Happy May Day

The Worker’s May-Pole
(1894)

See:

May Day Lotta Continua

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

May Week in Redmonton

Gnostic Easter

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
anarchy, anarchism, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, historyworkers, injuries, assault, crime, work, labour, labor, May Week Labour Arts Festival, Redmonton, service workers, Canada, May Day, MayDay, May Week, Edmonton, unions, Alberta,
libertarian, Italy, Fo, autonomous, marxism, anarchist, anarchism, Milan
Fire, choral music, Gnostic, Druids, Spring, Germany, Carnival,Mendelssohn, pagan, Divine Fool, Faust, Tree of Life, Christianity, Walpurgisnacht, Beltane, Goethe, magick, gnostic

May Day Lotta Continua

May Day the International Workers Day and the Struggle Continues (Lotta Continua)

As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past. Rosa Luxemburg 1894

Nigerian workers: still searching for succour

Today, the first day of May, otherwise called Workers Day in Nigeria, no longer has any meaning to many a Nigerian worker. It is doubtful if the workers understand the significance of the day as one set aside to recognize the valour and sacrifice of the creators of the nation’s wealth. The average Nigerian worker does not see any need for the celebration of his contribution to nation building or for his efforts to ensure that the country of his birth becomes prosperous so that he can live an assured life in future. The day to him now provides the opportunity to show the world the level of his impoverishment

FOR some time now, the May Day celebration has become a day for wilful display of anger by Nigerian workers against their employers, both government and private. Nowadays, industrial unions of both the public and organized private sectors look forward to the Workers Day to publicly vent their spleen against the soulless establishments that have grounded the nation’s social machinery that would have ensured and enhanced the quality of life in the nation. As such, the venues of the Day’s celebrations across the country are usually rally grounds where the workers loudly bemoan their pitiful conditions and declaim the nation’s rulers for making the lives of Nigerian workers laborious.

THAT the venues of May Day rally have been turned into agitation ground is an indication of the virtual collapse of the nation’s social structures and the erosion of the lives of the nation’s teeming masses. The Nigerian worker has made a singsong of his pitiable social conditions. He is one of the poorly paid workers (if not the poorest) in the world. There has not been any time his take-home pay has been made adequate by his employer to give him the much needed lifeline. In spite of his resourcefulness, experience and contributions he is hardly able to live from hand to mouth.

BUT as most social scientists like Adam Smith have postulated, the real wealth of any nation is not in the tangible resources like gold, silver or crude oil. The wealth of a nation is not in the quality or arability of its land. The real wealth can only be found in the quality of its human resources. A highly cultivated human resource, in terms of good and quality education, highly enhanced salary package and functional social amenities, will, without doubt, be highly motivated and resourceful and very productive. Conversely, a workforce that is poorly remunerated will only produce a very low yield. In both cases, the society is at the receiving end. In other words, the quality (and lack of it) of any workforce will translate into the prosperity (and otherwise) of that particular society.

THE fact that Nigeria has enjoyed unqualified status among the “scum of the earth” shows the extent to which its people have been degraded and dehumanized. The nation is ranked among the poorest countries of the world in spite of its enormous natural resources; it holds an un-exalted position as one of the most corrupt nations in the world and as one of the most looted nations, looted and raped by its own citizens. What all this shows is that the nation has not invested adequately in its human resources and this has made it possible for the emergence of the uncouth and rogue leaders who raped and looted the nation’s essence and still got away with their crimes. The failure to cultivate good citizenship has made possible the collapse of the nation’s economic and social structures and led to the creation of criminals in both low and high places. The result of this is the present collapse of the nation’s social structures.

And in an ironic twist of fate the original Lotta Continua in Italy were the subject of a political witch hunt in the Seventies and Eighties. Like the Strega of Old.

LOTTA CONTINUA

Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalized in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair.

Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999.

Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice. Translated by Antony Shugaar. New York: Verso, 1999. There is a sort of general democratic interest in showing how a concrete trial functions. --Carlo Ginzburg, Liberation (October 9, 1997) Social conflict in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s had a particular breadth and impact. Radical-left movements like Lotta Continua championed factory occupations and large demonstrations and saw the Communist Party and labor unions as stifling the workers' revolutionary project. ^1 Elements within the state responded with "the strategy of tension": exceptional police brutality and an instrumental approach to extreme-right violence (the cause of more deaths than extreme-left violence), often carried out sub rosa in conjunction with state secret services and intended by some to destabilize the state and create the basis for an authoritarian regime. In the mid-1970s, Italy promulgated a series of exceptional laws that bolstered police powers at the expense of individual rights and gave a special place to informers; increased the time an individual could be held in preventive detention; and made individuals of the same group liable for the same sentence despite differences in individuals' actions. ^2 Faced with declining expectations for revolution, factions [End Page 135] of the extreme left turned to vanguard party terrorism.

