News new national labour president vows a more militant approach

The Canadian Labour Congress, the umbrella organization for most of the country's labour organizations, has chosen a new president who has vowed to make the national body more militant in confronting management and the Harper Conservatives. "If you move to strip working people of our rights, we will respond with a force that's never been seen in this country," Hassan Yussuff, who was the first person of colour to ever be elected to the CLC executive in 1999, told the CLC convention yesterday in the wake of his close victory over long-serving president Ken Georgetti, a B.C. pipefitter born in Trail who has been the Congress president since 1999.