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December 22, 2009 - No. 239 Workers' Movement Speak Out in Defence of Workers' Rights!
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 December 15, 2005: Quebec's public sector workers demonstrate against Charest government's anti-labour decree at the National Assembly. |
In September and October 2009, Quebec's National
Assembly sanctioned two bills establishing the creation of
private-public funds in the education and social services sectors.
Bills 6 and 7, respectively named "An Act to establish a seniors
caregiver support fund" and "An Act to establish an early childhood
development fund and to amend the Act to establish the Fund for the
promotion of a healthy lifestyle" were the subject of consultations
organized by the its parliamentary Committee on Social Affairs, even
though the agenda was already set. Thirty-three organizations submitted
briefs or participated in the hearings.
Both during and after consultations several of the groups working in
the community with families and women expressed their opposition over
the fact that the State is providing owners of capital with the dictate
over Quebec social programs.
It is quite shameful that the bills are coming into
force while Quebec's 500,000 public sector workers are in the midst of
negotiations.
It should be recalled that the Charest government
imposed
a decree on them in December 2005, thereby forcing them to put an end
to their actions. That action was
precisely centred around demanding working conditions that would enable
them to respond to the needs of the people they work with in health
care, education and social programs and which the government refuses to
guarantee them.
The Chagnon Foundation, the Charest Liberal government's partner in both bills, is Quebec's largest private foundation. Created by the family of Vidéotron founder André Chagnon, the Foundation's $ 1.4 billion comes from the sale of Vidéotron. The Foundation has a dual mission: "poverty and disease prevention"and "improving the physical, psychological and social well-being of individuals, their families and their communities." Endowed with such lofty ideals, the Chagnon Foundation joined the Action Group on Student Retention and Success in Quebec, which published its report on March 17, 2009 entitled "Savoir pour pouvoir: Entreprendre un chantier national pour la persévérance scolaire" ("Knowledge is Power: A National Undertaking on Student Retention). The Action Group's President is Jacques Ménard, President of BMO Financial Group (Quebec) and Chairman of BMO Nesbitt Burns. Of note is the fact that in 2001, the Chagnon Foundation purchased 100 percent of shares in the restaurant chain Le Commensal, despite government opposition that a foundation would become the owner of a private business. Since 2006 the Foundation has sold 51 percent of those shares to the Pacini group, thereby maintaining 49 percent ownership in a restaurant chain generating revenues of over $20 million.
 Montreal, October 29, 2005: "Quebec is not for sale -- no to P3s" |
The budget for the projects stemming from Bills 6 and 7
(Québec en Forme, Québec Enfants and Seniors Caregiver
Support Fund) is more than $1 billion over 10 years, of which $600
million is to come from public funding, without mentioning the Student
Retention project with its budget of $50 million
over 5 years, half of which is to be taken from public funds.
The Charest government is rejecting the demands of
teachers and education and health care professionals, under the pretext
that there is no money available, that public sector workers are
privileged and they must do their part in dealing with the crisis. This
is all to prepare public opinion for the refusal
and, once again, the criminalization of their just demands. The
government's bills and its growing ties that bind it to the private
sector clearly demolish the government's fraud that it has no money. It
continues to pursue its policy of paying the rich and organizing the
economy in the service of the rich.
What is also emerging from all this is that the response to "poverty and disease prevention" and "improving the physical, psychological and social well-being of individuals, their families and their communities" is not about available money but about who decides on where public funds and the social wealth created by Quebec workers should be directed. As an article in the November 17, 2009 issue of TML (No. 211) points out: "The interests of the most powerful owners of capital within the financial oligarchy dominate and direct private and public enterprise with the entire whole becoming state monopoly capitalism. The aim of the monopoly capitalist state is to protect and expand the wealth of the most powerful owners of capital and actively fight against the development of a pro-social alternative." That pro-social alternative, in health care, education and social programs, has been put forward for years in the struggle waged by the workers of those sectors.
A nation-building project is not established on the basis of patronage, but on the basis of the demands emerging for the struggles of the various collectives of workers, thereby establishing the modern criteria for the services that the population is entitled to receive so that they may fully flourish as human beings. Opposition to the dicate of capital over decisions concerning public well-being is manifold. The working class and its allies must turn that opposition into an organized force capable of taking control over the socialized economy and excluding from power those who prevent people taking decisions over the affairs which affect their lives.
(Sources: Observatoire de la Fondation Chagnon, Le Commensal, la Presse affairs, Rapport du Groupe d'action sur la persévérance et la réussite scolaire au Québec, Quebec National Assembly)
Ontario
"Workers Are Being Deprived of EI Money
that Belongs to Them!"
TML: You intervened during the OFL Convention held recently in toronto on how workers are being deprived of their employment insurance benefits. Can you explain this please?
Melanie Kelso: Yes I did and I see these things happening frequently because I sit on the EI Board of Referees. Let me give you some examples. In our region, there are a lot of layoffs and closures. So the workers go to the company and often they take it to court in order to get their pension or their severance. Let's say that the court agrees that they should be paid some of their severance, for example. Because workers are paid just little bits here and there, the courts often rule that they are not entitled to their full amounts. Consequently, when these people go to apply for their unemployment benefits, they've got this paper saying they're getting "x" amount of money in severance. They don't have the money in hand. They don't know for sure if they will get it, even though the courts have decided that they are entitled to it. The companies still can go to the courts and say that they are not in a position to pay the severance. But, still, this is being counted against these workers. It is being assumed by the EI system that they are actually getting the severance money. So, consequently because EI then believes that they have their severance because it's court ordered that they're supposed to get it and because that's on the slips of their ROEs, their Record of Employment, then they're not even able to collect EI until their so-called "severance" is run out.