Ginzburg regards the convictions in the Calabresi case as the 20th century equivalent of the witchcraft and heresy convictions under the Inquisition. The contemporary Italian courts, he says, cared just as little for the evidence as the 16th and 17th century Catholic ones: Suspects could affirm their crimes, deny all or remain silent, and all these possible responses were regarded as evidence of their guilt. The Calabresi judges ended up believing the informer, Leonardo Marino, despite the dozens of problems Ginzburg cites with his story, any one of which, he says, should have created more than the shadow of a doubt and led to acquittal.

Ginzburg, a specialist in probing sixteenth-century inquisitorial records and
writing micro histories of the victims, uses court documents to scrutinise the
notorious May 1990 conviction of his friend of thirty years, the journalist Adriano
Sofri. Founder and leader of the radical left-wing group Lotta Continua from the
1960s until its dissolution in 1976, Sofri, along with his two co-defendants, was
pronounced guilty of the 17 May 1972 murder of the police superintendent Luigi
Calabresi, widely believed to be responsible for the death under interrogation of an
accused suspect three years earlier. Almost the entire case against Sofri rested on the testimony of one former Lotta Continua militant, Leonardo Marino. After a second career as an armed robber, Marino confessed in 1987 to a parish priest and in 1988 to three carabinieri offices his role as the driver in Calabresi’s assassination; he also named his former Lotta comrade Ovidio Bompressi as the murderer and two others, Sofri and Giorgio Pietrostafani, as the authors of the deed (pp. 8–11). Despite his long-delayed declaration of guilt as well as important errors and inconsistencies in his testimony, Marino’s accusations were never seriously challenged.

Ginzburg, although a renowned investigator of non-elites under pressure from
forces from above, was uninterested in Marino or his astrologer companion Antonia Bistolfi. While deftly demolishing Marino’s testimony, Ginzburg neglected to examine the bases of the ex-thief’s repentance, which had so powerful an impact
on the court.

Instead, Ginzburg’s main subject is the presiding judge Antonio Lombardi, who
‘with a clear conscience’ and ‘absolutely no doubt’ pronounced the ‘complete
reliability [of] Marino’s statements’ (p. 103). Although acknowledging that historians and judges share the practice of contextualising their evidence, Ginzburg demands a far higher threshold of proof from the figure handing out sentences and berates Lombardi for his reckless and illogical leap in validating Marino’s questionable story and condemning Sofri (pp. 110–18).

Unlike the Papon trial, where prominent historians gave contrasting views of the Vichy past, the Sofri trial was dominated by the judge’s and the prosecutor’s shared trauma of a decade of violence. Thus, The suspect, a railway worker named Giuseppe Pinelli, either fell, jumped or was pushed out the window of Calabresi’s office while under questioning about the bomb blast on 12 Dec. 1969 in the Banca dell’Agricoltura in Milan that had killed seventeen people and injured eighty-eight others. The subsequent official investigation showed that right-wing extremists, aided by the Italian secret services, had set the bomb.

Donald Reid, ‘The Historian and the Judges’, Radical History Review 80 (Spring 2001), p. 144, n. 4. Lotta Continua immediately denounced Calabresi for the murder; the incident was the subject of Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo’s play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Marino gave the wrong color of the stolen car and incorrectly described the assassination route (pp. 22–5, 72–97). ‘I do not know what pushed Marino to lie. The psychological motivations . . . seem . . . wholly irrelevant.’ (p. 97). according to Ginzburg, much like the earlier inquisitors, they were all too ready to accept even the most defective confirmatory evidence.

To be sure, in writing as an advocate for the defence Carlo Ginzburg appears
to have suspended his own critical judgement. Not only are most witnesses in
criminal trials unreliable, forgetful and self-contradictory, particularly sixteen years after the event, but also key evidence is often missing.25 Nonetheless, The Judge and the Historian is itself an important historical document. Underlying Ginzburg’s approach is a spirited defence of old-fashioned historical inquiry against the postmodern challenge, as well as a strong assertion of the existence of proof and of truth (pp. 16–17).26 Moreover, a century after another flawed trial, Ginzburg’s J’accuse not only demonstrates how those in power continue to rewrite history (in this case holding Lotta Continua responsible for ‘the years of lead’) but also suggests disquieting links with Italy’s Fascist past (pp. 119–20)

A H/T to Terry Glavin


Also See:

May Week in Redmonton

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

The Origins and Traditions of May Day

Anarchist Mayor of Milan

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
anarchy, anarchism, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, historyworkers, injuries, assault, crime, work, labour, labor, May Week Labour Arts Festival, Redmonton, service workers, Canada, May Day, MayDay, May Week, Edmonton, unions, Alberta,
libertarian, Italy, Fo, autonomous, marxism, anarchist, anarchism, Milan

Day of Mourning

Today is the International Day of Mourning for workers injured or killed on the job.


