Canada Post is picking this fight

Canada Post serves Lock out notice declaring uncertainty about potential work stoppage is affecting business. Meanwhile it's Canada Post management that is creating that uncertainty while the union refrains from issuing a strike notice and makes it clear they want to settle the dispute at the bargaining table.

This fight is 100% unnecessary and 100% being picked by management.

Their middle of the night press release using many many words to avoid using two short ones:  Lock and Out:

 Management, the media and all the usual suspects will be rushing to call this a Strike at every opportunity.  This is deliberate deception to obscure who is launching the first strike.  Do not fall for it and correct it every time you see it.

Overheated Rhetoric, Overheated Supporters

Brian Jean bears personal responsibility for the extreme attacks and threats against Rachel Notley from his supporters that he is finally, belatedly speaking against.

The government mishandled the rollout of what they saw as a commonsense implementation of rules that have been clearly on the table since long before the election as inevitable components of any future farm worker legislation.  Rules that have been discussed and consulted on and refined for literally years.  The suggestion that they are now being implemented too quickly with insufficient consultation is absurd on its face.

Brian Jean led the charge against rules he knew had been consulted on, that he knew would inevitably come in by judicial fiat if the government didn't legislate them first, that he knew would not impact traditional family farming or cooperative seasonal activities between neighbors.

Rules that he knew both he and the Wildrose had supported in whole in the past.

Despite all these things that Brian Jean knew, both he and his party engaged in a despicably dishonest and irresponsible assault on Bill 6, seemingly entirely for partisan gain.

Brian Jean needs to remember who his supporters are.  Brian Jean needs to remember that overheated rhetoric when delivered to overheated people is frankly and unambiguously dangerous incitement.

The Official Opposition of Alberta is a right wing party that defined itself in right wing rebellion against... a right wing government.  These are not conservatives, either small 'c' or big 'C'. These are radicals, extreme right-wingers by Canadian standards, who viewed the the PC government, easily the most right wing governing party in Canada, hostile to labour and the environment, light on regulation and fighting equal rights for gays to the bitter end....with utter contempt.

The Wild Rose was formed to oppose this as too moderate and liberal!

Brian Jean is trying to appear reassuring and rational and sunny.  He is leading a party of far right extremists and he needs to remember that the next time he's thinking of throwing a match into a pool of gasoline.

The Pendulum Swing

There seems to be a resurgence for the left in electoral politics.  Bernie Sanders is drawing huge crowds and worrying establishment Democrats and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn, originally a protest nomination for Labour party leadership and very much a UK equivalent of Sanders is causing alarm among Blairite Labour Party elites by giving every sign that he might be about to win.

And of course here in Canada the so called center left Liberals are a distant third while the left wing NDP is a credible contender for government itself.

The so called center left parties like Canada's Liberals internalized the message post Reagan that the only alternative was neoliberal economics and politics run for the benefit of the few and the wealthy with at best, some token nobelese oblige thrown to the poor as their policies swelled their ranks.  Emboldened, the political right charged ever further down the field to the kind of far right extremism that conservatives once purged from their ranks dragging the hapless moderate middle with them.

Now Canadian Liberals, Wall Street Democrats and Blairite Labour Party grandees all watch in shock and fury as the progressives they have repeatedly used, abused, lied to and disrespected abandon them in droves.  'Such people are unelectable!' they howl 'You are throwing power to the far right!' - who they share almost all the same policies with - but such alarmist rhetoric is based on outdated views of the electorate at large.

In the US the public at large elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as President in 2008 and re-elected him four years later and will elect any of the Democrats currently vying for the nomination Clinton, Sanders, ANYONE over any of the lunatics currently cage-battling to run the Republicans.

In Canada the NDP just elected a majority government in the most right wing province in the country and is polling in the lead federally.  In the UK the Labour Party just lost the most recent election largely because they became too right wing to keep the support of Scottish voters who turned to a left wing nationalist alternative and until they realize that if people want to vote Tory they will vote Tory not Tory lite they will be in permanent opposition. 

