Showing posts with label Monte Solberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monte Solberg. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Alberta's Padrone Culture


While unions in Alberta have opposed the exploitation of foreign workers which is being promoted by oil companies and their pals in the provincial and federal governments it is also the unions that are fighting for these workers rights.

Exploitation of foreign workers is rife in the free wheeling padrone culture of Alberta.

An advocate for Alberta's temporary foreign workers says her phone is ringing off the hook with people who say they're being treated unfairly by their bosses.

They came for a brief taste of the Alberta Advantage, with each man saying he paid $6,000 to $12,000 up front for a chance to ply his trade for a better wage.

But they wound up with no job, their money gone, crammed 15 to a house in Mill Woods, with no legal right to work in Canada. They had no promise of help getting home and demands from their work agent for even more money, they say.

The agency, Worldwide Workforce, says the men are lying and that the thousands of dollars it did charge went to cover legitimate costs.

In the meantime, two other foreign workers, with a Chinese firm, died on one of the oilpatch projects the East Indian arrivals expected to work on.

Seven of the East Indian men are now working, after residents took them in and introduced them to the International Boilermakers Union, which found them placements with employers who had federal permission to hire temporary foreign workers. Three more may have work soon.

Employment and Immigration and Industry Minister Iris Evans tabled a letter
from Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan in the Legislature today
as proof that she's doing everything she can to protect the growing number of
foreign workers brought into Alberta under temporary work permits.

But McGowan says all the minister's stunt proves is that she really
doesn't understand how her own department functions and what challenges
temporary workers actually face when they arrive here.
McGowan says there are currently no dedicated mechanisms in place at
either the federal or provincial level to ensure that temporary foreign
workers are being treated fairly by employers. Instead, both governments
simply say temporary workers are covered by the same system of workplace rules
as domestic workers.

"The current complaint driven system is flawed for domestic Canadian
workers - but it's a disaster for temporary foreign workers," says McGowan.
"By falling back on the current system, the Minister is basically admitting
that she's not prepared to do anything to help temporary foreign workers. As a
result, she's helping to create a vast underclass of exploitable workers who
don't have access to the same kind of rights and protections in the workplace
as other workers in Canada."



CALGARY/AM770CHQR - Employment and immigration minister is telling people thinking of moving to the province to stay home unless they have a job and a place to live.
Iris Evans says she doesn't want anyone coming here with unrealistic expectations.
Her comments come as Finance Minister Lyle Oberg pondered tax incentives for developers to get more affordable housing built.
Oberg says his department will be looking at both tax incentives and tax cuts.




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Monday, April 30, 2007

AUPE Calls General Strike Over Safety

The difference between business unionism and industrial unionism. Business unions are in the business of keeping business operating, industrial/social unionism says wobble the job for health and safety.

The head of Alberta Building Trades Council is calling for calm over the deaths of two foreign workers at a Fort McMurray-area oilpatch worksite.

Executive director Ron Harry called on workers and the public to wait until all investigations into the tragedy are complete before making any decisions.

"There are processes and policies on each site," said Harry.

"In the end a worker is a worker, no matter if he's union or non-union, an immigrant or non-immigrant. It's unfortunate but you must find out what caused the situation first."

He was responding to reports Doug Knight of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees called on workers to walk off the job immediately if they fear the jobsite is not safe.

If there is immediate danger at the workplace you must remove yourself and your co-workers from it," said Harry, "then work with the employers and owners on site about the problem, don't just walk off the job."

The ABTC represents 50,000 unionized workers, 16 affiliate trade unions and 23 locals in Alberta. The two workers killed were not union members.

Harry said that the last thing he wants to see are massive groups of workers walking off the job sites without first going through the workplace safety steps.

The two men died while working at the Canadian Natural Resources Ltd site in the Fort MacKay area, near Fort McMurray. Witnesses said that a massive tank collapsed and killed the two temporary Chinese workers and injured four more.

Fiona Wiseman, spokesman for Occupation Health and Safety, said that four investigators from Alberta Employment, Immigration and Industry are already at the site.