There are around a million
workplace injuries a year in Canada
— a compensable injury occurs
every seven seconds each
working day.

■ Deaths from workplace injury
average nearly a thousand a year. In
Canada, one worker is killed every
two hours of each working day.

■ Deaths from workplace diseases go
largely unrecorded and
uncompensated; they likely exceed
deaths from workplace injuries.

■ Despite this, many governments are
weakening health and safety rules
and their enforcement.

The Day of Mourning was declared by the Canadian Labour Congress in 1984. Steve Mahoney, chairman of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, said yesterday's occasion was especially sad with the death of a worker in Mississauga on Thursday and the TTC maintenance driver killed Monday. "Sadly it is a normal week. We lose two workers every week.

Every year on April 28th, the national Day of Mourning is observed to commemorate those killed or hurt by workplace injuries or disease. Last year, 101 people died in Ontario because of traumatic workplace injuries; and more died due to occupational disease.

The numbers are staggering. In Canada, some 855 employees die from work-related incidents each year, averaging more than 2 deaths every day. In fact, in 2005 the average increased to 3 fatalities a day. From 1993 to 2005, more than 11,123 people lost their lives due to workplace incidents. Another 900,000 per year are injured or become ill.

"In 1984,  there were 744 workplace fatalities recognized by compensation boards across
Canada," Moist said. "In 2005 there were 1,097 recognized fatalities. As
horrendous as these statistics are, the real picture is even worse because
compensation boards do not recognize a number of occupational illnesses."
   Since 1984 more than 19,000 Canadian workers have been killed on the job
and more than 20,000,000 have been injured. The Centre for the Study of Living
Standards reported that in 2005 the incidence of workplace fatalities in
Canada was 6.8 per 100,000 workers, up from 5.9 per 100,000 workers in 1993.
   "This workplace carnage has to stop and it can stop if governments put
their efforts into prevention programs and enforcing legislation," said Claude
Généreux, CUPE national secretary-treasurer.

In 2005 1,097* workplace deaths were recorded in Canada - up from 928
deaths the previous year. This 18% increase was driven mostly by the
rise in fatality rate from occupational disease, which accounted for
50.8% of all fatalities. Asbestos-related deaths make up more than half
of this number - as well as almost a third of all workplace fatalities.

SFL Lending Voice to Mourning Day Protest

100-thousand people a year die from exposure to Asbestos. That's according to the World Health Organization.

Canada exports over 200-thousand metric tonnes of Asbestos, mined in Quebec, to poor Asian countries that have few regulatory systems in place to deal with protecting those who work with the product.

The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour is supporting an American protest at the Canadian Embassy in Washington Saturday against the use of asbestos in third world countries.

Today is the International Day of Mourning for workers killed in their workplaces.

Day of mourning for workers hits home in Trail, BC

TRAIL, B.C. -- This year's day of mourning for workers killed or injured on the job will be particularly emotional given Monday's railway tragedy, say local organizers.

It is a really sad situation any time you have someone die on the job or any other place," said Al Graham, president of the West Kootenay Labour Council. "To have it happen only days before makes (the event) all the more sad and poignant."

The death of Lonnie Plasko in Monday's CP Rail accident in Trail will be noted at Saturday's ceremony, but the focus will remain on the safety of all workers, added Graham, a Teck Cominco plant worker and Trail city councillor.

"There are no accidents on the job site, only mistakes . . . Lonnie rode the train to the end to prevent others from being injured. Only time will tell what caused the problem. Our condolences go out to his family, and to all the families."

The international day has been marked for 25 years, "and the message is always the same: mourn for the dead and fight for the living," Graham said.

In B.C. last year, 160 workers died on the job or from occupational diseases, including four people who were asphyxiated in May at Teck's closed Sullivan Mine in Kimberley. There were 188 deaths in 2005 and a 10-year average of 150.

Two-and-a-half Workers a Week - The Price of Prosperity?