Far from being a disaster Corbyn is their only hope.

Anti-TFW But Pro-Immigration

It's important I think, in the mounting fervor against the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to remember that the workers in it are not the enemy.  These are people who are following the rules they were given in an effort to improve their families lives.  They have travelled thousands of miles to work hard and live frugally so they can send money home or save it up to someday bring their own families here.

It's all part of the same immigrant tradition as the family histories of most Canadians. 

I don't object in the slightest to competing for jobs against fellow citizens; workers who aren't afraid to stand up for themselves or change jobs or organize.  But migrant workers too afraid of being deported to do any of those things?  Workers who will put up with any abuse, tolerate any working conditions, be unwilling to even take sick days all because they are afraid of failing their families by being sent home?

Creating a class of workers that vulnerable and desperate and exploitable is bad for everybody.

Canada needs more people.  All the boomers will retire in waves and to afford the social safety net we want Canada will need more taxpayers than we will create with births alone.  We should increase immigration and make it faster and easier.

What we shouldn't do is create a permanently exploitable underclass.

"Yes, they are disenfranchised. Some of them don’t work for us anymore. But in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter." - McDonald's Canada CEO John Betts

Betts spends much of the conference call railing against the CBC's coverage of the controversy — but admits there is truth to the stories.
"Here’s the kicker. The kicker is there’s an element of truth in each of these stories," Betts said.

"What we’ve got to do is fix what we have in the restaurants concerning the temporary foreign workers.
"But what we’ve also learned is that we have other opportunities in the people area that we also need to take care of. Violations of labour law. And those are the kind of things that suddenly become compounded because we have another issue over here, that’s very emotional in Canada."
With regard to the company's decision to halt its Temporary Foreign Worker Program, Betts told concerned franchisees that, "In dealing with the government, the smartest move was to pre-empt their move in terms of suspending us."
"I think the relationship we build with the minister here is a politically astute one to be taking. Because they're feeling the heat big time before this story broke and now it's bigger and bigger," he went on.
"They need to see us as partners in this as a brand that can help them make some progress on this and at the same time give us an opportunity to clean ourselves up."
At no point during the recording does the CEO mention hiring Canadians instead of temporary foreign workers or go over the rules of the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

The plan is to wait till the heat dies down and get right back to business as usual. If the TFW doesn't get a stake in the heart from the Canadian public here and now it will come roaring back to life as soon as the public isn't looking. And suspending it just for the food sector doesn't help miners, IT staff, oil riggers. 

This government is Corporate Canada's eager servant and they are committed to wage suppression as an over-riding ideology before any other priority.

Losing their religion

When even The Calgary Herald agrees that legislation has gone too far in attacking unions and free speech it means we are halfway to Orwell's 1984.

"The passing of Bills 45 and 46 on Wednesday night mark a dark chapter in Alberta history.

...

The contract the government wants to impose is zero per cent for the first two years and then one per cent in each of the next two years. The union and province reached an impasse and the union decided to wait for binding arbitration, where it believed its chances would be better. That right and historic arrangement has been shredded.
Even more disturbing however, is Bill 45. Under this bill, public sector workers, union leaders and even members of the general public can be fined thousands of dollars for just musing about or encouraging a strike. If this sounds Orwellian, it’s because it is.
The fundamental right to freedom of expression is being violated here and should concern all citizens who value our rights and freedoms.
This legislation will also impose $250,000 fines per day for any illegal strike and a $1-million fine per day that would go into a liability fund. Fines for illegal strikes are not unusual, though these ones are onerous.
Needless to say, making it illegal to just talk about striking is the kind of law one might expect in some banana republic or other oppressive totalitarian state.

...

