Shailagh Keaney is a writer and gardener living in occupied Atikameksheng Anishinawbek territory.

Steelworkers rally in Sudbury

Steelworker calls on Bartolucci

NB Port Workers Said NO CANDU

Moira Peters — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 05:11:24 +0000

Argentina honours Saint John longshoremen for 1979 act of solidarity

They said, “We don’t care about our wages
and we don’t care about the boss.
When your brothers and sisters are dying,
there’s lines you just don’t cross.”
No Hot Cargo for Argentina!
No Hot Cargo for Argentina!
No Hot Cargo for Argentina!

—Maritimes folk singer Nancy White, in “No Hot Cargo,” a song inspired by the 1979 event this article celebrates.

FREDERICTON—Hundreds gathered at Lily Lake Pavilion in Saint John on Saturday, March 13, to honour the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 273 for what has been called "the single most dramatic example of Canadian trade union solidarity with workers in the Third World."

Argentina’s Ambassador to Canada, Arturo Guillermo Bothamley, presented the Orden de Mayo to Pat Riley, business agent for the Saint John Local of the ILA, for the union’s 1979 protest that prevented the shipment of heavy water to Argentina’s military dictatorship—an action that resulted in the release of 11 political prisoners. The Orden de Mayo is the highest award given by the Argentine government to citizens of another country for courage, honour and solidarity.

“We are going to pay an old debt from the heart to some people who put their security at risk for people thousands of miles away,” said Bothamley at the ceremony.

On the morning of July 3, 1979, port workers refused to cross a picket line on the west side of the Saint John harbour the day the workers were supposed to ship a load of heavy water to Argentina for the CANDU nuclear reactor Argentina had bought from Canada in 1973. Heavy water is a component necessary for the functioning of nuclear reactors fueled by unenriched uranium.

The picket had been organized by the NO CANDU committee, the New Brunswick Federation of Labour, and the Saint John and District Labour Council. With signs and buttons stating, "NO CANDU FOR ARGENTINA," and "HOT CARGO," the protesters demanded the release of 17 political prisoners in Argentina, most of whom were trade unionists.

The action was part of a national campaign started by the Group for the Defence of Civil Rights in Argentina—initiated by Argentine expatriates—in response to the brutal military dictatorship that took power in Argentina in 1976.

“The 1979 Argentine military junta was a rogue government in league with other rogue governments, such as the government of South Africa, which was itself notorious for its apartheid policies and its similar threat of acquiring nuclear capabilities," said Riley at the award ceremony.

"The military junta’s most appalling practices were not well-known. Whether you were a newspaper editor, a university professor or a university student, a trade unionist, or simply a person of conscience, you could well disappear if you spoke out about the inhuman practices of the junta.”

It is estimated that 10,000-30,000 people were tortured, murdered or “disappeared” between 1976 and 1983. The government of Canada was enthusiastically supporting business with Argentina, including the export of nuclear technology, despite the Argentine government’s refusal to sign the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The picket line was joined by members of many local unions, including the Canadian Paperworkers, the United Auto Workers, the International Association of Machinists, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Church groups and members from the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, Project Ploughshares and the Maritimes Energy Coalition also joined the picket.

As a result of the protest, 11 of the 17 political prisoners were released within days and three were sent into exile.

Another prisoner identified by the NO CANDU campaign, union leader Alberto Piccinini, was released a year later. During a visit to Canada, he expressed his gratitude to a group of Canadian workers: “Unity is the unity of all of us; and it must go beyond national boundaries. I am very clear that I am free today because of the struggle first of the people in my country and second because of workers elsewhere—especially in this beautiful country.”

At the March 13 award ceremony, Saint John mayor Ivan Court spoke of the workers’ decision to respect the picket line on the July morning, 31 years ago: “People matter first and foremost... So when the longshoremen in this city in 1979 said to the boss, ‘We’re not crossing the picket line. Life is more important than a paycheck,’ that’s what Saint John is all about... People were willing to say, ‘no,’ and ‘no’ did save lives,” he said.