"Alberta has little to boast about in the area of workplace safety," says
AFL President Gil McGowan. "Workplace accidents are on the rise, despite - or
maybe because of - the boom."
 "Alberta workplaces kill 2 1/2 workers each week. Is that the price of
prosperity?" McGowan asks. "If so, it is too high for me."
    In 2006, 124 workers were killed due to work, and an additional 20
farmworker fatalities, who are not included in official figures. "There were
over 181,000 reported accidents last year in Alberta," observes McGowan. "An
increase of 7.4% in one year."
    "Why do so many workers die, year after year, with apparently little
progress? The answer I come up with is because none of us make occupational
health and safety the priority it needs to be."
    "The government is in denial, and employers are too interested in their
growing profit margins to take safety seriously," notes McGowan. "To hear
government spin doctors' talk, you would think we have the safest workplaces
in the world. However, their rhetoric is made up of misleading statistics and
hollow promises."
    McGowan argues accidents are on the rise because workplaces are too busy
and corners are being cut on safety. "Employers have the money right now to
ensure safety equipment and procedures are in place. By not doing it, they are
failing in their legal and moral responsibility."

   Alberta Workplace Fatalities

    -  In 2006, 124 workers were killed, plus 20 farmworkers
    -  In 2005, 144 workers were killed, plus 14 farmworkers
    -  This is the 10th straight year with more than 100 fatalities
    -  613 workers have been killed in the last five years
    -  Since 1905, 9,466 workers have been killed due to work (not including
       farmworkers)
    -  According to Statistics Canada, Alberta has the fourth highest
       fatality rate in Canada (deaths per 100,000 workers):
       -  Territories: 27.4
       -  Newfoundland: 11.7
       -  B.C.: 8.9
       -  Alberta: 8.0
       -  Ontario 6.5
       -  Quebec: 6.0
       -  PEI: 1.5 (lowest in Canada)

    Alberta Safety Statistics

    -  Number of reported workplace accidents, 2006: 181,159
       -  An increase of 7.4% from 2005
       -  Up 23.8% since 2000
    -  Number of person/days lost to injury, 2006: 1,477,000 (up 9.7% from
       2005)
    -  Percentage drop in WCB Premiums 2005 to 2006: 9.0%
  

Here are my posts on this;

Danger At Work

In Canada Work Kills

Work Sucks

Psycho Bosses Depressed Workers

Which Is True

Outlaw Working Alone

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
workers, injuries, assault, crime, work, labour, labor, government, public sector workers, service workers, Canada, job, dangers on the job, assault, crime, unions, working alone

Why Managers Need Unions

COMPENSATION

Managers' overtime victory short-lived

Manitoba quickly closes loophole that handed supervisor a win

VIRGINIA GALT

WORKPLACE REPORTER

The hopes of overworked managers everywhere were briefly raised yesterday when a scrappy former store supervisor from Winnipeg won a victory at the Supreme Court of Canada in her fight for overtime pay.

Before they could even think about collecting countless hours of back pay, however, it became apparent to even the most sleep-deprived manager that the window of opportunity opened by the ruling is about to slam shut.

Effective April 30, the Manitoba government will fall in line with all other Canadian jurisdictions and exempt management employees from overtime-pay provisions in their labour laws.

Sharon Michalowski will bank more than $10,000 in overtime pay she has been battling to get from Nygard International Ltd. since 2003. She says her protracted fight has made her the "the poster girl" for other managers who hoped her case would set a precedent.

Even before the Nygard case had worked its way through the courts, employers in Manitoba -- alarmed by the possible implications -- persuaded the provincial government that managers are generally paid better than other employees, have more power to set their own working conditions and, therefore, should not qualify for overtime pay.

Yeah right they are as exploited as the rest of the employees. Managers need to be unionized with the rest of the workers in a shop. The NDP government should be ashamed of itself for being sucked into this claptrap from the bosses. The difference between a Manager and the rest of the workers in most shops is the colour of their shirts, or that they have to wear a tie. Power to set their own working conditions, yeah right....which means that instead of being paid for Overtime they are owed they can flex their work hours, but of course that never really happens at all, instead they just accrue and accrue more unpaid OT. And if they get time off its at straight time, and at the bosses convenience.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, workers, work, employees, labour, labor, unions, Manitoba, over time, managers, Labour laws,

Labour Boom = Falling Rate Of Profit

Go figure. Under capitalism an increase in labour, that is real productivity, means a real reduction in profit levels, a decline in surplus value, thus a falling rate of profit.

In other words more workers available means the economy is less productive than if you laid off workers and replaced them through technology or outsourcing. Go figure.

This is of course an analysis that is not based on the labour theory of value, but rather 20th Century Macroeconomics. And yet the mainstream economist outlines the essential truth of the Marxist critique of capitalism.