That Premier Redford actually has the gall to claim that among unionized workers “there’s an appreciation for what we’re trying to do,” is laughable.
Nobody believes that and no one can believe that a so-called human rights lawyer would allow such an abomination to the most fundamental right of any free and democratic society — the right to speak and say things that the state might not agree with."

 And we must never forget that the other motive besides sticking it to public workers, is to distract Albertans from the scandal over covering up the deaths of scores of vulnerable, mostly aboriginal children in provincial foster care.  This government is so cartoonishly evil they should be twirling their moustaches as they tie children and workers to train rails!

Nice Day for it

When Conservatives get in trouble due to their scummy worst instincts, whether it be covering up the deaths of scores of foster children in Alberta or being caught being pigs in the trough in the Senate they look for an enemy to burn at the stake or hang from the tallest tree to distract their nutter base.

The Auto-da-fé target du jour both provincially and federally is working Canadians who commit the horrific sin of banding together to defend and promote their interests, those evil thugs who believe employers owe their employees the opportunity to have a decent middle class lifestyle. The barking mad Conservative base is never happier than when someone half-baked libertarianism and sheer seething hatred for anyone who thinks differently than they do is getting it in the neck and the politician's corporate honchos are happy with the ongoing plan to turn Canada into a low wage economy in a mad race to the bottom with the slave labour economies of the developing world.

Middle Class Canadians watch their middle class lifestyles recede in the rear view mirror but maybe enough will say 'fuck you Jack, at least I've got MINE' to give the Conservatives another one of those razor thin margins of 30% or 35% of the population they laughingly refer to as a mandate.

"Oh well its a nice day for it, bring the kiddies - Oooh look at his feet kick!"

Dance with the ones that brung you Allison

“The PC party of Alberta has a proud history of being progressive and conservative and as we go forward from this place tonight we will honour both of those traditions.” - Premiere Redford's Victory speech Monday night. 

Translation: "Thanks for bringing me to the dance after those other guys dumped me, would it be OK if I still flirted with them now that we're here?"

In a word, No.

Alberta's progressives saved Premier Redford's bacon and that of her party on Monday. Here's what that support will cost, please note, this is not a wish list. This is a price tag.

• Labour - Alberta has the highest worker fatality rate in Canada. It also has the single most anti-worker labour laws in the country, a prevalent attitude of contempt for labour and the most chummy pro-management policies of any province in Canada. It's not a coincidence, there is a direct correlation between these things. If Redford wants to keep the progressive support that saved her from the unemployment line, the current state of affairs is not going to fly anymore. She needs to bring farm workers under Occupational Health and Safety rules and remove the second class citizen status that forbids them from even tyring to form a union. An exception originally justified for small family farms has resulted in ruthless, often deadly exploitation by huge corporate Agribusiness giants. A human rights lawyer who countenances such a thing is, to put it mildly a despicable hypocrite. Among many other concerns for Labour like a blatantly in the management tank provincial Labour Board is the Temporary Foreign Workers program, which is under federal jurisdiction, but its in Alberta that it has achieved its full flowering of racism, abuse and exploitation. All of this needs to change if Redford's vaunted 'Progressiveness' is to be anything but tattered fig leaf. 


•   Health Care - Redford has many soothing words on this file promising major new investment and labour peace. We will be watching to see if this government continues its sub rosa campaign of underfunding and mismanagement that for years has been a clearly intentional effort to manufacture consent for privatization. The government has zero good will and trust from the Alberta public on this file and would be advised to remember that. 


• The Environment - Sure, unlike Danielle Smith Redford concedes the existence of global warming caused by man. Good for her. But acknowledging the problem while resolutely doing nothing about it is less than meaningless. And no, carbon capture, an expensive useless pr boondoggle with numbers that will never add up does not count.

These are the top of the list on the bill - I'm sure others can think of more examples. It's due now, when can we expect payment?

Damn Peasants!

The Globe and Mail sniffs in outraged offense at the peons daring to inconvenience or insult their betters.

