Locked out for thirteen months, over three hundred IKEA workers in Richmond, BC are still holding out. While setting record profits in 2013, IKEA is trying to impose a two-tier wage system and seriously weaken benefits. The stakes are high as IKEA Richmond sets workplace standards for non-union IKEA stores. Of the twelve IKEA stores in Canada and Quebec, it is the only one unionized outside of Montreal where workers are represented by CSN. Teamsters Local 213 represents the workers in Richmond.
Canadian workers have been remarkably patient. For over three decades now—a generation—their wages have been restrained, workloads intensified and social benefits eroded, the promise being that this will ultimately bring security for themselves and their families. What they got was more of the same while class inequality reached the highest levels in over 80 years. Where is the anger? When the Great Financial Crisis hit, first and deeper in the US then in Canada, the Canadian state acted decisively to subsidize banks and imposed austerity on workers to pay for this. Where was the rage?
The following remarks were made by Seattle City Councilor Kshama Sawant on Monday, June 2, as the council voted unaminously to pass a $15 minimum wage, the highest in the nation:
Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?
This question came to me as the left side of my brain was reading Thomas Piketty's important new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century while the right side of my brain watched the news.
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.
Local chapters of four labour unions that recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Enbridge - the energy company behind the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline - have also thrown their support behind the expansion of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline, pending the National Energy Board's approval of the project...The Construction and Specialized Worker's Union Local 1611 (under the Laborers' International Union of North America), the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 115, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 213 and the United Association of Journeym
Canada’s largest private-sector union has thrown its support behind First Nations in opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline project, vowing to hit picket lines in solidarity if the project goes ahead. Unifor, formed on Labour Day weekend with the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, now has more than 300,000 members across the country.
My hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan, was once known as the Furniture Capital of the world. The furniture industry moved south, and then overseas, but in the 1970s a few stalwarts still plied the pretensions of the uppity class with vestiges of noblesse oblige. We made reproductions of antiques. Why not? We had the blueprints, patterns, jigs, fixtures, and most importantly, the experience. I worked at John Widdicomb Furniture Co.
The BC Expansion Committee of the People's Social Forum held an assembly in Vancouver on April 24, 2014 to discuss climate change and oil and gas pipeline issues in BC. Watch this video session on 'Trade unions and climate change'.
Speakers:
- Gary Engler - Longtime Vancouver journalist who is currently vice-president of Unifor Local 2000 and author of The New Commune-ist Manifesto—Workers of the World It Really is Time to Unite.
When labour leader Jim Sinclair turned up at the legislature last week for release of the workforce plan for the liquefied natural gas industry, I teased him that he’s being seen around the halls of government more often than when the New Democratic Party was in power. Sinclair, the longtime president of the B.C. Federation of Labour, took it with good humour, reminding me of the joke about his predecessor Ken Georgetti — that he had an actual seat at the cabinet table in the NDP government.