Last year's freakish growth disguised our falling productivity, said professor Ted Chambers of the Western Centre for Economic Research, University of Alberta. "Full-time employment rose by 7.6 per cent -- 114,000 jobs," he said.

If employment rose even faster than total output, then output-per-worker must have declined, Chambers explained.

"Provincial productivity numbers, released by Statistics Canada not long ago, showed Alberta at the bottom."

Productivity -- not GDP -- drives profits, incomes, and competitiveness.

The reason for the decline in 'productivity', is the decline in profits due to the increase in wages earned by the growing workforce.

Economy churns out 55,000 new jobs in March; unemployment holds at 6.1%

In the first quarter of the year, the agency estimated that employment grew by 158,000, the strongest first-quarter growth since 2002.

The booming job market has also resulted in Canadians earning more. Hourly wages rose 2.4 per cent during the first three months of this year, compared with last year, well in excess of the 1.6 per cent inflation rate.

Alberta's booming economy was mostly responsible for higher wages, rising 5.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year, from the same period in 2006.

The rise in March employment was led by women aged 25 years and older as adult women reached a new high in workforce participation at 59 per cent. In March, women in this age group captured over 39,000 of the new jobs created.

Over the past 12 months, adult women more than doubled their male counterparts in finding new jobs. Women over 55 also reached record levels of participation in the workforce, at 25.8 per cent.

By sector, employment growth in the services sector grew by 66,000 jobs in March, more than making up for the continuing weakness in Canada's beleaguered manufacturing.

Employment in trade grew by 27,000, with Alberta registering almost half the gains. The agency said the strength in this sector in March reflects gains in wholesale trade as a result of increased activity following February's CN strike.

Canada's labour force participation, the proportion of adult Canadians that have jobs or are actively looking for one, has jumped 0.6 per cent since last October and now stands at 67.7 per cent.

See:

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
workers, variable costs, labour, labor, Marx, variable capital, labour theory of value, social-factory, proletariat, capital, capitalism, profit, productivity, Alberta

Senate Security Report Attacks Workers

Since 1985 there has been no improvement in security at our airports or ports. Nor since 9/11 says the new security report from the Senate. However it's recommendations that all workers in airports and ports be screened has nothing to do with security and everything to do with concerns about organized crime. Hence the recommendations for increasing RCMP at airports and ports, and putting security under the Public Security Ministry.

Canada’s ports are “riddled with organized crime, and nobody seems to be doing much about it,” according to the all-party committee. It wants security clearances for all workers at Canada’s seaports.

In broad sweeping generalizations the report wants all workers searched coming to work. Though this will do little to stop organized thefts or smuggling, since that occurs on site and when workers leave. And part of the problem is also the increased use of privatized security companies

While all this sounds perfectly reasonable at first glance, it is much like the issue of drug testing in the workplace. And the result will be interesting when unions representing these workers challenge the government over this.

The other issue here is not just improved security, but a lack of staffing that is forcing workers in airports to work mandatory overtime, and a management that is authoritarian and abusive. Adding the RCMP to the mix will make the workplace even more volatile.

The Senate document containing 16 recommendations was released as CBC reported chaos during a labour dispute at Calgary airport caused a serious breach in security last December when a rushed airline manager let 30 pieces of luggage fly to Houston without the owners on board.

Internal documents CBC obtained under the Access to Information Act show that Transport Canada is investigating the incident, a direct violation of major international security rules Canada adopted after the 1985 Air India bombing, which killed 329 people.

Continental Airlines has since issued an apology for its mistake last December, but in a scathing letter to the government agency in charge of security, Garth Atkinson, president of Calgary's airport authority, called pre-flight screening out of Calgary “the absolute worst in Canada.”

See:

Anti-Terrorism Act

Spying

Statist Anti-Terrorism Act

Paranoia and the Security State

State Security Is A Secure State

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, anti-terrorism act, Government, Liberals, NDP, Conservatives, War Measures Act, 1970, Arar, terrorism, crime, liberalism, state, statism, libertarian, civil liberties
Air, India,, John, Marshall,, RCMP,, CSIS,, Sikh,

Liberals Defeat Anti-Scab Law

Whether in government or as the Official Opposition the Liberals have once again shown their true colours. They defeated the Bill C-257 the Anti-Scab law.

Not the Conservative government, the Liberals. Who flip flopped, having promised to support the private members bill, Dion in the last two weeks changed his mind and said the party would not support the law.

Again the boys from Bay Street pull the strings of the Liberal party.

Progressives should remember this.

Since the Liberals have defeated Anti-Scab bills every time they have come before the house over the past 14 years.