Consider contacting the Globe and Mail and expressing how you feel about this display of patrician disdain.  Try to avoid any tempting four letter words.

Hat tip to Dawg

Quote of the Day

What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

One World. One People. One Struggle.

Good rule of thumb:

Anybody who refers to popularly elected union leaders as 'Bosses' is trying to con you.

"Sarah Palin also weighed in on the matter in a Facebook post on Friday, telling union members that they should break away from leaders.

"You don't have to kowtow to the union bosses who are not looking out for you, but instead are using you," wrote Palin.

"Wisconsin union bosses want union members out in the streets demanding that tax payers foot the bill for unsustainable benefits packages."

It's a transparent attempt to obfuscate that the real union bosses are the union members.

Union executives, Presidents, Council members, Business Agents right down to the level of Shop Stewards are elected by their fellow members, enact the policies their members tell them to and can be overthrown in these things called elections  if those members feel they aren't following the will of the membership.  I was a member of one where that happened.

Yes, like any democratic government including that of the United States itself, criminals or incompetents occasionally rise to positions of power.  The strength of the whole system is reflected in how quickly such figures are identified and removed.  I'd put union governance in general against the governance displayed by someone like Governor Walker coming to power.  Any day.

I agree with Robert Creamer, that the radical right over-reached themselves in Wisconsin last week.  They counted on a lightning fast blitzkrieg attack on their political enemies.  Such a fundamental existential attack on the right of collective bargaining becomes far less likely to succeed thanks to Democratic Senators being willing to take the vital step of denying Walker a quorum to ram through his changes.  With public pressure building and both sides exploring recalls against the opposition's state senators the pressure on Walker's caucus will start to have an effect.  A lot of Republicans in the Wisconsin House are getting calls right now from former supporters telling them in no uncertain terms they weren't elected to gut worker's rights.

Best case scenario: This ends in Wisconsin with a fig leaf of some benefit cuts but the most contentious proposals limiting bargaining rights and other union busting poison pills like dues check off withdrawn.  Governors all over the country look at the angry crowds filling the legislature in Madison and decide there's other fights they'd rather spend their time and energy on.

If Walker and the radical right in Wisconsin succeed though, the ongoing class war against workers in North America enters a new and very dangerous stage.  Unions weren't granted the rights they have out of the goodness of the hearts of government and industry, they fought for them in the streets until government and industry decided organized labour was the safer route than an increasingly radicalized population in a world sliding into revolution on every horizon.

The grand compromise of the modern social contract was a peace treaty.  Generally speaking, tearing up a peace treaty means war.

"If you're going to take away bargaining rights, you leave them with what?  You leave them with what they had in the '20s and '30s, you leave them with the streets."

Quote of the Day

Rising tensions in Madison and could presage the kind of labor unrest that hasn’t been seen in the US since the Great Depression, says Professor Bruno.
"If you're going to take away bargaining rights, you leave them with what?" he says. "You leave them with what they had in the '20s and '30s, you leave them with the streets."

Attention must be paid. Don't kid yourself that Conservative politicians in Canada aren't looking at Wisconsin with a mixture of calculation and longing. This is like the partisan attack our own loathsome right wingers tried with political financing; a deliberate act of war and an unambiguous existential threat to their political enemies and to civil society itself.

Republican Governer Declares war on Workers

Taking away public workers bargaining rights with the stroke of a pen. How long before Harper tries to import this idea?

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) said Friday that he was willing to mobilize the state's National Guard force in order to address the potential repercussions of his stated proposal to eliminate collective bargaining rights for state employees.

The Associated Press reports:
Gov. Scott Walker says the Wisconsin National Guard is prepared to respond wherever is necessary in the wake of his announcement that he wants to take away nearly all collective bargaining rights from state employees.

Walker said Friday that he hasn't called the Guard into action, but he has briefed them and other state agencies in preparation of any problems that could result in a disruption of state services, like staffing at prisons.

