Showing posts with label labour shortage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label labour shortage. Show all posts

Friday, November 28, 2008

Neo-Con Industrial Strategy.

The Federal Conservatives have a plan to help with the labour shortage in Alberta......mass unemployment in the rest of Canada forcing workers to move to Alberta. As a result of this mass unemployment labour rates will decline making it cheaper to build all those upgraders now on hold. Call it a ne0-con industrial strategy.
Link
Unemployment to rise in 2009, Flaherty predicts
Unemployment is slated to rise to 6.9 per cent next year. While that's still far below the 13 per cent jobless rate in the early 1980s recession and 10 per cent in 1991-93, it will still mean hardships as thousands of jobs are shed in manufacturing, energy, mining and other sectorsFlaherty predicted the jobless rate will rise to 6.9 per cent in 2009 from 6.2 per cent now, but Porter predicted it could creep up to 7.5 per cent by the end of 2009 – with a loss of 50,000 jobs for the year.
As the unemployment rate rises, "you'll begin to see some of the steam come out of wages as the labour market loosens up," Porter said. Bruce Cran at the Consumers' Association of Canada said consumers are more pessimistic than Ottawa and are reacting by cutting their spending "From what we're hearing, it seems the government's a step or two behind the reality of what people are thinking."


Boy you can say that again, they have no plan...because having a plan well that would mean well a 'planned economy'....an anathema to neo-cons. So what do they offer us instead why the solution that got us in this mess in the first place back in the bad old days of the ninties. A made in Alberta solution that we saw under Ralph Klein. And he had no plan either except slash and burn.

Flaherty's instinct to cut out of step with world
As the rapidly worsening global recession pushes governments around the world to step up spending, Ottawa's first official response is to cut back. The fiscal update presented yesterday by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will suck $6-billion out of the economy next year. But it will show the slimmest of budget surpluses, even as his own figures show Canada has slipped into recession. By cutting government spending, limiting its transfers to the provinces and padding its revenues by charging commercial banks to partake in money-market measures, Mr. Flaherty said he will narrowly avoid a deficit. But his moves are exactly the opposite of what many economists recommend in times of recession. Government spending should not be contracting when the economy could use a boost, they argue. In most other developed countries, governments are ramping up multibillion-dollar programs ranging from infrastructure spending to food stamps for the poor.

Progressive economists who have been calling for large stimulus spending reacted angrily yesterday to Ottawa's fiscal update, arguing the government used it to deliver an assault on democratic freedoms, gender, minority and labour rights in Canada."This is class and gender warfare," said economist Robert Chernomas, from the University of Manitoba. "This is the type of economic policy agenda Sarah Palin would have delivered had she been elected president in the U.S." Chernomas is among 88 Canadian economists, sociologists and political scientists who appealed for a stimulus package for the failing economy in a letter last month to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.Members of the Progressive Economic Forum, they oppose the brand of neo-liberal "laissez-faire" capitalism – the markets know best – in vogue until the recent global meltdown.Several economists interviewed yesterday by the Toronto Star said Finance Minister Jim Flaherty let down Canadians by playing politics in time of crisis. They said he failed to offer measures to save jobs or stimulate the economy, despite agreement to do so among the G20 nations – including Canada – at a recent emergency meeting in Washington.

Of course a capitalist goverment has no plan because neither do the capitalists.....

"There is what I believe is somewhat of a perfect storm coming at us," says Liz Wright, practice leader at Watson Wyatt consultancy's Human Capital Group in Toronto.
"We have both recessionary pressures and a talent shortage" that combined, will require a thoughtful approach to instituting cost-saving measures, she says.
The consultancy conducted its annual survey of workplaces in Canada earlier this year to determine companies' preparedness for an economic downturn and workforce preservation.
While the survey won't be released until next month, Ms. Wright says it found 60% of companies surveyed have contingency plans that include layoffs in the event of a recession.
"Some of the top areas they've identified in their plans are organizational restructuring, layoffs, hiring freezes and a slowing rate of salary increases," she says.
However, the survey, titled the 2008-2009 Global Strategic Rewards Report also found more than half of Canadian companies do not effectively undertake workforce planning.
"They don't really understand what their business needs are in terms of the workforce," Ms. Wright says. "Roughly 30% to 40% are conducting an analysis of some sort but the rest aren't."


