And again with the pre-emptive legislation, Lisa Raitt
I’m beginning to think this might be a pattern. Same company, same rhetoric, same lies.
Electro-Motive plans to close its London plant
So a handsomely profitable corporation buys a London Ontario locomotive factory in June 2010 and promptly tells the 465 or so members of the CAW local there that they’ll have to cut their wages in half and give up their pension plan to keep their jobs. Things lead to things and on New Year’s Day the company locked out the workers.
C’mon people now, smile on your brother everybody get together try to love one another right now
A line from a cheesey hippie song from the sixties. À propos of nothing, really, except this. No, I’m not expecting Stephen Harper will start getting together and trying to love all the low-income seniors he’d screw out of two years of OAS even as the F-35s scream overhead.
Gerry Nicholls has my blood boiling
This Postmedia item has had me in a lather all day. It’s not just that they’re whipping up the faithful against the people I work for. That always bothers me but it’s ah… not new to me.
CAW and CEP talking merger? Wow
So this is me talking from a great distance, I hedge. I remember when CEP was formed in 1992. It was, itself the product of a merger of three unions: Canadian Paperworkers Union, the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada and the Energy and Chemical Workers.
Bribing your audience: how much do contests matter to email open rates?
I sent out an email to ten or fifteen thousand of my closest union friends today, asking them to do an online survey about what the union’s priorities should be.
Yeah, see? OC Transpo driver had a story too
So this OC Transpo driver is recorded yelling at a passenger to shut up. The video goes on YouTube and a short time later he’s fired. There’s much outrage focussed on the driver and much trash talking of the union that had the chutzpah to suggest there was more to the story. Even people like me were silent on the issue because, well, it seemed to be a bit of a losing battle.
Air Canada arbitration: so what was that decision all about?
Air Canada was happy. The union was not. But then, this is Lisa Raitt’s shop, we could have predicted that, right? So here is my understanding – as an outsider – of what was at stake.
Dear commercial media quit using “union boss” to describe our leaders
I know y’all are into brevity and everything. I’m with you. But is the pain of adding three extra characters to your titles and content really so onerous that you have to completely misrepresent the relationship between someone who is the head of a union and her or his members?
Writing web content for union members: is it public voice or intimate voice?
Most of the how-to manuals on web writing focus on writing in public voice. They presume that the words will be the product of many pairs of eyes, the writer being only the first. Editors, revisors, approvers, translators etc. It’s a safe assumption because most web writing – the kind that people are paid to do anyway – is providing content for an organization, agency or corporation of some kind.
Welcome to Toronto, mister president
Alrighty then. That’s another website to get redone then. Stuck my hand up once again at the wrong time and I am now overseeing the redesign/reengineering of calm.ca. In truth, it had to be me. After all, it’s what I do for a living and I am the president of the organization. Fortunately the CALM [...]
Lisa Raitt sends labour relations back to the 1920s
When I first saw reference to this on Twitter I thought maybe it was some sort of hyperbole. Or that some progressive soul, like myself, prone to Swiftian rhetoric, had done the whole reductio ad absurdium thing to normal Tory talking points. But no. Labour minister Lisa Raitt actually said the definition of “essential” – as in the kind of worker who should not be allowed to withdraw their labour as part of bargaining new wages and working conditions – should be redefined to include any worker whose absence would affect the economy.
Air Canada vs CUPE: the company charges ‘bad faith’
It would be funny if I didn’t think that the livelihoods of 6,000 or so people hung in the balance. But Air Canada has charged the union with bad faith bargaining because the membership refused to accept the second tentative agreement CUPE negotiators reached with management.
The federal labour board ‘reviews’ the situation at Air Canada
Journalism can be so maddeningly vague at times. This business of the federal labour relations board “reviewing” the negotiations at Air Canada and therefore rendering any strike illegal is just one of those times.
Air Canada flight attendants vote down two tentative agreements
Wow. This does not happen a lot. Air Canada flight attendants – CUPE members – have voted down not one but two tentative agreements that the union’s leadership was recommending.