"They were ordinary people knowing that they were doing something to try and change the living conditions—the lives—of people a long way away," said Barbara Byers of the Canadian Labour Congress at the ceremony. "But they were ordinary people taking extraordinary actions. They were ordinary people making history."

Byers went on to draw connections to current political issues in Latin America, including the recent coup d’etat in Honduras and the proposed Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement:

Today the widespread military dictatorships may be on the wane, but we now have a dictatorship of the free markets and free trade agreements. And the labour movement has been at the forefront of the resistance to that new kind of dictatorship going back to the fight against the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. We learned many lessons from those struggles and we are applying them to the current fight to oppose the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Colombia may not be ruled by a military dictatorship, but human rights violations taking place in that country are equally surreal. The dirty war there is being waged against trade unionists and leaders who dare to organize a union, lead a strike or oppose the government in any way.

Upon accepting the Orden de Mayo from Ambassador Bothamley, Pat Riley expressed his gratitude for the recognition of their action 31 years ago, and reflected on the event.

“The story of the 1979 NO CANDU for Argentina picket line was a story of immense courage, ingenuity and resolve. For the disappeared political prisoners. For the mothers of the disappeared. For the Group for the Defence of Civil Rights in Argentina. For the NO CANDU for Argentina committee and so many others. For the 1979 Port of Saint John picket line and demonstration. The determination to see justice done...was a path for those involved,” said Riley.

Marie-Christine Allard is a member of the New Brunswick Media Co-op. An original version of this article was published by the New Brunswick Media Co-op.

Argentina honours Saint John longshoremen

Just Green Jobs

Moira Peters — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:40:50 +0000

Transitioning towards an environ-mental economy

OTTAWA—Organizers of the Power Shift Canada 2009 conference are looking to bring hundreds of young activists from across the country to Ottawa, from October 23-26, to discuss climate change in the run-up to the United Nations Climage Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. But along with climate change, the Ottawa conference will also be looking to empower attendees to participate in the transition to green jobs.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Powless, a Power Shift organizer and member of such groups as the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition and the Indigenous Environmental Network. He had just returned from the Green For All Academy in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, where 50 attendees, 49 from the United States and one—Powless himself—from Canada, were coming up with ways to bring green jobs to the forefront of both the environmental and social/economic justice movements.

“We [the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition] started setting up our own working groups [on green jobs], and really not seeing a lot of movement on the ground around green jobs: I mean you can find a few policy documents by some environmental groups, you can find some stuff on their website, but nobody’s out there in the streets talking about it.

“The focus around green jobs is to try and imagine a society and an economy—a way of life—that is environmentally sustainable: to try and imagine the actual jobs and the transition that we would have to go through,” said Powless.

“[Green jobs] are positions from all aspects of the economy, from typically what’s called ‘blue collar’ work right up to ‘white collar’ work, from research to actual design, to manufacturing," said Powless. "As well as things like simply going into houses and fixing them up: construction, manufacturing. So it really focuses on...fundamental aspects of our society, from our energy sources, our food sources, to the way we build things and the way we consume things, and eventually [the way we] have to recycle [those things].”

To transition to a more sustainable way of organizing our society, understanding that we need to reorient our entire workforce toward sustainability—making green work work—will be vital in addressing the global environmental challenges we face.

Granted, the effort is more than understanding what “green work” entails. It is also about coordinating a just transition in implementing these programs, to ensure that we are working toward social, economic, and environmental justice together.

“[The concept of green jobs] tries to address at the same time the fundamental social inequalities in our societies, especially tackling issues of poverty...[and] marginalized communities frequently not having access to most aspects of the environmental movement and not having access to a clean, healthy, safe environment.”

Green jobs are not just about making the world a cleaner place. According to Powless, there is “a human rights basis to it: that people of colour, people from poor communities, have just as much a right—in many cases even more of a right where their communities have been marginalized in the past—to participate in this new economy.