SEE:
Economics 101
Neo-Cons Have No New Ideas

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Monday, September 03, 2007

Abolishing Adolescence

Says the daddy of Alberta neo-cons; Ted Byfield.

One of those old-style teachers, who died in the early '50s, was Sir Richard Livingstone, a classics prof and educational philosopher.

Livingstone defined what he called "educable ages" of human beings.

We are most educable, he said, when we're very young, least educable in the teen years and early 20s, and become highly educable again as adults.

In effect, he was abolishing the whole concept of the teen-ager, the adolescent.

If nearly everybody at 12 or 13 joined the work force, they would in fact become part of the adult world.


Wait a minute weren't he and his neo-con pals the same ones that want to raise the age of sexual consent to 16. Decrying any sexual relations between teen agers and adults as child abuse and equating it with child porn. Yep they were.

And they are of course the same ones who want the age lowered, perhaps to 10, to be able to try teen-agers and children as Adults for crimes like murder. And we recently say how effective that was with the Stephen Truscott case.

Ted is the Pater Familas of the Byfield clan, whose influence is spread through out Canada's social conservative political lobbies.

Ted created the conservative weekly St. Johns Edmonton Report, which later became Alberta Report ,as part of a tax free religious charity associated with St. Johns Boys School. A school founded on the principle's of same sex education and spare the rod spoil the child.

At least one blogger noted this would be a return to the 19th Century use of child labour. Actually child labour in Canada was abolished through Factory Acts beginning in the late 19th Century. In Alberta child labour laws were not passed until 1917. And now child labour has returned in B.C. and Alberta.

And perhaps this is the real subtext of what Byfield is saying, since Alberta and B.C. are suffering from massive labour shortages.

Adolescence and the concept of the teen-ager began after WWI with the post war boom and the consumer culture created by Fordism. It became a mass cultural phenomena world wide after WWII. It is the result of the post war baby boom and concurrent development of post war industrialization. By the late fifties and early sixties, teen agers were in news first as juvenile delinquents, then as student rebels. The rise of the student movement and an anti-war culture, would result in the development of the New Left.

For the post Viet-Nam new right it became a simple formula; abolish adolescence and you abolish rebellion. And in their political agenda there are only children and adults.

In fact this idea of children between 12-21 being adults is a throw back to an much earlier age. The Medieval Age. Which is where Byfield remains to this day.


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Of all the books on childhood in the past, Philippe Aries's book Centuries of Childhood is probably the best known; one historian notes the frequency with which it is "cited as Holy Writ. " (18) Aries's central thesis is the opposite of mine: he argues that while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was "invented" in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell.

To prove this thesis Aries uses two main arguments. He first says that a separate concept of childhood was unknown in the early Middle Ages. "Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it" because artists were "unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale."(19) Not only does this leave the art of antiquity in limbo, but it ignores voluminous evidence that medieval artists could, indeed, paint realistic children.(20) His etymological argument for a separate concept of childhood being unknown is also untenable.(21) In any case, the notion of the "invention of childhood" is so fuzzy that it is surprising that so many historians have recently picked it up.(22) His second argument, that the modern family restricts the child's freedom and increases the severity of punishment, runs counter to all the evidence.



The idea that adolescence was not recognized as a category of development separate from both childhood and adulthood is a more subtle distinction, but only just. The primary evidence concerning this outlook is the lack of any term for the modern-day word "adolescence." If they didn't have a word for it, they didn't comprehend it as a stage in life.