On Thursday, Walker told the Associated Press that he will propose removing nearly all public employee collective bargaining rights to help plug a $3.6 billion budget hole.

Walker, a Republican who took office in January, said no one should be surprised by the move he will ask the GOP-controlled Legislature to approve next week given that he's talked about doing it for two months.

"This is not a shock," he said. "The shock would be if we didn't go forward with this."

But union leaders, and even some Republicans, were taken aback at the scope of his proposal.

How they got suckered. Us too.

Myriam Miedzian has an excellent piece at Huffington Post for all those who are continually baffled by working class people who vote against their own interests to protect the tax breaks of multi-millionaires.

In his recent book, After Shock, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argues that the economic downward mobility of American workers, has "to do with power...income and wealth in fewer hands." Apparently, many working class Americans want to keep it that way. A recent SEIU poll reveals that, 38 percent of American voters are opposed to rescinding Bush's tax cuts for the 2 percent who earn $250,000 or more annually. 2 or 3 percent of taxpayers probably earn close enough to $250,000, to think they might be affected someday. This leaves about 33 percent voting against their self-interest -- higher taxes on the wealthiest would reduce the national debt, facilitate spending on levies, bridges, schools, healthc are, and create jobs. Similarly, an AP-GfK poll found that in the upcoming election, 58 percent of white working class Americans favor Republicans who opposed rescinding the Bush tax cut, and fought every Democratic bill benefiting low income earners including extending unemployment benefits.
On the other hand, a 2005 study by Dan Ariely of Duke and Michael Norton of Harvard, reveals that when presented with unlabeled pie charts representing wealth distribution in the U.S where the richest 20 percent control about 84 percent of wealth and Sweden where the top 20 percent control 36 percent, 92 percent of respondents -- who reflected U.S. ideological, economic, and gender demographics -- stated they would rather live in a country with Sweden's wealth distribution.
"Why don't more Americans -- especially those with low incomes advocate for greater redistribution of wealth?" the authors ask. Their answer: Americans drastically underestimate the disparity between the very rich and the rest of the population, are overly optimistic about social mobility, and there exists a disconnect between their attitudes toward inequality, their self-interest and public policy preferences.

And they didn't get to the point where they drastically underestimated that disparity by accident:

Instead, as Reich points out "rich and powerful think tanks, books, media, ads" were designed to convince Americans that free markets "know best" and operate in the interest of working people. They also convinced them that their enemies are not the heads of large corporations and the Republicans who represent them, but rather the Ivy League quiche eating, Eastern elite -- people like Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, outspoken supporters of policies beneficial to working class Americans. This has fed into a "Real Men Vote Republican" reaction among many white male blue collar workers.

Lest you conclude we are immune  to such mythology here in Canada, remember that organizations like the Fraser Institute have the unambiguous goal of making us just as ignorant about where our best interests truly lie.  If they weren't having great success at that project would we have the government we have now?

"What the parliament does, the street can undo"

Progressives, union activists and the anesthetized majority in North America can only look at the agressive and confident activism of the engaged French citizenry with envy and awe.  If we stood and fought with these kind of numbers and this kind of determination we'd be living in a different Canada today.

PARIS - Hundreds of thousands of French workers, students and functionaries walked out on strike Tuesday and paraded through the streets in what labor unions described as the beginning of a long-term showdown with President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Air and rail service throughout the country was disrupted by the protests - the fourth in a month.
They were aimed specifically at reversing a new law requiring people to work until age 62 rather than 60 before receiving their retirement pensions. But they also were a platform for broader-based political resentments that have been building among France's salary-earners, many of whom view Sarkozy's government as callous and too close to big business.

In the souring atmosphere, union leaders declared many of the strikes that on Tuesday nearly crippled the country would continue indefinitely or recur on an irregular schedule. The result could be gasoline shortages, curtailed rail and air travel, chaos at schools and perhaps even power cuts in France's main cities, they warned.

