Showing posts with label unfai labour practices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unfai labour practices. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Linda McQuaig on Harper's Anti-Labour Policies

Drawing comparisons between Republican animus toward labour and Harper government policies that permit the kind of outrageous corporate behaviour unfolding at Electro-Motive Canada, Linda McQuaig's column in today's Star warns us of what is ahead for workers in Canada.

Two key excerpts provide the tone of her piece:

Harper played a key role in bringing about this disaster for the London workers by approving the sale of the company, Electro-Motive Diesel, to foreign-owned Caterpillar in 2010, after supposedly investigating whether the deal was in Canada’s interests.

Harper is of course staunchly pro-capitalist, and has aggressively lowered corporate tax rates, while refusing to link lower taxes to investment or job creation.

But his anti-union stance, evident in disputes at Air Canada and the post office last summer, has been particularly provocative. He seems determined to turn Canada into an anti-union paradise
.

As usual, McQuaig's analysis is well-worth perusing in full.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Truth About The Garda Screeners' Dispute At Pearson Airport

While the mainstream media has uniformly reported that the job action delaying so many passengers recently at Pearson International is over scheduling conflicts, to my knowledge only one source has actually reported the nature of that conflict.

The Toronto Star's Thomas Walkom yesterday reported the following:

A few months ago [Garda, the screeners' employer] tried to cut costs by replacing better-paid full-time workers with part-timers.

Garda now wants its workers to bid against each in order to keep down the wage differentials it pays those who do the worst shifts.

Shift-bidding, as it is called, strikes directly at the heart of unions. It allows the employer to pit one worker against another in a search for the most desperate.


So in other words, to increase its profits, Garda, in an apparent violation of the collective agreement it has with its workers, is trying to get those workers to offer their security services cheaper than their fellow workers.

Why has the MSM withheld this information from the public?

Do we really want to entrust our flying security to a company that shows such contempt for its employees?