For a breakdown on how they voted see Uncorrected Proofs.

Interesting side note that there is no press coverage of this at Google Canada Top Stories.

See;

Anti-Scab

Dion

Buzz

Gomperism

Liberals

Unions


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
scab, anti-scab legislation, Liberals, Canada, BQ, NDP, Labour, labor, CLC, CAW, Buzz, unions, workers

Free Trade=Cheap Wages

The truth is in reading the fine print. Free Trade is not about trade, or sustainable markets, it is about off-shoring production and contracting out services.

India also offers Canadian companies another cheaper-wage locale besides China where they can shift production to save money and remain competitive.

This little fact will get lost in the hoopla that will be generated around a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and India.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
free trade, contracting out, Canada, India, privatization, off shoring

Labour Bureaucrats Go On Strike

CUPE Staff Strike Update: Staffers hit the bricks

Well the high paid staff reps at CUPE have gone on strike against the membership of CUPE. These guys make an average $110,000 a year, have a paid car, get a great benefits package, have additional monies paid to them monthly as per diem's.

They are permanent staff. They are the bureaucracy striking against themselves.

I am sorry I am opposed to labour fakirs and porkchoppers, the guys who live off the backs of union members, being treated like other workers who go on strike.

This is a professional class whose jobs are reliant on some of the lowest paid public sector workers in Canada. While they earn six digit salaries many of their workers are making just over $10 per hour as entry level wages. None of the CUPE members have the protection or benefits that these guys have. And when they advise the membership it is often in their own self-interests and not the members.

Back at the turn of last century labour organizers were paid a $1 a day. Often they supplemented their wages by also selling life and benefit insurance through fraternal orders.

Today these striking bureaucrats are part of the business of business unions. Representing workers in the business of labour relations. Advocating against strikes, especially wildcats and general strikes, supporting managements rights clauses, etc. etc.

There is only one union in Canada that actually has eliminated the idea of a professional class of labour bureaucrats; that is CUPW. The Postal workers elect their representatives at their national convention. Being a CUPW rep is not a permanent job , it is what is supposed to be, a member who works for the members.

Not a labour fakir bureaucrat who belongs to another union within the union. That is the very antithesis of democratic industrial unionism. All reps should be elected and thus subject to recall. To create a professional class of reps is undemocratic and leads to an entrenched bureaucracy, and the transformation of a democratic industrial union into a business union.

On the other hand I support unionization of support staff who work for unions as they are employees. Reps are not employees they are supposed to be fellow workers who represent the members. Thus they should be elected and subject to recall. Something I have advocated for years.

It is now up to the membership, the rank and file of CUPE to challenge the bureaucrats and their own bureaucracy to be reformed into a truly member run organization.

Down With the Bureaucrats!

All union representatives should be elected and subject to recall.




See:

Unions

Strike



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
CUPE, CUPW, labour, labor, Canada, public service, public sector, workers, strike, union, Canada, union reps

Liberals Scab

Liberals are not the party of workers in Canada.

When in power provincially Liberals oppose a living wage.

Now the Federal Liberals under Dion have flip flopped on anti-scab legislation Bill C-257.

A private members bill from the BQ supported by the NDP and until today, supported by the Liberals.

And like the flip flop on the Anti-Terrorism Act, Mr. Dion does it again. But will he whip the vote? Probably not. Without the Liberals support the bill will die on third reading. When they were the government the Liberal majority voted against previous private member anti-scab bills.

My what a friend business has in Mr. Dion. I guess two controversial votes in a week would be a bit much for Mr. Dion's fragile leadership. The infighting in caucus would be even more virulent than it was over the Anti-Terrorism Act. After all the Liberals are the party of Bay Street as much as the Conservatives are.

By flip flopping on this bill, which has been placed before parliament five times now, the Liberals prove they are not just pro-business but pro-scab. Which means anti-union. I hope they don't plan on trying to solicit funds from their old friends in the General Workers Union in Toronto.

Progressives? In name only.

Green? Sure thats the colour of money.

Friends of Buzz Hargrove? Only during elections.

Labour has a political party and it is the NDP. All others are pretenders and fair weather friends.

See

Dion

Buzz

Gomperism

Liberals

Unions


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
scab, anti-scab legislation, Liberals, Canada, BQ, NDP, Labour, labor, CLC, CAW, Buzz, unions, workers

Chocolate and Cars

Hersheys has announced it is cutting and running, reducing production in Canada and the United States in favour of Mexico. Which led one investment banker to note;

Wachovia Securities analyst Jonathan P. Feeney said the plan leaves fundamental problems unaddressed. "We are skeptical that pulling capacity out of the system while allocating capital away from the core business accomplishes the critical mission, which is to reinvigorate consumer response to its core chocolate products," Feeney wrote.

