In keeping with the government’s vision of making Canada a low-tax jurisdiction, the Conservatives have been gradually cutting taxes on corporate profits since 2007.
By 2015 under this plan, the share of federal government programs paid for by corporate income taxes will have shrunk to 12.3 per cent from 20.8 per cent in 2000.
Do we really want to 'look more like Ireland?'
Shortly after rolling out the Harper government’s first budget in 2006, a boisterous Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was asked during a visit to New York what Canada would look like in five years under a Conservative majority regime.
“It will look more like Ireland — more dynamic, more attractive to investors, brighter, more positive, outward-looking,” Flaherty said in a published report of his comments.
Perhaps in part due to his Irish heritage, Flaherty has long been a fan of Ireland’s fundamental economic strategy — rock-bottom corporate income tax rates.
But with Ireland's low-tax Celtic Tiger now dead, the Harper government no longer cites the Irish example to promote corporate tax cuts in Canada. Nonetheless, despite the dire state of Ottawa's finances, the Conservatives are sticking to the low-tax policy pioneered in nearly bankrupt Ireland.
Billions in profits boost bank shares
Banks in the United States and Europe are getting hit by bonus taxes and a welter of new regulation but here in Canada, where policy makers see less need to penalize the sector, the Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion Bank thrashed earnings expectations with combined first quarter profit of $3.4 billion, driving their shares higher.Canadian corporate operating profits rose to $65.5 billion in the last three months of 2010, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday, a 7.9 per cent increase over the previous quarter.
StatsCan said the increases were widespread across the economy, with 19 of 22 industries reporting higher earnings.
The rise followed moderate declines in the previous two quarters. Operating revenues were up 2.8 per cent for the sixth straight quarter.
Operating earnings in the non-financial sector increased by 7.3 per cent, with the biggest gains in mining and oil and gas.
Financial institutions climbed by 9.5 per cent as insurance firms rebounded from a poor performance in the third quarter. Chartered banks rose 5.6 per cent.
Profits up 9% for the year
Compared with the same period a year earlier, operating profits for all industries were nine per cent.
By the end of 2010, profits had grown by 5.5 per cent since the beginning of the recovery, regaining 56 per cent of the ground lost during the recession.
It's looking like a better year for dividend increases
Please sir, I want some more dividends.
Flush with cash and encouraged by a strengthening economy, companies are doling out dividend increases to the delight of yield-hungry investors.
And with corporate profits rebounding strongly, the trend is likely to gather momentum over the next couple of years, analysts predict.
This month alone, Canadian companies including Rogers Communications Inc., Shoppers Drug Mart Corp., TransCanada Corp. and Russel Metals Inc. have raised their quarterly payments, signalling their confidence in both the economy and the strength of their balance sheets.
Armine Yalnizyan: Five economic reasons to say no to more corporate tax cuts in CanadaLeast effective job creation measure: According to the nation’s official number crunchers, if you want policy to encourage job creation, cutting corporate taxes is the weakest option (20 cents growth from every dollar of tax cut). Spending on infrastructure has the most impact ($1.50 on every dollar spent). The Department of Finance shows that spending on income supports for the unemployed and for low-income Canadians has an equally big pop, and housing initiatives are almost as good ($1.40 for every dollar spent).
Little impact on investments: Federal corporate tax rates have fallen from 28 percent in 2000 to 18 percent in 2010. Business investment (in non-residential structures and equipment) as a share of GDP was 12.4 percent in 2000. It was also 12.4 percent in 2009, and on track for the same in 2010. In the 1960s, the heyday of industrial expansion and economic development in Canada, the federal corporate tax rate was 40 percent. Statistics Canada’s data on business investment starts in 1981. That year the federal corporate tax rate was 36 percent, and business investment represented 11.5 percent of the economy. By 1990 the federal corporate tax had fallen to 28 percent. Business investment had fallen to 10.8 percent of the economy. There are many factors that drive business investment practices, and while taxes are a consideration, they are not the primary factor in investment decisions. The historic evidence shows that a commitment to this strategy is a costly faith-based proposition.
Pay more tax to cut taxes: Since fall 2010 the Harper team has been saying corporate tax cuts “pay for themselves”. But Budget 2009 figures show that reducing the general corporate tax rate from 22.12 percent in 2007 to 18 percent by January 2010 removed $6.7 billion annually from public coffers, right through the worst of the recession. Cutting the rate further this year to 16.5 percent meant another $2.8 billion in foregone revenues annually. The Harper team’s commitment to reducing the corporate tax rate to 15 percent will reduce the size of the public purse by $13.7 billion annually by 2012, according to Finance estimates, at which time the federal budgetary deficit will be between $21 and $26 billion (the range of Finance, PBO and IMF estimates). Financing this tax cut requires borrowing more money. The average Canadian taxpayer will pay interest on the borrowed money to provide a tax break for profitable corporations.