A government translator who speaks Mandarin, the same language the two dead men spoke, is also on the scene. Wiseman said that no details will be released until the investigation is completed. In 2006, 124 people died on the job in Alberta. The death toll reached 27 in the first two months of 2007.


See:

Day of Mourning

Labour Shortage = Union Busting


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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Return Of the Work Camps


Ah shades of the dirty thirties in Alberta......Company wants to set up work camp near Calgary

Back then they were called Relief Camps for unemployed single men. We would call them internment or concentration camps today. Return Of Internment Camps

However this work camp will be for new temporary workers imported to work in Alberta and then kicked out after two years.

Padrone Me Is This Alberta

Forward into the past, backwards into the future.

See

Temporary Workers

Labour

Unions

NAFTA

AFL




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Thursday, March 01, 2007

Labour Shortage = Union Busting

The only labour shortage in Alberta is finding unskilled folks to work at Timmies, and even there they are now paying $14 an hour plus benefits. But as for skilled labour, well they are working there too because they can't find jobs through the Merit Contractors and their business pals like CNRL and the Padrone's of CLAC.

These guys being anti-union would rather hire temporary workers for $14 dollars an hour no benefits. To do union jobs that pay over $22 an hour with benefits.

Worker shortage a 'myth' - union
'Lots of skilled people in province'
Alberta's labour shortage is a myth, says the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Tim Brower, IBEW Local 424 business manager, says non-union contractors are using the "myth" of a labour shortage to bring in temporary foreign workers who are taking away jobs from Albertans. "There is a shortage of unskilled people in this province. I won't deny that," he told reporters at the legislature yesterday. "Tim Hortons is looking for people. 7-Eleven is looking for people ... but when it comes to skilled people in this province, there is no shortage. I am the expert. I have them available."Brower said 1,000 electricians in his union are unemployed or working other jobs because they can't find work in their trade. "I have run into my members working at Home Depot handing out electrical components," he said. "Some of them are driving trucks.



And since our new Minister of Human Resources; Monte Solberg loves his Timmies it's no wonder he is joining his pals in the non-union construction sector in Alberta calling for more Temporary Workers. Thats so more unionized workers can get jobs at Timmies. There are lots of unemployed skilled workers in Alberta, but of course they belong to the building trades unions.

Companies like CNRL and others that are using Merit Shops to build oilsands projects are taking advantage of this to undercut the unions. Heck even right wing Edmonton Sun Columnist Neil Waugh noted this 'fact' last summer. And he notes it again today in a scathing attack on lack of planning by the new Stelmach regime.

That's because the Merit Shops are not independent contractors at all but spin offs of unionized companies! Merit Shops are about as independent as CLAC is an independent union. Neither of them are and both are spin offs of Alberta's Big Construction Companies trying to bust the Building Trades Unions.

Kushner is the president of the Merit Contractors Association and the person most responsible for getting a review of the Code rolling. Call them merit contractors, or open shops, it all means non-union (or at the very most, an "alternative" labour group such as the Christian Labour Association of Canada).

Alberta's non-union construction industry began 20 years ago, as the oil price slump of the early 1980s shut down jobs and pushed companies into bankruptcy. Driven by the earlier, decades-long boom and labour shortage, construction labour relations had become a perpetual upward spiral of wage increases. Faced with the crunch, companies had to cut costs or go under.

The end result was the famous "spin-off" company, a term industry people are reluctant to use to this day. After locking out their employees for 25 hours, the firm would hire them back in a subsidiary company, or through a labour broker, at lower wages. After the dust settled, the complexion of Alberta�s construction industry had changed forever.

Today, there are few union contractors working in the commercial/institutional sector, while the large industrial projects are built almost exclusively by organized labour. The Merit Contractors Association represents 670 companies in Alberta, employing over 20,000 persons who complete 32 million hours of construction work annually. The Association has been growing at a rate of 36% a year, for the past four years. During those four years, it�s been lobbying ceaselessly, in its own right and through its members, for changes to workplace legislation, making annual presentations at Standing Policy Committee and appearances at Conservative Party functions.



See

Labour Shortage

History of the WRF

Alberta's Free Market In Labour

The Labour Shortage Myth

AFL Agrees With Me

Lack of Planning Created Skills Shortage in Alberta


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