When the Union is the Boss

Fired union whistleblower wins job challenge in Supreme Court
Private sector Business Unions in the building trades are notorious for being bad employers especially for their female support staff. Women workers have faced abuse and harassment in the workplace, due to the sexist attitudes of craft/trades men. You know the attitude I work and the little woman stays home. In Alberta OPEIU which represents women office workers in private sector unions filed charges against several building trades unions over this.

A woman who was fired from her job after blowing the whistle on alleged misspending by her superiors has won her case in the country's top court and now wants to go back to work. In a 6-1 judgment released Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of Linda Merk, who was ousted as bookkeeper and office manager for a Saskatchewan local of the Iron Workers Union.

The Iron Workers Union like other private sector business unions like the Labourers International, Carpenters, Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employees (HERE), Teamsters, etc. have alleged connections with organized crime. And their officers often act as if they were Padrones.

In the last decade in Alberta the HERE Local was involved in a scandal over Executive board members, a Father and Son, who embezzled pension funds.
As business unions these organizations view the workers as their source of cash and capital, much like the boss does.

And with big pension and benefit funds the temptation for these business agents, International Reps and local executives (who are often appointed by the International or if elected are part of the good old boys network) to dip into the cash drawer can be a bit overwhelming.

After all they are only doing on the local level what the big wigs in Washington with their shady connections have been caught doing.

And being good ol' boys they figure that the little woman should know her place, in this case she did, she exposed the rats that stole from the rank and file. The rats in the union executive did what all rats do, they covered up their crime and canned a worker who was doing what was in the best interests of the members (remember them they are the reason the union exists).

Merk's drawn out legal battle began more than four years ago when she complained about salary and expense payments to two union officers According to the set of facts the high court used in its ruling, Merk first took her complaint to her supervisor and was rebuked.So Merk's father, a former union employee, and three other members wrote a letter to the general president in Washington to complain. After the matter was investigated internally, the local executive authorized Merk's firing. Merk said her family has a long history with the union and she wants to go back to work. "I love my job," she said. "I liked being with the members and the members liked me."

Good for her, time to clean house and as the Wobblies say "dump the bosses off your back," including the union bosses who view our unions as their personal fiefdoms and cash cows.

New Home For Red Between The Lines

Modblog the home of my blog Red Between the Lines is still offline after seven days and counting. Update (11/22/05 @ 7:11PM CT): The ModBlog file server has returned online. And though they say the server is back up, well thats nice but our blogs aren't. So rather than continuing bitching about Modblog, and its sever failures which have occured with unpleasant regularity this past year, I am moving Red Between The Lines here to Blogger. And I have given it an appropriate red background. So I will be posting my short pithy news comments on RBTL instead of here on Le Revue Gauche in a couple of days once I have changed links and notified blog associates about removing the old modblog link for the new site.

Christian Killers and Rapists

Recent reports on the sexual assualt, by students at a Catholic School in Toronto along with the recent murder at a funeral at a Seventh Day Adventist Church seemed to miss the neccasary headline monicker that would be added if these events had happened at a Jewish or Muslim or other minority religious insitution.
So here they are:
Christian Students Arrested for Sexual Assault
Christian Kills Christian at Funeral.

Canadian Blog Awards 2005

The first round of voting is now open in the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards. Of course I have my humble blogs posted under Progressive, Business (for Red between the Lines) and my series Gothic Capitalism under Series. Vote often.

And speaking of Blog Awards here is an interesting story about the latest MSM blog award: Fictional housewife takes top blog prize

Organizers received more than 2,500 submissions, in nine different languages, for the second-annual competition, which is run by the internet arm of Germany's Deutsche Welle news service. Co-sponsors include CBC.ca, Reporters Without Borders, France's Le Monde and China's Phoenix TV.The jury, with members from around the world, chose eight finalists in each category. Then the internet community was encouraged to vote. According to Guido Baumhauer, editor in chief of DW-World.DE, more than 100,000 ballots were cast through online voting worldwide.

Gee and how did I miss this? Must be the most underpublicized Blogs Award ever. Oh right its a mainstream blog award.

