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Currently viewing articles tagged with Unions.
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The Assault on Public Services
Today, the message is that if you don’t like the way things are, tough — you have no alternative. The real lesson of course is that if the present economic system can’t offer us a better life, then it is that system, not our expectations that needs changing.
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Organized Labour and the Occupations Movement
As the small encampment in lower Manhattan has swelled and spread to cities across the country, the rallying cry of the “99%” has at least momentarily introduced the mainstream discourse to a conception of class, which is usually missing from the political theater showcased on corporate news outlets.
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Precarious Labour
There will be no return to the days when full-time permanent jobs were the norm for many working people. Non-standard employment is the working arrangement of choice for employers eyeing their bottom lines.
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Puebla workers at Johnson Controls sign first collective bargaining agreement
A long and dramatic struggle at the Johnson Controls Interiors (JCI) factory in Puebla, Mexico, has finally resulted in the expulsion of a sham “protection union” and the signing of a real collective bargaining agreement with Mexico’s mineworkers’ union (SNTMMSSRM or Los Mineros).
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Wisconsin Death Letter Blues
The real story from Wisconsin is the elephant in the living room none want to acknowledge, namely, the cuts that humbled union production workers in the 1980s are now moving up the ladder to include the last bastion of union held territory.
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Review: Unions, Equity and the Path to Renewal
Unions face serious problems in the twenty-first century, including a major participatory and democratic deficit. How should we address these problems in order to “renew” 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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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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