Showing posts with label bank profits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bank profits. Show all posts
Friday, March 04, 2011
Tax Breaks=Corporate Welfare
The Conservatives are out promoting the Liberal Tax breaks for corporations they inherited...claiming that our poor Canadian Capitalists need tax breaks so they will be encouraged to create jobs. While economic reality says that Canadian workers are paying taxes to their bosses who are rolling in money. And the reason for existing deficits Federally and provincially is because of corporate bail outs of Big Auto.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Subsidizing Criminal Capitalism
Why are we bailing these guys out with taxpayers money while they are guilty of being criminal capitalists. Of course hidden in their bad loan charges will be the costs of criminal charges as well. And in order to offset your criminal charges you can use loosy goosy accounting standards to cook the books. Wait a minute isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place? And there is still no real transparency in the operations of Canada's banks. A profit is still a profit and CEO stock options have not been cut back. Canada Bails out its banks to the tune of over $1650 for every man women and child. Oh, and ATM fees are going up.
Ottawa to buy $50B in mortgages, hopes to spur loans
Royal Bank of Canada agrees to $10.7M settlement
The Justice Department said Tuesday that RBC Mortgage Co., a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada, has agreed to pay the U.S. more than $10.7 million to settle allegations that the company falsified loan documentation.The Justice Department said the allegations concerned 219 federally insured loans for mortgages submitted to the Federal Housing Administration of the Department of Housing and Urban Development between 2001 and 2005.
CHICAGO - A Canadian bank holding company that purchased a former mortgage company in Rockford will pay the U.S. nearly $11 million to settle claims over bad loans. RBC Mortgage, formerly known as Prism Mortgage, had a lending office in Rockford. Three RBC Mortgage loan officers and 22 other people were convicted of knowlingly setting up 219 loans that failed in the Rockford and Freeport areas between February 2001 and April 2004. Each loan resulted in foreclosure causing financial loss to the government.
Bank of America, Royal Bank of Canada to bail out holders of auction-rate securities
Bank of America Corp. and Royal Bank of Canada will bail out customers stuck with $10.3 billion in auction-rate securities and pay fines to settle state and federal claims that they misled investors in selling the products. Bank of America will buy back $4.5 billion of the securities and pay a $50-million fine in agreements with the Securities and Exchange Commission and New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo that "closely mirror" a deal last month with Massachusetts. The bank will help clients dispose of an additional $5 billion, the SEC said. Royal Bank of Canada said it agreed to buy $850 million of the debt and pay a $9.8-million fine.Companies including Citigroup Inc., UBS and Merrill Lynch & Co. have agreed to repurchase more than $50 billion in debt to settle claims they touted the instruments as safe, cash-like investments.
RBC takes $1.6B hit on bad loans
RBC said it was avoiding even bigger charges by taking advantage of new looser accounting standards to reclassify impaired assets so the losses would not have to be acknowledged.
Charges cut profit, but RBC expects to make $1.1B in Q4
Gordon Nixon • Born, Jan. 25, 1957, Montreal • Chief executive officer, Royal Bank of Canada (TSX: RY)Years at company: 21 • Age: 51
2007 Earns $8,767,229 in compensation and bonus. Realizes gain of $29,033,072 on exercised stock options. “I think the industry, all of us, anticipated the ability of the markets to recover from those events and to move out of it much more quickly than it has actually happened,” Nixon says. “I think we’ve misjudged the severity of the liquidity crisis.”
Toronto Domion Bank Ex-Commerce Bank CEO to pay $4 mln to settle probe
WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Vernon Hill, former chief executive of Commerce Bancorp Inc, agreed to pay $4 million to settle allegations of unsafe banking practices, regulators said on Monday.
Commerce forced Hill out in June 2007 after regulators complained about dealings between the bank and partnerships controlled by Hill as well as an architectural design firm run by Hill's wife, Shirley.
Under the settlement with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Hill must also pay $4 million to TD Bank, which acquired Commerce in March. But the iconoclastic banker incurred no fines or prohibitions in the settlement, paving the way for the launch of Metro Bank, a new venture based on the Commerce model of service and convenience. Meanwhile, a U.S. District Court judge in Camden issued an injunction Tuesday forbidding Hill to use materials reflecting Commerce signage and colors at a banking conference in Orlando, Fla. The injunction was sought by TD Bank, whose Canadian parent bank acquired Cherry Hill-based Commerce in March for $8.5 billion. The OCC said Hill failed to comply with sound corporate governance principles related to real estate purchases, leases and joint real estate development transactions involving Commerce that financially benefited him.The bank announced in August 2007 that Hill would receive an $11 million severance payment, subject to regulatory approval. After resigning, Hill started a private investment group that will invest in financial industry stocks. This past summer, he doled out $6 million to become and investor and consultant in Philadelphia’s Republic First Bancorp, which announced last week that it would be acquired by former Commerce affiliate Pennsylvania Commerce Bancorp of Harrisburg, Pa., for $109 million.