“If we don’t actually make sure that it’s led by communities, it’s not going to be the poorer communities who get access to their own sources of energy, who get access to energy audits.

“And it’s going to be especially immigrant and poorer communities who don’t have access to education and training [and] who are not going to be able to get those jobs, and are not going to be able to be involved in setting up any of those programs.”

To break the cycle of marginalization of poor and immigrant communities as the green jobs movement expands, Powless says it’s crucial for the green jobs movement “to make sure that...these communities are able to be there at the table as some of the main initiators of this discussion. And I think that’s why...we have to really start getting these people involved now.”

Another key aspect of the transition is keeping a local focus. “Remodelling a house, doing energy audits, installing renewable energy systems...local community agriculture, community gardens—these are all fundamentally local processes, and it can be replicated on a wide scale in most urban and even semi-urban centres across North America, and in a lot of other places.

“And these are the kind of things that can’t be outsourced, and [they] provide secure employment for people.”

Greg Macdougall is a member of Common Cause, an Ontario anarchist organization. He is also active with the Organizing For Justice conference in Ottawa (October 15-18), the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa and Equitable Education.

Green Jobs Ashley Chee

Green Jobs Youth March

A Striking Outcome

dawn — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:14:30 +0000

Sudbury ‘78 resonates today

SUDBURY, ONTARIO–Twenty-four thousand workers rallied in September 1978, in a historic strike against Inco – a strike that forever changed the community of Sudbury and has had lingering reverberations for workers in the mining industry ever since. At the time, Inco was the second-largest nickel producer in the world, and the nickel deposits in Ontario were the largest on Earth.

In the late 1970s, Inco was on its way to bankruptcy: the company had too many workers on the books, costly operations and used and outdated equipment. Many people in Sudbury, including today’s Mayor John Rodriguez, say the company was like a house that was old and hadn’t been looked after for many years. More importantly, Inco had, until that point, controlled the price of nickel. When competition from Russia began to emerge in the world nickel market, Inco was not prepared, and began to see a drop in profits.

Every three years, workers with Inco, who are organized under the United Steelworkers (USW) union, must renegotiate their contract. When the workers' contract was up in July 1978, the company decided that the best way for them to save money would be by cutting pensions, wages and benefits. These were gains the USW had worked hard to achieve over decades.

"Inco was persistent all the way through negotiations – that if the concessions weren’t made, then there would be no collective agreement. We went past the July 10 deadline and in September we went back to the bargaining table once more to get Inco to move away from these concessions. They refused and on September 15, our members voted by 58 per cent to reject the collective agreement and take strike action," says Wayne Fraiser, who served on the bargaining committee for the Steelworkers throughout the strike.

In spite of ongoing bargaining during the strike, it took nine months before any agreement was reached.

Whether or not the small wage increase and pension package that workers received in the new contract was worth the fight is debatable. Thousands of workers lost their homes and cars from their inability to make the payments with their $20-per-month strike pay, and as nickel mining was Sudbury's primary industry, the city at large suffered.

Nickel has long been considered a 'strategic' metal, necessary for the manufacturing of arms and defense equipment, as well as for making stainless steel. The Sudbury strike in 1978 significantly impacted the world market for nickel.

Since 1979 Inco has undergone a tremendous amount of restructuring. They cut 20,000 employees from their staff and now have more people receiving payments from the pension roll than pay roll.

Malcolm Léger is now a pensioner who worked with Inco on the floor and as management for over 30 years. Léger believes the strike caused long-term psychological damage for the Sudbury’s workers and the wider labour movement.

“Every time we came up to negotiations, every three year cycle, we would remember the nine-month strike. And the shut-down period that came after the strike. And then we would remember the layoffs that happened afterward. Well, how do you think that made us feel? We would ask each other, ‘Are we in for another nine-month strike?’ It was in everybody’s brains and we were scared after of ever having to do it again. Even to this day.”