"We are going to continue," vowed Bernard Thibault, secretary general of the General Labor Federation. "The mobilization is not going to stop just because the senators have voted."

The myth of the pampered public sector worker

In both the US and Canada its an article of faith among the political right that public sector workers are a coddled, overpaid, over unionized group with a huge and unfair advantage over their private sector counterparts in wages and benefits. Disregarding for a moment, the question of whether such a divide should lead to raising the standards of the private sector workers rather than lowering them for public ones, do the numbers back up the premise at all?

And the answer, not too surprisingly, is that in both Canada and the US this is nothing more than a myth.

It's a myth deliberately promulgated and promoted by right wing 'pro business' groups like the CFIB, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, who incessantly trumpet shoddy studies claiming there is a huge divide in wage and benefits between government workers and private sector workers. They've been repeatedly shown to use deceptive, even imaginary numbers. They fail to account for higher education requirements for many public sector positions, wage equity laws that require equal pay and benefits for men and women and also compare all public sector workers with all private sector workers - rather than unionized public workers with unionized private sector workers. Drilling down shows that they are comparing the wages and benefits for public sector professionals like doctors or technicians with a range of private sector employees that includes minimum wage waitresses and cashiers

When these factors are added to the calculations the disparity vanishes - in fact in managerial positions the disparity is reversed.

These false numbers have been promoted so often though, that they are uncritically reported and the false assumptions about a huge, unfair gap is treated as a given by the pro-business media in a transparent attempt to drive a wedge between workers, defend right wing governments facing public sector labor negotiations and promote an ideal of a low wage service economy for all.

Heh.

Salon's Labour Day review of 'Alien':

What happens when you put the financial well-being of a company ahead of rational self-interest? You end up flat on your back in an operating room with a giant lobster creature on your face and a razor-toothed eel gestating in your belly. Happy Labor Day!

A gentle reminder from the service economy workforce

Dedicated to former JetBlue employee Steven Slater:

Liberty in the UK

Regular readers can probably guess that were I a citizen of the UK I would identify as a Labour supporter. I am, essentially a Social Democrat after all. But that's on the economic/social safety net axis of the political compass. On the political axis I'm basically a lefty libertarian and that part of my political make up stood up and cheered at some of the reforms proposed by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition yesterday:

The Britain of today is watched constantly by CCTV cameras, is preparing for a national ID card, slaps a "crown copyright" on most government data, and can now censor websites and eventually boot people off the Internet.

According to the new Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government, that's all about to change. The coalition today released its unified policy statement (PDF), and for techies and privacy advocates, there's lots to like.

• We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.
• We will outlaw the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission.
• We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
• We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
• We will further regulate CCTV.
• We will end the storage of internet and e-mail records without good reason.
• We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
• We will create a new "right to data" so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
• We will introduce measures to ensure the rapid roll-out of superfast broadband across the country. We will ensure that BT and other infrastructure providers allow the use of their assets to deliver such broadband, and we will seek to introduce superfast broadband in remote areas at the same time as in more populated areas. If necessary, we will consider using the part of the TV license fee that is supporting the digital switchover to fund broadband in areas that the market alone will not reach.

In the few hundred yards around the home of 1984 author George Orwell, there are literally hundreds of CCTV cameras both public and private. Private citizens in the UK can be compelled to provide DNA samples without criminal charges brought against them, teens who get into any kind of trouble can be slapped with ASBOs, antisocial behavior orders, basically a juvenile equivalent of dangerous offender status and lose big chunks of their civil rights.

The authoritarian, borderline totalitarian impulses in New Labour, combined with calculated, pandering appeals to people's worst fears, class suspicions and harsh reactionary criminal justice views have led to some seriously disturbing excesses. I'll applaud anybody, even the mixed bag of neoliberals in the Lib Dem/Tory coalition, who reverse some of them.