TD's capital ratio fell significantly on Nov. 1 under global banking rules, Basel II, that require it to change the way it counts its stake in TD Ameritrade. The decision to issue equity is a dramatic about-face for Mr. Clark, who told analysts on a conference call just Thursday that “raising common equity would be extremely difficult” at the moment. He signalled that the bank would rather increase its capital levels using other methods, such as issuing preferred shares. As a result, the bank had to count 50 per cent of its $4.6-billion stake in TD Ameritrade in its ratio. “That meant we immediately lost $2.3-billion of Tier 1 capital, and that's what brought our Tier 1 capital ratio down,” Mr. Clark said. TD had already raised $1.25-billion of Tier 1 capital during the quarter, Mr. Mihelic noted.TD still has room to issue “more than a couple billion dollars of preferred shares under the rules,” Mr. Clark said.The decision to issue common shares was made yesterday afternoon, because markets improved since Thursday and investors were signalling they wanted a higher capital ratio, he said. TD last week disclosed a surprising $350-million after-tax writedown from credit losses and further investment declines that will not show up in results because of new accounting rules.
Bank of Montreal Rogue gas trader admits to fraud A disgraced natural gas trader at the centre of Bank of Montreal's $853 million commodity trading scandal has pleaded guilty to intentionally mismarking his trading book in a "criminal scheme" to pad his bonus, Manhattan's district attorney announced yesterday ... The charges stem from a joint investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the New York Office of the FBI into Bank of Montreal's natural gas trading losses, which topped $850 million
BMO net rises 24%; dividend is frozen
BMO's high yield should set off warning bells Globe and Mail
First, those results weren't as good as they looked. The headlines say earnings were up 22 per cent to $1.06 a share. Nice, but considering, for example, that the tax rate was not low, not zero but negative, you have to take that with a grain of salt. Reclassifying assets as available for sale added $123-million to the bottom line. Only a very recent rule change allowed that - thank you regulators. Trading revenues were abnormally high too. And here's another reason: no one understands how a modern bank works. During yesterday's conference call, analysts were scratching their heads trying to understand the repercussions of the Apex commercial paper trust, which the bank sponsors; BMO has about $1.6-billion on the line there. If the investments and its attendant risks are hard for professional and experienced analysts to follow, they're practically incomprehensible for the average retail investor - and even some professional investors - to understand as they salivate over a juicy yield.
Bank of Montreal profit climbs The Gazette (Montreal)
Quarterly profit rose 24 per cent at the Bank of Montreal, helped by tax recoveries, higher profit at its Canadian retail banking unit and new accounting rules,
Bank of Montreal Profit Rises on Consumer Banking
Bank of Montreal, Canada’s fourth- biggest bank, said higher revenue from consumer banking helped boost fourth-quarter profit by 24 percent from a year ago, when it had debt writedowns and trading losses. Canadian consumer-banking profit rose 20 percent to C$344 million from a year earlier as personal loans rose 21 percent and it added more mortgages. Commercial loans and credit-card revenue also rose from a year earlier. Investment-banking profit soared to C$285 million from C$46 million a year earlier, when the firm had C$275 million in losses from trading, bad bets on natural-gas options contracts and writedowns on debt investments.
BMO head urges Ottawa to act decisively
Bank chiefs on Bay Street are urging Ottawa to commit to making a major injection of cash into the economy to help stem a rising tide of bad loans, after internal bank figures showed Canadians were increasingly struggling to make payments on money they've borrowed. Bill Downe, chief executive of BMO Financial, said strong and timely fiscal stimulus was needed from government, arguing it would be "positive for employment" and facilitate "constructive investment," while reviving growth for banks.
Let's not bank on the banks
Given this risk and the serious economic consequences of the banking crisis, it may be appropriate that premiere events at the Air Canada Centre are becoming notable for the scarcity of bank executives, who earn up to 500 times more than arena staff. Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, said yesterday he had been somewhat troubled by the nature of his conversations with chief executives during the last five years. He suggested in a BBC interview that bank chiefs should perhaps have spent more time reviewing their loan portfolios and less time thinking about the "opera or the ski slopes."
Carney signals more rate cuts
In a sign that the global credit crisis is seeping across Canada's borders, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney warned yesterday that the country "has been importantly affected by global events" and hinted that another interest rate cut may be in the offing. Pointing to "a tightening in credit conditions," Carney said in a speech to the Canada-United Kingdom Chamber of Commerce in London that "the risks to growth and inflation in Canada identified (in October) appear to have shifted to the downside." He said the crisis has essentially ended for Canada's banks, and short of a complete global market failure, he expects financial and credit markets to improve in Canada
Canada Purchases C$1.05 Billion of Non-Mortgage Debt (Update1)
By Alexandre Deslongchamps and Greg Quinn
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The Bank of Canada bought C$1.05 billion ($839 million) of securities from investors, less than the C$2 billion it offered to purchase, in an effort to restore normal trading in credit markets.