In 2006 Inco was bought by Brazilian mining company CVRD, which has since become Vale/Inco. The same year Inco was removed from the FTSE4GOOD index, which is designed by the Ethical Investment Research Service. Inco’s failures to meet the human rights criteria and environmental concerns were cited as reasons for the removal. The Steelworkers Union continues to represent the workers for Vale/Inco in the region of Sudbury.

The strike and its aftermath have emphasized the need to diversify the economy. "We don't ever want to go back and be beholden to the big mining companies again," says Mayor Rodriguez. He is busy lobbying to see mining profits used to help build and support other industries, such as research in environmental science and tourism.

Although The Dominion attempted to speak with a representative of Vale/Inco on numerous occasions, the company declined comment.

Amy Miller lived in Sudbury from 1980-1997 and credits the city for developing much of her analysis. She continues to visit her family, who live there.

Sudbury Stack

Working to Death

dawn — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:04:28 +0000

Canada's asbestos legacy

SARNIA, ONTARIO–Industrialized countries are facing a global disease epidemic.

Every year, two million workers die of occupational causes, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). Seventy-five per cent of these preventable deaths are due to work-related disease. Of these diseases, cancer is the biggest killer. The single largest contributor to this work-related cancer epidemic is exposure to asbestos, causing 100,000 to 140,000 deaths annually worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that between 5 and 10 million people will ultimately die from asbestos-related diseases.

Historically, Canada has been one of the world’s leading sources of chrysotile asbestos, the most common variety.

Used in thousands of products for its heat-resistance, its insulating properties and its strength, over 300 million tonnes of asbestos have been mined in the last century.

Most common uses of asbestos have been banned since the 1980s, but today it is used primarily in cement materials manufactured and used in developing countries.

For over 60 years, the asbestos industry knew about the carcinogenic potential of asbestos, but actively kept this information from its employees and the public. Since the information became widely known, insurance claims and lawsuits forced American asbestos manufacturers in the United States out of business; many are under bankruptcy protection.

Among industrialized countries, Canada has remained essentially alone in failing to acknowledge and act upon cases of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related cancers and respiratory diseases.

Two recent reports – one on asbestos-related diseases in Quebec, the centre of Canadian asbestos mining, and the other on work-related mortality in Canada – reveal a startling set of findings.

In the case of Quebec, the government report found rates of mesothelioma – a disease caused almost exclusively by exposure to asbestos, in which malignant cells develop in the protective lining of the body's internal organs, and for which the prognosis is poor – to be some of the highest in the world.

The report on Canadian occupational mortality, entitled “Five Deaths a Day: Workplace Fatalities in Canada, 1993-2005,” estimates asbestos-related deaths at almost 31 per cent of all workplace fatalities. The authors further suggest that almost 70 per cent of the increase in workplace fatalities between 1996 and 2005 was due to asbestos.

In industrial communities such as Sarnia-Lambton, Ontario, the toll of asbestos-related disease has been devastating. Sarnia-Lambton is home to a large petrochemical complex that produces approximately 40 per cent of Canada’s chemicals. The community has age-adjusted rates of mesothelioma that are comparable to some of the worst international asbestos disease hot-spots, such as areas in Scotland, where shipbuilding exposed tens of thousands of workers to asbestos.

The asbestos disease tragedy in Sarnia-Lambton has garnered national and international media attention. Between 1999 and 2008, the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) recorded and diagnosed approximately 700 workers or family members with asbestos-related cancers or asbestosis, a chronic inflammation of the lungs. Over 1,000 of the asbestos-exposed workers with pleural plaques are being examined at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto with the use of low-dose CT (medical imaging) scans in the hope of detecting lung cancer in its early stages, when is still treatable.

Major health organizations, such as the International Agency for the Research of Cancer (IARC), the Collegium Ramazzini, the US National Toxicology, and the WHO, classify all forms of asbestos as human carcinogens and have determined that there is no safe threshold of exposure to the chemical. In 2007, the Canadian Cancer Society joined the above-mentioned organizations and called for the "elimination of exposure to asbestos."