This argument also leaves something to be desired, especially when we remember that medieval people did not use the terms "feudalism" or "courtly love." And again, there is some evidence to refute the assumption. Inheritance laws set the age of majority at 21, expecting a certain level of maturity before entrusting a young individual with financial responsibility. And there was concern expressed for the "wild youth" of teenage apprentices and students; the mischief that youth can cause was frequently seen as a stage that people pass through on the way to becoming "sad and wise."

In towns and cities, children would grow to become the laborers and apprentices that made a craft business grow. And here, too, there are signs that society as a whole understood the value of children. For example, in medieval London, laws regarding the rights of orphans were careful to place a child with someone who could not benefit from his death.

Among the nobility, children would perpetuate the family name and increase the family's holdings through advancement in service to their liege lords and through advantageous marriages. Some of these unions were planned while the bride- and groom-to-be were still in the cradle.

"The psychodynamics of mystics, their symbol formations and their actions are based on excessive early trauma. . . . There is evidence that medieval mystics
were deprived and also emotionally and sexually abused as children."

-- Childhood and Fantasies of Medieval Mystics, Dr. Ralph Frenken

". . . Frenken's mystics each attempted to achieve their desired transcendent knowledge, albeit through perverse methods resulting from their horrid childhoods -- they were merely attempting to create psychic homeostasis."

"The production of pain, bleeding, religious symbol scarification, self-flagellation
and wearing body-injuring garments all served the mystics' purpose of achieving unity with the divine as a substitute for childhood psychic abuse, of merging with an idealized Mother and as a defense against normal sexual emotions."

"Whatever ecstasy they may have achieved was short­lived because it
never addressed a resolution of childhood trauma."

-- Jerrold Atlas, Ph.D.

The idea of childhood is disappearing.

Writing a new preface three years ago for the re-released version of the book, Postman, who teaches media and political culture at New York University, confessed that, "sad to say," he saw little to change in his 1982 text. "What was happening then is happening now. Only worse."

In Postman's view, the postmodern culture is propelling us back to a time not altogether different from the Middle Ages, a time before literacy, a time before childhood had taken hold as an idea. Obviously, there were children in medieval times, but no real childhood, he says, because there was no distinction between what adults and children knew.

Postman's book recalls the coarse village festivals depicted in medieval paintings - men and women besotted with drink, groping one another with children all around them. It describes the feculent conditions and manners drawn from the writings of Erasmus and others in which adults and children shared open lives of lust and squalor.

"The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame - these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world," Postman writes.

Only after the development of the printing press, and of literacy, did childhood begin to emerge, he says. Despite pressures on children to work in the mines and factories of an industrial age, the need for literacy and education gradually became apparent, first among the elite, then among the masses. Childhood became defined as the time it took to nurture and transform a child into a civilized adult who could read and comprehend complex information. The view American settlers was that only gradually could children attain civility and adulthood through "literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame."

It was during that time, Postman notes, that public education flourished, that children began celebrating birthdays and that a popular culture especially for kids developed around games and songs. Postman places the high-water mark for childhood at between 1850 and 1950.


"Childhood was invented in the seventeenth century."

So begins chapter seven of Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. I highly recommend the entire book, but this chapter in and of itself deserves special consideration. Postman was a brilliant writer and social critic, rest his soul, and I wouldn't presume to improve on his presentation. What I can do is summarize and tantalize enough that you'll head out to the nearest library and pick up a copy of the book yourself. Or at least internalize and spread the meme.

Of course children existed prior to the seventeenth century, but that's not the same thing at all. Childhood is a social construction, a collective agreement to set aside some time between infancy and adulthood largely free of responsibilities that is enforced by behaviors, social norms, and laws. (What this time is for is a major question that we'll get to later.)


Hugh Cunningham has taken on a formidable challenge in this book: describing the history not only of the Western idea of childhood, but the actual experience of children over a span of nearly five hundred years.