The central bank will hold the non-mortgage loan portfolio assets as collateral for 28-day loans. The bank has offered to buy C$8 billion or more of such securities by Dec. 9.
Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said last week in separate speeches that they will take whatever steps are needed to shore up the economy and help mitigate the global credit crisis. The central bank has another program under which it will inject up to C$35 billion into the financial system this year through loans to major bond dealers.
Tomorrow, the Bank of Canada will offer loans of C$6 billion to major bond dealers, instead of the minimum of C$4 billion it announced on Nov. 3. On Nov. 27, the central bank will sell C$1.45 billion of treasury bills, to offset the increased value of assets on its books from its special loans
Sympathy slight for banking blues
The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), for instance, announced yesterday that its estimated profits for the last three months plunged a frightful $200 million from a year ago. That left the nation's largest bank with a paltry profit of only $1.1 billion -- for its worst quarter of the year.
Putting it another way for those of us who can't quite fathom a billion of anything, the so-called credit crisis engulfing the globe has reduced the Royal to making a little over $12 million a day, including weekends when its branches aren't even open for business. One can only imagine the terminal indigestion all this must be causing in the bank's executive dining room these days.
Only a year ago, the Royal was boasting "a record-busting profit of almost $5.5 billion (for 2007), achieving the highest annual income ever for a Canadian bank despite global capital-market turmoil that has engulfed the entire industry." The Royal, for instance, reports a tidy $330-million increase in revenues over the past three months from an improved credit spread.
Turns out that while most public and media attention has been focused on the near-collapse of the financial system in the U.S. and overseas, the highly regulated Canadian big banks have escaped relatively unscathed. No matter. Nothing like a good global banking scare to sneak through a bit of consumer gouging here at home.
It started in the middle of the recent federal election when the Bank of Canada unexpectedly cut its key lending rate by a full half-percentage point after the first wave of the market meltdown.
The move was intended precisely to get the Canadian banks to cut their lending rates to consumers and businesses in an effort to keep the economy rolling.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the banks -- they decided to cut their rates by only a quarter-point, and keep the rest.
This was not an isolated bit of banking robbery.
According to Bank of Canada figures, its key lending rate has declined 45 per cent from a year ago, from 4.5 per cent to 2.5 per cent. But the prime business rate that banks lend money to their best commercial customers has only dropped 33 per cent -- from six per cent to four per cent.
But no one is getting burned more than consumers and, in particular, homeowners.
In the year that the central bank rate has dropped 45 per cent, the banks have passed along to consumers a tiny fraction of the savings.
For example, according to the Bank of Canada, the average five-year conventional mortgage that was 7.39 per cent a year ago, was being offered to homeowners in October at 7.20 per cent.
Even the average one-year mortgage dropped barely 12 per cent in the year, from an average 7.2 per cent to only 6.35 per cent in October.
All of which clearly helps to explain why Stephen Harper's government has generously provided the big banks with $75 billion of public money with which to further gouge, um, the same public. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the move would help average Canadians by "making consumer and mortgage loans more affordable."
SEE:
UBScandal
Casino Capitalism
Money Laundering Canadian Style
Bank Theft
Credit Card Fraud
The Cone of Silence Bank Presidents and the RCMP
RBC Centre
Greedy Banks
BMO More ATM's Less People
A Day in the Life of Corporate Criminals
Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:criminology, corporate-crime, white-collar-crime, sociology, hedge funds, scandal, criminal-capitalism, workers, employees, theft, crime, layoffs,, Canada,, banks,, banking,, BMO,, natural gas,, Bank of Montreal,, Banks,, Canada,, bank, Royal, Bank-Of-Nova-Scotia, banking-regulations, disclosure
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Bank Union
Banks and credit unions need unions. Especially those credit unions that were created by unions. But even then being unionized does not mean that the management and democratically elected board that runs the credit union will act differently than any other boss when it comes to the union. As the ongoing strike in Hamilton by credit union workers shows.
We are reminded of the exploitation of tellers and other bank workers by Karen a contributor to the Progressive Bloggers.TD Bank Needs A Union for underpaid Workers - by poor teller
And by the latest class action suit which while successful in the U.S. may not be as successful in Canada which does not have tort law.
Teller launches CIBC lawsuit
CIBC facing class-action suit over unpaid labour
Such class action suits would not be necessary if bank workers were unionized.
And once upon a time in Canada we had the beginnings of a bank union drive organized by SORWUC in the lower B.C. mainland amongst credit unions and later the CIBC.
The success of that drive in the 1970's emboldened the labour movement, but instead of supporting SORWUC which was an independent Canadian union organized by rank and file women, it saw SORWUC as a competitor. So instead the old style business unions tried their hand at bank organizing in Toronto amongst the big five banks, and failed. Never to try again.
In light of this new class action suit, SORWUC tried to organize CIBC branches as did the CLC affiliates. But they were defeated by legal battles and the deep pockets of CIBC. Which is why this class action suit faces a dubious future.
