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Currently viewing articles tagged with Unions.
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Toronto Labour Council Organizes Stewards’ Assembly
In an environment where working people in Ontario have suffered major setbacks, organized labour’s response has so far been disappointing. The May 7th coming together of over 1,600 stewards, workplace representatives, staff, and other union reps in Toronto around the necessity of fighting against attacks by employers and governments was an unprecedented and impressive exception that brought some hope for forward motion.
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Web Exclusive: Setting the Record Straight
Tyler McCreary’s Tough Union, Tough Lessons would be a useful contribution to the important post-mortem of a strike ended wrong, if not for the fact that most of the evidence upon which his arguments are premised bears little resemblance whatsoever to the historical record.
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Tough union, tough lessons
Over the last three decades in Canada, governments’ neoliberal policies have created a crisis of under-funding in post-secondary education. With steep funding cuts, universities and colleges have looked to other measures to balance their books: increasing tuition and ancillary fees, soliciting greater private funding and implementing cost-reduction measures like increased reliance on contract faculty to teach courses. The present economic crisis has further exacerbated the financial situation at many universities, as cash-strained investors restrict their donations, universities’ sizable endowment funds bleed with investment losses, and deficit-laden governments balk at increasing education funding.
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York University’s get of jail free card
The longest university strike in English Canada came to an unhappy end on January 29, 2009, in a manner that should send a wake-up call to an entire labour movement already on the defensive. After 85 days on the picket line in an effort to reverse the trend towards casualized teaching in post-secondary institutions, the contract professors and graduate-student workers of CUPE 3903 were legislated back to work by a Liberal-Conservative coalition. One by one, MPPs stood up to vote for Bill 145, as picketers outside could be heard singing the words, “we’ll not stand for this.” Within days, there were reports of imminent legislation forcing Ottawa transit workers back on the job. Within a week, 70,000 elementary school teachers accepted a tentative agreement after being told to “watch the situation at York very closely.”
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Thinking through the York University strike
The recent strike by CUPE 3903, which represents the contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate assistants at York University, has left deep divisions in the union and on campus. In a heated discussion about the merits of the two articles we commissioned, the Dimension collective generated a number of questions over which no agreement emerged. We thought it would be useful to share these questions with our readers.
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Unions and the crisis
The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.
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The Labour Report
One might think that a prolonged and deep recession would provide the inspiration for socialist renewal. The contradictions of capital, combined with the insatiable greed of many capitalists, have once again revealed how this system doesn’t work for people who depend on selling their labour. But failures of capitalism don’t automatically lead to thoughts of socialism. If history can teach us, we should look beyond the labour movement for sources of new inspiration and leadership.
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Drawing a line in the sand
Plans are afoot for the wholesale ecological reconfiguration of vast parts of the northern hemisphere. The planners are suggesting that infrastructure is required to facilitate far-reaching change: the second-largest dam in the world, a possible nuclear-power station at Peace River, and pipelines across Alberta to the west coast, across the prairies, and down the Mackenzie River.
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Dissent and Democracy
For a while it looked like the 2007 CUPE national convention was going to be a placid affair. As in 2005, the majority of delegates voted in favour of increasing the representation of women on the National Executive Board. But once again, nothing will change because the vote was not quite sufficient to break the two-thirds threshold required by CUPE for constitutional changes to be adopted.
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The CAW-Magna Agreement
Collective bargaining is a complex process. It requires assessments of relative power and strategic considerations that are usually only fully appreciated by the people directly involved. As such, we are reluctant to comment on the decision of the Canadian Autoworkers Union to agree to the Framework of Fairness Agreement (FAA) with Magna International Inc.
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