And this happened the same week Chrysler announced its Saint Valentines Massacre of 13,000 jobs from its own operations, but the layoffs and closers will be far deeper as secondary and tertiary parts and suppliers go out of business as a result.

What Chrysler did not announce, nor did Hershey, was any change in production. In other words in order to get out of their economic bottoming out, both companies are NOT changing their products. They are making short term economic gains on closing plants and dropping shifts of workers.

Chrysler failed to address the real source of their problems, they are producing out-moded large cars and trucks. And the Japanese and other Asian competitors are beating them with sales of compact and hybrid models in North America.

File this under the following cliche's;
Cutting ones nose to spite ones face.
Short term gain for long term pain.


See

Layoffs

Chrysler



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
UAW, CAW, Buzz, Chrysler, Hersheys, layoffs, workers, Mexico, Canada, USA, Japan, auto, automobiles, chocolate, NAFTA

Danger At Work

Not hundreds, not thousands but;
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians assaulted at work

Work not only kills it injures. And not a word about this crime wave in the workplace from the Law & Order government in Ottawa.

In a report released Friday, the agency said 17% of all self-reported incidents of violent victimization that year, including sexual assault, robbery and physical assault, occurred at the person’s place of work. That figure represents over 356,000 violent workplace incidents in Canada's 10 provinces. And those were only the incidents that were reported.

Don't expect the Law and Order Conservatives to do anything about violence in the workplace because that would interfere in the market place.

As Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day reminded us when he was Labour Minister in Alberta and unions called for Working Alone legislation after workers were assaulted on the job. He said there was nothing he would do about bringing in Working Alone legislation. Instead he cut jobs in his department.

It took the murder of a young woman working alone in Calgary to actually get the ruling PC's in Alberta to take the issue seriously. But by then Stock was leading the New Canadian Alliance Party.

Of course Public Safety in Canada means keeping us safe from foreign terrorists not terror on the job. Especially when most of these assaults were on public sector workers, that is government workers.

The majority -- about 70% -- of the violent workplace incidents were classified as physical assaults. That's more than the 57% of non-workplace incidents that were classified as physical assaults. The three offences were much more common in the social assistance and health care services sectors, the study found. One-third of all workplace violent incidents involved a victim who was working in those types of jobs. A high proportion also occurred in accommodation or food services, retail or wholesale trade and educational services sectors.

As the ILO reported as far back as 1998 the reason for the increasing assaults in the work place is the decrease in workers on the job the privatization of public services and the consequences of the reduction in the size of government. Because the bureaucracy has not declined only front line services.

In situations of structural change and transition, when the main objective is to retain employment and income, safety and health issues are often relegated to second place. However, it is these very situations which generate anxieties, frustration and organizational difficulties, which in turn can lead to violence. In practice, violence at the workplace may include a wide range of behaviour, often of an ongoing and overlapping nature. While attention has traditionally been focused on physical violence, in more recent years evidence has been emerging of the impact and harm caused by non-physical violence which, although often referred to as psychological, can also have physical repercussions for the victim.

A survey by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) revealed that almost 70 per cent of respondents considered verbal aggression to be the leading form of violence, citing physical violence as the next most frequent form. Growing attention is also being paid to perpetuated violence involving repeated behaviour. In itself this type of violence may appear to be relatively minor, but cumulatively it can become very serious, taking the form of sexual harassment, bullying or mobbing. It is this type of behaviour which can have the most negative impact on human resource development at the workplace.

The impact of the 1995 Neo-Con revolution in Canada, the so called "Reinventing Government", when Stockwell Day was Labour Minister in Alberta and Paul Martin was Finance Minister, and both the provinces and Federal Government cut funding and outsourced public sector jobs, is still with us.

And thus the public sector and service workplace is just as unsafe as it was when miners needed canaries to go into the mines. Which is why we mourn the loss of life and the injuries of class on April 28 each year.




See

In Canada Work Kills

Work Sucks

Laundry Workers Fight Privatization

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
workers, injuries, assault, crime, work, labour, labor, government, public sector workers, service workers, Canada, job, dangers on the job, assault, crime, Stockwell Day, unions, Alberta, working alone

Scab Trains Go Off The Tracks

Management can't run CN trains safely during the best of times, why would it be any different as they get scabs to run the trains during the current strike by UTU.

Well in this case the management and scabs managed to have two accidents in one day. That's a record even for CN.