The resulting defeat of SORWUC led the banks to aggressively reduce their workforce of tellers replacing them with ATM's, the one armed bandits that rip us off with their monopolistic surcharges.
The irony is that thirty years later women workers in banks are still unorganized, while the labour movement has changed embracing the social unionism of SORWUC. Bank workers need a union, and the labour movement in Canada needs to organize these unorganized workers. It has been done, it can be done, it must be done.
1972 Association of University and College Employees (AUCE) and the Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union (SORWUC) are formed as feminist unions in response to the resistance of mainstream, male-dominated labour to organize traditional women’s jobs, or to bargain for issues of importance to women. They also applied feminist principles to collective decision making and action. Neither
exists today.
GENDERING UNION RENEWAL:
WOMEN’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO LABOUR
MOVEMENT REVITALIZATION
Paper prepared for the Union Module of the Gender and Work Database
Jan Kainer
April 18, 2006
Many new and independent women’s organizational structures emerged in the seventies because of a lack of support for feminism within labour movements. In Canada, feminist women who supported labour struggle and wished to unionize women, formed their own women-centred structures to overcome the obstacles they experienced from organized labour. In 1972 the Service, Office and Retail Workers of Canada (SORWUC), a self-described “grass roots, feminist union” (Lowe, 1980:32) was formed by women labour activists to unionize workers in service sectors where women predominate. Despite a weak commitment by the Canadian labour movement to SORWUC, the union certified 26 units in the banking industry. Eventually limited resources and an important legal decision restricting certification (i.e. unionized) units to bank branches in small, scattered locations, undermined the momentum of the campaign, and the union was unable to continue its organizing efforts. While SORWUC was relatively short-lived, its alliance with the women’s movement sustained, and informed, other organizing achievements, as this activist explains: (Jean Rands cited in Rebick, 2005:91) We got our confidence from the women’s movement. We were intimidated, but we supported each other and kept reminding ourselves that organizing was our right…we believed that workers should be the ones negotiating, rather than trade union leaders. Collective agreements should be readable by workers too – short and well indexed and written in plain language.
Bank Book Collective An account to settle; the story of the United Bank Workers (SORWUC).Illustrations and cover by Pat Davitt.
Press Gang Publishers Vancouver 1979 127p., wraps, illus. "In 1976, a group of women bank workers decided to organize their workplace. The banks were enraged. When they decided to do it themselves, the big unions were upstaged. Over the next two years, nearly a thousand bank employees in western Canada participated in a unionizing drive that challenged not only the banks but organized labour's approach to a workplace they had long considered beyond their range of union activity."
Thinking Through Labour’s Organizing Strategies: What the Data Reveal and What the Data Conceal
Efforts to organize women in the Canadian private sector are not new. One of the most important campaigns took place in the mid-1970s and involved an attempt to organize chartered bank workers. The Service, Office, and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC) made an important breakthrough in organizing predominantly female bank tellers in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. At the height of the organizing drive, more than one thousand workers were signed up.
SORWUC was a small, avowedly feminist union dedicated to implementing a nonbureaucratic democratic process. It perceived itself to be a movement of women workers, but the CLC and the Canada Labour Relations Board (CLRB) took a different view.
SORWUC’S connections to the women’s movement and the political Left were regarded with suspicion by both organizations. Marc Lapointe, head of the CLRB, expressed skepticism that a feminist group could be considered a legitimate trade union. Indeed the Banks, the Labour Board, and the CLC declared SORWUC to be irresponsible, not acting as a legitimate trade union, and unable to play by the rules of the game because its leaders were naive, incompetent, or linked to subversives.
Prior to SORWUC’s efforts to organize bank workers, the Canadian Labour Congress
(CLC) had established an organizing fund through a levy on its entire membership. In response to SORWUC’s campaign the CLC, using this fund, established the Bank Workers Organising Committee (BWOC) with the purpose of enlisting all of its affiliates to contribute organizers and union support to the Committee. Several of the affiliates, however, refused to participate, arguing that bank workers were part of their jurisdiction so they should be the ones to organize the banks, not the CLC.
To this day, this stance on the part of many affiliate unions blocks the possibility of a coordinate response to organizing the unorganized. It is a discourse of ownership. Unions in a particular jurisdiction perceive that they own the workers; if those workers join a union, it must be their union. The lack of solidarity among unions over who should organize bank workers and how it should be done contributed to the failure of the BWOC. There were other important reasons as well, including the very aggressive anti-union campaign conducted and coordinated from the headquarters of the chartered banks.
As well as placing nails in the coffin of a coordinated, solidaritistic approach to
organizing the unorganized, the failure to organize chartered bank workers also enforced the discourse that women were difficult to unionize.