The book first explores the evolution of ideas about childhood in the Western world. Beginning with a brief but lucid examination of the classical and medieval world, where the most important change in the notion of childhood came with the spread of Christianity, Cunningham turns to the period beginning about 1500. His aim here is to describe the rise of what he calls a "middle class ideology of childhood." This ideology has its origins in the thinking of a succession of figures, the first of whom was Erasmus. Erasmus's stress upon the importance of the father and of education--for boys, at any rate--was the first step in the creation of a distinctly modern vision of childhood. Interestingly, Cunningham argues that the Reformation's importance was in advancing the notion of the importance of education for Catholics and Protestants alike. Though he concedes that there were differences--the Puritan obsession with original sin and the Catholic elevation of the priest above the familial patriarch, for example--Cunningham prefers to stress continuities across the religious divide. John Locke, the next important contributor in Cunningham's view, was important for undermining the idea of original sin, and for encouraging the secularization of the western ideal of childhood. It was left for Rousseau to follow Locke's secular ideal to its logical conclusion: nature, rather than the Church, should be the director of a child's growth. These romantic ideals were immensely influential among educated Europeans, and were popularized still more after the publication of Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Mortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." This work, says Cunningham, "came to encapsulate what was thought of as a romantic attitude to childhood: that is, that childhood was the best part of life" (p. 74). And unlike Locke's own gendered notion of childhood, Wordsworth and Rousseau made no distinctions between boys and girls; children of both genders were "godlike, fit to be worshipped, and the embodiment of hope" (p. 78).

Of course these ideas were the product of elites, and until the nineteenth century rarely applied to any other children, as Cunningham recognizes. The rest of his book traces the ways in which this "middle class ideology" came to be applied to all children. In the early part of the period, Erasmian prescriptions had no place in the experience of the vast majority of children, who were trained from about the age of seven to take their place in the adult world of work. But beginning in the seventeenth century, education, sponsored by churches and lay charity, began to have a broader impact. Many of the free schools founded in English towns in the period, for example, followed, if only loosely, Lockean ideals. While their goal was usually to teach a useful trade, they also provided literacy skills and made the experience of schooling more common for the non-elite majority.

Industrialization, Cunningham argues, did little to alter the structure of the family, but it radically changed the experience of its members, as people moved from agriculture to industry. Children, accustomed to work in the fields, quite naturally took their places in the factory work force. Here the Romantic ideal began to have its effect upon the majority of children, as middle class reformers pressured Western states to limit the impact of industry upon children. A hallmark of the century after 1750, Cunningham tells us, was the dramatic increase in state intervention in child-related matters. Regulation imposed upon child labor was one feature of these policies. Eighteenth-century governments had deliberately encouraged the rapid introduction of children into the work force, teaching them trades, but by the mid-nineteenth century the goal was to exclude them from the shop floor. Most important of all was the introduction of compulsory schooling. Although feeble state efforts at requiring education had been underway since the early eighteenth century, it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth that school became a common experience for all.

While compulsory education reinforced the Romantic ideal of childhood, Cunningham points out that Western states had far more in mind than assuring fun and games for youth. Increasingly sophisticated economies required sophisticated skills. Schools served the interests of governments and their rulers: children pledged allegiance, saluted portraits of kaisers and kings, and learned about the benefits of the status quo. Moreover, the state's increased role in the lives of children--not simply through schooling, but also through public health programs and social work, both of which emerge simultaneously with the public school, "entailed an unprecedented degree of surveillance of the working-class population" (p. 168). Despite the utility of such policies for governments, there is no doubt but that the Romantic ideal of childhood dominated public action. Even science did more to serve the ideal than challenge it; pediatrics, a branch of medicine unknown much before the turn of the century, helped ensure a dramatic fall in infant mortality rates, a shift Cunningham emphasizes is of great importance.



http://www.artesacra.com/gallery/images/samples/honthorst_childhood_of_christ.jpg




SEE:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

Smurfs are Commies

Oliver In Alberta

Temp Workers For Timmies

Foley's Follies=Sexual Harassment



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Friday, July 27, 2007

$63.90 Per Hour


On average, B.C. and Alberta saw productivity gains worth $122,698 per net worker gained from migration. Provinces who lost population due to migration, however, saw average productivity gains of $82,955 per worker.