Two CN trains derailed in separate incidents Tuesday in British Columbia and Alberta while being operated by management during a railway strike.

In Prince George, B.C., the wheels on the locomotive came off the rails along tracks between a pulp mill and a refinery, said a CN spokesman.

He also said the role played by replacement workers and managers will be part of the investigation.

union representatives say it shows the dangers of supervisors running trains when they have little experience.

Which reminded me of this song by Joe Hill, changed to reflect the guilty.

The Workers on the CN line to strike sent out a call;
But Casey Jones, the engineer, he wouldn't strike at all;
His boiler it was leaking, and its drivers on the bum,
And his engine and its bearings, they were all out of plumb.

Casey Jones kept his junk pile running;
Casey Jones was working double time;
Casey Jones got a wooden medal,
For being good and faithful on the CN line.

The workers said to Casey: "Won't you help us win this strike?"
But Casey said: "Let me alone, you'd better take a hike."
Then some one put a bunch of railroad ties across the track,
And Casey hit the river bottom with an awful crack.

Casey Jones hit the river bottom;
Casey Jones broke his blessed spine;
Casey Jones was an Angelino,
He took a trip to heaven on the CN line.

When Casey Jones got up to heaven, to the Pearly Gate,

He said: "I'm Casey Jones, the guy that pulled the CN freight."
"You're just the man," said Peter, "our musicians went on strike;
You can get a job a'scabbing any time you like."

Casey Jones got up to heaven;
Casey Jones was doing mighty fine;
Casey Jones went scabbing on the angels,
Just like he did to workers of the S. P. line.

They got together, and they said it wasn't fair,
For Casey Jones to go around a'scabbing everywhere.
The Angels' Union No. 23, they sure were there,
And they promptly fired Casey down the Golden Stairs.

Casey Jones went to Hell a'flying;
"Casey Jones," the Devil said, "Oh fine:
Casey Jones, get busy shovelling sulphur;
That's what you get for scabbing on the CN Line."

See

CN

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
UTU, Canada, railroad, CN, strike, workers, Joe Hill, scab, accident, trains, train accident, B.C., Alberta,

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

For Black History Month I will look at some of the historically obscure but influential black intellectuals of the 19th Century.

Today I feature Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son in law who was a Mulatto and faced racial discrimination as well as being subjected to antisemitism.

Paul Lafargue was born in Cuba in 1842. As he would later boast, he was an “international[ist] of blood before [he] was one of ideology.” By which he meant that of his four grandparents, only one was a Christian French citizen – one of his grandmothers was an Indian from Jamaica and one was a mulatto refugee from Haiti, and his maternal grandfather was a French Jew. He also liked to say that “the blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins” and when Daniel DeLeon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, “I am proudest of my Negro extraction.”

Despite his family ties to Marx and his friendship and patronage by Engels we was no Marxist, he was a follower of Proudhon and an avowed anarchist/libertarian socialist.

He is known for his famous exhortation to the working class to struggle against work; The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

This would be the inspiration for the polemical proto-situationist text; The Right to Be Greedy and later Bob Blacks popular consumer version;The Abolition of Work

Lafargue's critique that workers under capitalism were no better off than slaves rings true even today. He applied the term wage-slave literally, and literarily. He exhorts workers to not to demand the right to work but to demand the right to leisure. Something capitalism of his time could not provide, though today it is all around us in modern consumer society of the G8 countries.

Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the social and political life of a century of science and industry, has become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they dared demand the right to work -- a slave's right.

His tongue in cheek sarcasm and ridicule makes his writing humorous, accessible and pointed. In this case he points out that those who advocate for the morality of animal rights would do well to advocate for the ultimate pack horse of capitalism, the worker.

THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely and more firmly to his economic duty.

"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity but they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds call "lower."

Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too great a task to go through the longs list of its benefactions; I will name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.

Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.

Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, timothy and other succulent plants.

These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their feats of running and leaping They respect none of the social dignities before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew.

It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted by their high social station; had they taken it into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing- lace and diamonds, and drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery would he impending over the class of wage-workers.

Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their anthropophagic tastes.

The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of Man." The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.

The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols until he is grown.

The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable abomination -- to demand for babies the rights of colts.

As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work. and their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.

This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his heart being torn by it.

This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the entertainment of a quadrupled than for paying the wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his death.

The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the consciousness of all men.

The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights, with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.

Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on the tender grass of the mountains.

The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a weary lamb.

True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.

Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.

Also See:

Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Paul Lafargue, Black history, Black history month, Cuba, Marx, The Right To Be Lazy, workers, socialism, libertarian socialism, Proudhon, anarchism, end of work, France, intellectuals