Feminism as a Class Act:
Working-Class Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Canada
Meg Luxton
The 1970s in particular was a period of women’s organizing activities in unions. For example, at the 1970 United Auto Workers convention, union women called for "full equality now." 34 The fight for affirmative action started with struggles to get women hired into so-called non-traditional jobs or all-male preserves at workplaces such as Stelco and Inco or in the trades; such initiatives demanded union support for challenges to employers. 35 Union women formed organizations to help them fight inside the labour movement to improve women’s situations; for example, in March 1976 Organized Working Women (OWW) was formed in Ontario, with Evelyn Armstrong as its first president, with a membership restricted to women already in unions, while in September 1979 Saskatchewan Working Women (SWW) formed with its membership open to all women who agreed with its objectives. Frustrated by the lack of support for women in the existing unions and outraged by the failure of the union movement to organize in predominantly female workplaces, a group of socialist feminists in 1972 formed an independent union in BC, the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC). 36 Unable to sustain their efforts in the face of employers’ hostility and the reluctance of the union movement to support them, they collapsed after a few years but their initiative prodded the union movement to pay more attention to predominantly female sectors of the labour force.
Responding to increasing pressures from their members, unions began to take up union women’s issues. 38 They held conferences, educationals, and training programmes. Many unions from locals to national organizations developed women’s committees or caucuses intended to help women identify their concerns, develop the strategies and tactics to advance their issues, and strengthen their capacities to intervene in the male-dominated culture of the union. In 1965 the Ontario Federation of Labour set up its first women’s committee, which was chaired by Grace Hartman, then a Vice-President of CUPE. In 1966 that committee organized a conference on Women and Work. 39 In 1976 the CLC held its first conference for women union activists. Unions developed new structures and new positions. In 1977 the Ontario Public Service Employees Union hired its first full-time equal opportunity co-ordinator. Recognizing their failure to get women into leadership positions, some bodies developed affirmative action measures. In 1984 for example, the CLC designated a minimum of six women vice-presidents. They recognized that when competent women leaders are visible, more women are likely to participate and more men and women are able to accept women in leadership positions. Even more important were the positions unions adopted both in contract negotiations on, for example, maternity and parental leave or same-sex spousal benefits, and in union policies such as providing child care at conventions. Finally, unions were also part of, and supported the activities and organizations of the women’s movement. They co-sponsored specific activities such as International Women’s Day demonstrations and joined coalitions to work on campaigns such as those for employment and pay equity, access to abortions, and quality child care.
What makes an Approprite Bargaining Unit?The appropriate bargaining unit sets the initial constituency within which a trade union must gain employee support for collective representation. The right to collective bargaining set out in labour statutes should not be illusory, so labour boards resist creating such large and diverse bargaining units that they are impossible to organize. The B.C. Board put the proposition this way in one of its leading cases:
It is an absolutely fundamental policy of the Code that the achievement of collective bargaining is to be facilitated for those groups of employees who choose to use this procedure as the means for settling their terms and conditions of employment. (...) If bargaining units are defined too widely, or a number of separate groups are put into one unit, it is unlikely in the department store industry that the employees will agree on union representation. In these circumstances we will not deny collective bargaining to those small pockets of employees who, by reason of their own special needs and interests, have.
That does not mean the Board will carve out totally artificial units, based solely on the extent of organization by the union (and sufficiently to give the latter a majority). We will require some reasonably coherent and defensible boundaries around the unit over and above the existing, momentary preference of the employees. (...) However, we will not reject applications for small bargaining units on the basis that a large unit is a more rational structure for hypothetical collective bargaining in the distant future, where the result will be the denial of actual bargaining rights now.
Woodward Stores (Vancouver) Ltd. [1975] 1 Can. L.R.B.R. 114
This approach is especially prevalent in industries that are historically hard to organize. See, e.g. SORWUC v. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce [1977] 2 Can.L.R.B.R. 99 (Can.L.R.B.); CUBE v. Canada Trustco Mortgage Company [1977] 2 Can. L.R.B.R. 93 (Ont. L.R.B.). In each of these cases the board found a single branch of a financial institution an appropriate bargaining unit.
Jonas Gifford – December 2004
· Kitimat CIBC (20 yrs earlier) – board rejected application of Kitimat branch, saying ABU was all CIBC branches in CDA – de facto denial of CB for bank workers
· SORWUC and CIBC (1977)
· Held: branch is the ABU
· Comments: BUT note that board recognized this as a variant of foothold – eventually wanted to rationalize
iii. Comment
· Pluralism cares about negotiation of CAs, not about organization
· Bank EEs in CIBC got ability to unionize, but lost a lot of bargaining power b/c restricted to branch
· This especially b/c CIBC really didn’t want to be unionized
· Used protracted litigation – applied for judicial review for EVERYTHING
· Effect – serious $$ impact on SORWVC
· Effect – delayed CB process w/ significant $$ implications – union just couldn’t afford the whole process, also EEs wouldn’t want to keep paying dues for nothing
General Barriers to Women's Trade Union Participation
Women's Unions: Many unions in which women form significant sections of the membership (like banking and retail) are still not recognized as legitimate by employers. Two examples are the Canadian banking system (SORWUC; CUBE), and Eaton's Dept. Store (RWDSU; UFCW)
Costs more burdensome for union than employer (e.g. organizing small workplaces; 1 reason for SORWUC self-decertification)
Saskatchewan Working Women (SWW)
The SWW was a grassroots, feminist organization of female wage earners which operated from 1978 to 1990. SWW was formed by an alliance of trade union women and community-based feminists. Members of SWW came from many different political backgrounds, including the Waffle, the New Democratic Party, various Communist, Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist parties, the women’s movement on university campuses and women’s centres, and the trade union movement. Some SWW women were also involved in the organizing drives of the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC), a feminist trade union active in Saskatchewan and BC. SWW originated because an increasing number of women were joining the workplace and becoming both unionized and mobilized.