Based on these productivity estimates it means that workers in B.C. and Alberta should have earned wages of $63.90 an hour. In fact in the Trades most earned less than half that. Leaving the surplus value for the bosses. In Ontario the wages were closer to unionized manufacturing rates at $43.50 per hour.

In fact average wages even in booming Alberta are 1/3 of what each worker creates in surplus value, profit, for the bosses.

Alberta continues to lead all provinces in average weekly earnings despite a drop in May, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

Earnings for payroll workers, including overtime, hit $818, down from $825 in April but up 2.3 per cent over May, 2006.

Earnings are up 4.3 per cent so far this year, second only to the 5.1 per cent in Prince Edward Island, which has the country's lowest weekly rate at $635.

Ontario has the second highest earnings at $798, up from $796 in April, followed by B.C. at $750, down from $755 the previous month.

Average earnings for hourly paid employees edged up 14 cents in May to $19.04.


Which is why the bosses demand concession bargaining as they are in the case of Molsons Edmonton strike, since the CAW and the Molson bosses are negotiating in Toronto. They are overlooking the Alberta boom and the fact that Molsons corporate productivity and value has increased since its merger with Coors.


SEE:

Pay 'Em What They Want

Labour Boom = Falling Rate Of Profit

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital

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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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Thursday, May 24, 2007

The Return of Child Labour


Child labour and the ten hour day were supposed to be things of the past like unions. Unions were created to end child labour and fight for the eight hour day, today they are needed more than ever among the vast majority of unorganized workers.

Teens are taking on a very adult 50-hour workweek

Researchers tallied the hours that teens aged 15-19 spent at school, doing homework, working part-time jobs and doing chores, and found that they did an average of 7.1 hours of unpaid and paid labour per day in 2005. That adds up to a very adult 50-hour workweek.



Also See:

Temp Workers For Timmies

Better Late Than Never

The Labour Shortage Myth



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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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Thursday, April 05, 2007

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


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Saturday, March 24, 2007

Oliver Twist In Alberta


This is what happens when you ban smoking in the bars and resteraunts to protect children from second hand smoke while simultaneously changing the laws in Alberta to allow child labour in those same bars and restaurants.


What was the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission's (AGLC) vision when it agreed to allow kids as young as 12 to work in nightclubs and bars? Never mind that the province has since scotched -- no pun intended -- the idea. How would it have worked?


Oh yeah and you plan to do it through secretive back room cabal like meetings between the government and its business pals, with no plan to announce it to the public until it was fait accompli.

NO WORKING (OR ROCKING) IN BARS FOR MINORS IN ALBERTA
On Thu, Mar 15, Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (AGLC) officials responded to an inquiry from the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA) about the possibility of allowing bars and pubs to hire underage staff to work in kitchens or other non-drinking areas of licensed establishments by indicating that it would consider such requests on a case-by-case basis.

A long-standing AGLC policy has allowed minors to enter licensed establishments under special circumstances—in many cases, as musicians or some other kinds of performers—with parental consent and the approval of the AGLC. The commission advised the CRFA that bars wishing to hire a minor could apply to do so under the same provision.

The next day, an email from CRFA’s Vice President for Western Canada, Mark von Schellwitz, was sent to the association’s members advising them of the new policy. The email was leaked to the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), who alerted the media that the Alberta Government was effectively opening the door for children as young as 12 to work in licensed establishments. Sensational editorials followed (the Calgary Sun, for example, asked “You have to wonder, if not for [the AFL], when would we have heard about the new rules? Maybe the first time a teenage dishwasher ran into a drunk in the bar washroom.”) and public outcry quickly forced the government to reverse its policy.
Perhaps this is another reason to allow for smoking in designated well ventilated areas of bars and resteraunts, to avoid having children exposed to the dangers of smoke since the government considers that far more important than protecting children from the usual dangers in the work place, hence all the recent deaths of teen agers on construction sites.


See

Temp Workers For Timmies


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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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