The government of Canada maintains that Canadian asbestos –chrysotile, or white asbestos – is a weak carcinogen, despite scientific consensus to the contrary.

In fact, the federal government provides economic and political support for the asbestos industry and helps to maintain global asbestos markets by funding the industry-sponsored Chrysotile Institute over $20 million. Ottawa also exerts diplomatic pressure on behalf of the industry, funds legal challenges and defends against economic threats.

The Canadian federal government brought a legal challenge to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reverse the European asbestos ban, but in 2000, the WTO ruled in favour of the ban, saying Canada was unable to disprove evidence regarding the carcinogenicity and other harm to human health caused by exposure to chrysotile asbestos. Canada unsuccessfully appealed the decision.

At the time of the WTO dispute, Canada was the world’s largest exporter of asbestos. While asbestos is still mined in Canada, it is now more profitably mined in developing countries. However, Canada continues to work in tandem with the global asbestos industry by providing technical expertise and political influence.

Canada’s generally positive global reputation allows it to promote this hazardous substance with minimal scepticism. The Canadian government has blocked efforts through the United Nations to have chrysotile asbestos included in the Rotterdam Convention, a global treaty that obligates producing countries to warn of the possible harm posed by their exports – essentially a right-to-know treaty for toxic substances.

Recently obtained federal government documents contained briefing notes for Gary Lunn, Minister of National Resources, which explained Canada’s opposition to the Rotterdam Convention. A group that included Gary Nash, an assistant Deputy Minister and former founding President of the Chrysotile Institute in Montreal, prepared the background information.

The documents reveal that the international asbestos industry is intentionally keeping the price of chrysotile asbestos inflated so Canadian mines can remain competitive, allowing the Canadian government to use its international standing to promote and protect the global asbestos industry.

The Globe and Mail reported that “federal officials believe there is a type of informal quid pro quo operating in the industry, with Canada using its good image abroad to promote asbestos, in return for foreign companies treating Canadian miners with kid gloves in the battle for market share."

The document, which was prepared by high-level bureaucrats for the Minister, stated, "Foreign producers tolerate higher-cost Canadian producers because of Canada’s leadership and credibility in promoting the safer use of chrysotile."

A blacked-out bullet point follows. The document goes on to say that lower-cost producers could, at will, "...withdraw support for the Canadian chrysotile industry in that they could easily reduce prices to eliminate Canadian competition," revealing the global strategy of the asbestos industry. Rather than have the Canadian industry forced out of business by global competition, asbestos-producing countries will tolerate an artificially inflated price in order to maintain the Canadian political and diplomatic role in defence of asbestos.

The true extent of the asbestos disease epidemic continues to be hidden from the Canadian public. Every year, hundreds of cases of mesothelioma are diagnosed while the majority are never submitted to the provincial compensation boards. Other asbestos-related cancers are left almost totally unrecognized and uncounted. The lack of public and medical awareness about the true extent of these diseases leaves individual workers and their families suffering and grieving without acknowledgement and support. Meanwhile, the public healthcare system is forced to cover the costs of treatment that, by law, should be borne by employers through compensation insurance.

This public health and social policy scandal has brought together a growing number of voices that are demanding an end to Canada’s century-long failure to protect workers from preventable asbestos diseases. A national network of trade unions, environmentalists, medical and scientific associations and victims’ groups have formed an organization called Ban Asbestos Canada.

A ban would end the export of Canadian asbestos and disarm the global asbestos promotion campaign that has been based in Canada. It might also help restore a semblance of credibility to Canada’s reputation as a just, caring and equitable nation.

Since the writing of this article, Canada successfully opposed the addition of chrysotile asbestos to a global dangerous-substance register at a conference in Rome, Italy.

This article was adapted from a longer version first published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, entitled "Canada's Asbestos Legacy."

Margaret Keith and James Brophy are cancer researchers, currently involved in two breast cancer studies. They have each worked in occupational and environmental health for 30 years.

Asbestos

Asbestos Hazard