Vancouver History Timeline 1987
Local 1518 of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers Union), with 23,000 members, began representing 57 home care workers when the Service Office and Retail Workers Union (SORWUC) merged with it.
Sisterhood & Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times - Google Books ResultJanet Mary Nicol, " `Unions Aren't Native': The Muckamuck Restaurant Labour Dispute Vancouver, B.C. (1978-1983)," Labour/Le Travail, 40 (Fall 1997), 235-51.
"IN THIS SOCIETY," explained First Nations union organizer Ethel Gardner to a skeptical First Nations community, "being in a union is the only way we can guarantee that our rights as workers will be respected." (1) Ethel was an employee at the Muckamuck restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia when its First Nations workers decided to organize into an independent feminist union in 1978 and subsequently struck for a first contract against white American owners. The dispute allied First Nations people with predominantly white trade unionists and made an even wider community aware of their circumstances. The union picketed the restaurant for three years, discouraging customers from entering, while the owners kept the restaurant functioning with the use of strikebreakers, many of them from the First Nations community. When the owners closed their operation in 1981, the union ceased picketing and both parties waited a further two years for a legal ruling from the Labour Relations Board. Finally in 1983, the owners were ordered to pay remedies to the union, but sold the restaurant and pulled all their assets out of Canada, refusing to comply with the decision.
Songs For Ourselves, Revisited:
Most Friday evenings for the last couple of months, a group of women has appeared near the corner of Davie and Denman in Vancouver, unpacked guitars and tambourines, and started singing. The scene is the SORWUC [Service, Office and Retail Workers' Union of Canada] picket line at the Muckamuck, a Vancouver restaurant, and the strike is into its ninth month. We pass out song sheets to the other people on the picket line and spend two or three hours picketing and singing together about our goals and our struggles. They are feminist songs; at the same time they are songs for all working people. The strikers and their supporters on the picket line are both female and male and we all bellow out Working Girl Blues, the Secretaries' Song or Solidarity Forever.
Helen Potrebenko, one of Vancouver’s most uncompromising feminist writers, was born on June 21, 1940 in Grand Prairie, Alberta. After arriving in Vancouver to attend university, she documented the struggles of a female cab driver to earn a living in her novel Taxi!. “It just never occurs to them we’re people and not zoo animals to be stared at,” the narrator writes, “and that we have feelings and don’t like being prodded and mauled by thirty different guys in one day.” Potrebenko’s second book, No Streets of Gold, is a social history of Ukrainians in Alberta. Her collection of fiction and other writings, A Flight of Average Persons voiced her pride in the dignity of working class lives, particularly women disadvantaged by a patriarchal society. Potrebenko marked the second anniversary of her participation in the strike to earn a first contract for SORWUC workers at the Muchamuck restaurant on Davie Street in Vancouver with the publication of Two Years on the Muckamuck Line. The owners of Vancouver’s first restaurant to exclusively serve West Coast native Indian cuisine ultimately left Vancouver in the strike’s third year. Six workers had been fired upon the union’s application for certification and the owners had refused to negotiate. “The Muckamuck hired scab labour and tired to keep the restaurant open,” says Potrebenko. “Sometimes they were assisted by outside goons. When the owners finally left town, the Labour Relations Board bestirred itself to order the Muckamuck to pay a token $10,000 because of its illegal activities. This could never be collected. We’ve never officially called the strike off.” The restaurant became the Qualicum Restaurant, operating with the support of the union, but the restaurant eventually closed.
LOU NELSON X10-34
Patricia Lucille Nelson was born in Montreal on December 12th, 1953. Although
both her parents are from the West, Nelson and her four siblings grew up in
Laval West and St-Eustache (Québec). She studied the humanities and
languages at Vanier College in Saint-Laurent, printing at Ahuntsic College in
Montreal and worked at Classic Books before moving to the West in 1974.