Leveling the playing field for tax cheats

Income trusts are poised to rise Thursday after Ottawa decided not to hit the sector with a new tax regime, but instead level the playing field by cutting taxes on corporate dividends.
Thats the way to deal with those nasty income trusts that were set up as a tax haven for corporations. Don't tax them nah, just give the other corporations another tax cut. The logic in that is what? Well the government failed to collect millions in taxes from income trusts, mainly because as the Auditor General pointed out, see s All the Newz that didn't Fit, Revenue Canada FAILED to collect what was owed us. Now this tax give away might have served a purpose if it had strings attached, like making sure that dividends were invested back into production. As it is now this is not happening. Instead the money is invested in the stock market by corporate managers to make more money. And thats the real reason that the Income Trusts lost money over the last six months, because so did the stock market.

King Klein's Grande Tour

So while the Alberta legislature sits, King Klein leaves the province on his Grande Tour like the aristocracy of old. No need for the Tyrant to be at home, after all what can the legislature do anyways? The opposition can ask questions, and ask some more, and they get no anwsers from the papercutouts in the government backbenches. It is a comfort that the Alberta Government can merely sit for the shortist sessions of any legislature in Canada since all the decisions are made behind closed doors by cabinet, or between legislature sittings, or on the whim of King Klein. Such as his latest announcement of the Klein Legacy Fund, a direct steal from Jean Chretien.

Alberta Centennial Scholarships giving students across Canada reason to celebrate
$2005 awards to be spread among students from all provinces and territories

Hey wasn't he supposed to get this passed in the house? Nah, he knows it will pass. Yep thats royalty for ya. And you thought the aristocractic ruling class was a thing of the past. Not in Alberta, we have the Oil Royalty and their Party of Calgary.

And not everyone is happy with King Kleins Centenniel Award. After all Alberta students pay some of the highest tuition in Canada.

Student leaders say money should be used to fix Alberta's needs

Like Capone, Pinochet gets his

They may not have been able to get him on human rights violations and murder, just like they couldn't get Al Capone for racketeering and murder, but like Big Al it appears the Chilean people may finally get justice with the imprisonment of Augusto Pinochet for tax evasion. Just like Big Al. Pinochet indicted on tax-evasion charges

Once a Liberal always a Liberal

Klein says Harper seen as 'too much on the right,' predicts another Liberal minority


The reason Ralph wants the Liberals to win is cause he once was one. Ok for the record, all kidding aside, the real reason he wants them to win is that its the Alberta Advantage. With a Federal Liberal government to kick around the Conservatives have stayed in power in Alberta. Ok they stayed in power under the Mulroney Conservative government but look what happened then, along came Son of Socred, Presto Manning, and he started the Reform Party in revolt against Mulroney. Now Harper is leading the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party and Klein is afraid that as closely identified with Alberta as they are, and the fact they are the overwhelming majority of Federal MPs in Alberta, this will spell DOOM for his party's chances in the next provincial election. Seriously. All politics are local, and in this case Klein is seriously worried that without the Liberals in power in Ottawa to be the boogeyman Albertans will begin to look at the replacing the boogeyman in their own back yard. After all Alberta has historically opposed Ottawa, and whoever is in power in Ottawa.

Child Poverty Forgotten But Not Gone

What was supposed to be a temporary expansion of the depression era soup kitchens, the Food Bank, instituted when the economy collapsed after the Wall Street crash of 1987 and the decline in oil prices is now a permanent fixture in the social economy. Almost half those using it are children. Say wasn't there a red book promise about ending child poverty in Canada back in the 1993?

Winter will be hard, food-bank report warns

Canadian unemployment is dropping, but total food-bank use in March 2005 – the month the dry-goods charity suppliers do their annual count – fell just one-tenth of one per cent from 2004's record high, the HungerCount report said. However, use is still up 24 per cent from 1997 and 118 per cent from 1989. The report says 823,856 Canadians, including more than 300,000 children, visited food banks in March, the report says.

Ok You Are An Anarchist

Editor's File When politicians come a-waffling
By Leo Valiquette, Ottawa Business Journal Staff
Wed, Nov 23, 2005 4:00 PM EST

How low would voter turnout have to be in a federal election for it to be sheer absurdity to declare anyone a winner?

I would say if less than half of the electorate turned out to cast a ballot. The problem is, even if the majority of Canadians abstained from voting, the results of the election would still be valid.

It's a shame really, for I think a minimum voter turnout in a federal election would provide Canadians with an unprecedented avenue through which to express their discontent. If too few votes are cast, the election is null and void. The previous government remains dissolved and no party can form a new one until another round at the polling stations yields that minimum voter turnout.

Call me an anarchist, if you will, but a little anarchy appears to be what we need right now to provoke someone to take definitive action.

Ok you are an anarchist, or at least a Marxist, Grucho Marxist.