Nelson quickly settled in Vancouver and started working in a screen printing
shop, a coop house and, in 1975, she joined Press Gang. Here she worked on a
voluntary basis and she became a press operator. This is also the time when
she came out as a lesbian and decided to change her name to Lou, a shortened
version of her middle name, in honor of the occasion. It is also when she
became involved more actively in the feminist, socialist and unionist movement
that prevailed in Vancouver in those years. For example, she joined the NDP in
September 1974. The following year, she participated in the occupation of the
Vancouver Canada Manpower Centre Office to pressure the Canadian
Government to make real changes regarding women and work. She supported
Press Gang by involving herself in numerous fundraising activities and helped
organize the 1979 Conference on Women and Work. “In order to sustain
herself”, she ran Simon Fraser University Student Society’s printshop for four
years. While working at SFU, she also got involved with the feminist union
Service Office and Retail Workers Union (SORWUC).
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Friday, April 20, 2007
The Cone of Silence Bank Presidents and the RCMP
Funny but Bank Presidents sound just like the RCMP Superintendent and Commissioners when it comes to telling the truth to Parliamentary Committees.
Deputy Commissioner George, who was suspended from duty after a previous appearance before the committee, was rebuked by MPs, who said her testimony has been evasive and incomplete.Staff Sgt. Frizzell said the pension investigation took an unexpected turn when documents were uncovered suggesting insurance funds were being diverted with Deputy Commissioner George's approval.
But he was ordered off the case before he had a chance to follow the trail, he said.
She said she had nothing to do with the winding down of the pension-fund investigation, or the issuing of a "cease and desist order" to Staff Sgt. Frizzell directing him to return to other duties.
She did not rule out the possibility that she might have seen documents related to transferring insurance funds to the pension fund.
She did not recall this, but she said she relied on advice from another senior Mountie with expertise in insurance and financial matters that there was nothing untoward with the life-insurance funds.
Canada, anti-terrorism act, Government, Liberals, NDP, Conservatives, War Measures Act, 1970, Arar, terrorism, crime, liberalism, state, statism, libertarian, civil libertiesBack off on ABM legislation, banks warn MPs
Whenever members of the Commons committee probing ATM fees tried to peer inside the world of banking, they were met for the most part with blank expressions or no comments."We won't comment on that," said the Royal Bank's Jim Westlake, group Head, Canadian Banking, when asked about profit margins on the ATM fees.
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Sunday, March 18, 2007
Don't Bank On It.
That the banks will voluntarily concede on the issue of ATM fees.
In February, the Toronto marketing research firm TNS Canadian Facts announced that 81 per cent of Canadian adults surveyed in the fall of 2006 had used a bank machine during the previous month, up from 78 per cent a year earlier, and that nine out of every 10 cash withdrawals had been made at a bank machine.
Furthermore, deposits of cheques and cash at ABMs doubled those made in branches, and in fact only 53 per cent of Canadian adults had visited a branch in the previous month, the lowest percentage since 1994.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Cry Me A River
Canada's Banking Cartel is crying about politicians bashing them, cry me a river.
At a time when the federal finance minister is asking Canada's big banks to justify a raft of ATM banking fees, Canada's second-largest bank is reporting its first quarterly profit of more than $1 billion.
Bank of Nova Scotia reported Tuesday morning a first quarter profit that smashed all expectations at $1.01 billion, or $1.01 a share, up almost 20 per cent from $844 million, or 84 cents a share, a year ago.
Last week Canada's largest bank, Royal Bank of Canada, posted first-quarter net earnings of $1.5 billion or $1.14 per diluted share, a 27.6-per-cent increase from the same quarter last year
Let us review the facts; ATM fees are set by a cartel of Canada's six banks. Not credit unions or foreign banks. The Banking Cartel owns Interac, it implemented ATM's as a way of closing branches and reducing front line staff.Credit Cards, Visa and MasterCard, are owned by the same Banking Cartel. They set the interest charges and fees for the use of credit cards.
Bank fees themselves are then charged on top of this. For instance the banks charge you a service fee for having an account, and for any cheques used, or for any ATM withdrawls, and for use of their credit cards.
So when they claim that they need to charge you ATM fees for withdrawing money from their branch and not your own, well thats a little white lie. Since the cartel owns Interac, the fact is they have colluded in a monopolistic fashion to set fees.That would be illegal in the United Sates. It is not illegal in Canada.
So you get charged for your ATM withdrawal three times, once when you use an ATM that is not your bank, next a charge by your bank for doing so and then they charge you a monthly service charge for having done so. Sounds like usury to me.
The Finance Committee will be reviewing Banking operations later this month, they need to look at all service charges as well as ATM fees. And they need to look at the impact of the Banking Cartels in operating Interac and the Credit Card business.
It has been a long standing libertarian tradition to oppose cartels and monopolies especially in the banking industry. A fact most conservatives forget, including the ones who claim to be libertarians.
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Monday, January 29, 2007
Compare and Contrast
Sometimes it's just impossible to seperate the right wing from the right wing, in this case, as with the recent debate in the blogosphere over minimum wages, some Liberal blogs at Progressive Bloggers sound just like Blogging Tories on the issue of the NDP calling for an end to bank service charges and ATM's.
Which shows, once again, that despite the catcalls from the right the Liberals are no more progressive or left wing than the Conservatives.
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