So you can't collect unemployment because you're supposed to use up your severance. It is counted against you, as if you were working, but it doesn't count as weeks worked, which doesn't make sense to me, but that's the law, even if you don't have the money in hand. And that's it. Because if you get severance, they put "x" amount of money, depending on how much it is for how many weeks, as if you were working. If you don't even have the money in hand, it's just on a piece of paper, you're still held hostage within the EI system. So, the worker may actually be deprived of both, severance and EI, and these things do happen.
Then, what happens is that because people will appeal and do things in groups -- because you only have thirty days to go to the Board and appeal after you get a yes or no whether you'll get EI -- and because they have so many different case workers and so many new people that work for the Commission, they're all over the map. So some workers get it and some workers don't. Some people got a partial amount. It is all over the map. But a lot of people do not receive any help.
We say that severance is severance, it should not be tied up with EI. If you get severance, that is extra. You should be able to collect EI at that time. And the thing is that they count it as if you were working, but they don't count it as work. They take it off as if you're getting a paycheque, but they don't add it as hours for you, which is wrong.
The Board has to rule according to the law, but the law is wrong and unfair.
DriveTest Workers
Oppose Serco's Provocations
to Break the Strike and the Union
Recent updates from USW Local 9511 which represents the Ontario DriveTest workers on strike since August 21 report on the stepped up provocations of the private UK-based employer Serco DES to break the strike and the union. The union also reports that a tentative agreement was reached between the union's bargaining committee and the employer on December 19. Picket actions continue across the province and workers will vote on the tentative agreement between December 24 and 29. In terms of the recent provocations against the workers, a December 6 strike update reported:
"1) On the morning of Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009, the Employer's legal council sent a letter via email to our USW Lead Negotiator, Marie Kelly stating that Striking Employees and several Bargaining Committee Members have 'engaged in serious picketing misconduct that is direct violation of the Criminal Code of Canada.'... The letter also contains a list of numerous violations with the maximum penalty that could be imposed, that we allegedly committed without giving any details of any one alleged charge. The Employer then issues a copy to all of our picket lines. The Union can clearly see that this is a major scare tactic in order to subconsciously scare our Members back to work.
"2) Just before noon on the same day, the Employer posted on their Employee Website the following: 'we welcome all employees who want to return to work. This strike has gone on far too long and we have a growing desire to stop the harm this strike is causing the public. We also know this is hurting many of our employees and we want to put an end to that as well. We welcome back any employees who want to help us achieve this. By the same token, we fully respect the right of employees who would prefer to continue striking.'... (http://www.drivetest.ca/dt_news. asp) Furthermore, the Employer/Serco reads the riot act (Criminal Code) for any one who chooses to remain on the picket line and fight for a fare and equitable Collective Agreement.
"3) In the early afternoon (approximately) on the same day, the Employer posted on its Website, a carrier section for all DriveTest positions throughout the province. The Union has been told by many of its Members, that the Management is saying that if you don't come back to work, you are going to lose your job and the Company does not have to take you back after this strike is over.
"How much can a person take in one day?
"Later in the same week, the Employer posted and announced that it will open several more DriveTest Centres in the Province starting Monday, December 6th, 2009."
On Wednesday, December 2, 2009 a DriveTest worker reported to the St. Catharines and District Labour council that the picketers were attempting to learn where unprofessional and un-audited truck license road tests were taking place in order to picket this unsafe practice that puts the public at risk.
The union continues to request support of all kinds, whether financial or in passing the information to other workers or joining them on their picket lines at the 56 DriveTests locations across Ontario or organizing solidarity rallies. It reports that the workers remain determined to improve their working conditions, especially in defence of full-time jobs which are being more and more replaced with part-time ones with worse working conditions and in opposition to managers doing more and more of the jobs that belong to the unionized workers.
"Our members told us they needed significant changes in working conditions for the safety and quality of service, writes Jim Young, the President of Local 9511. In bargaining we attempted to convince Serco to make the changes that would not only benefit our members but that would ultimately improve our ability to serve the public."
For more information and to express support, Jim Young can be contacted at (647) 409-9511 or at jyoung@usw9511.ca.
British Columbia
Victory to the HandyDART Workers!
Vancouver mass paratransit workers have been on strike since October 26
Several issues in the HandyDART situation:
1) The 525 workers for HandyDART who provide public mass transit to a section of the people with temporary or permanent disabilities, and the passengers of the public service they provide are now segregated from the rest of the workers and passengers of Vancouver's mass transit system called TransLink. The public mass transit service for Metro Vancouver residents who cannot take regular transit to work, school, appointments or other outings and the workers who provide the service are segregated from the regular public transit system.
A human-centred perspective views the provision of
public mass
transit as an integrated whole without discrimination based on physical
and mental abilities or any other reason. This requires an integrated
public enterprise without direct involvement of owners of capital
taking money out of the system. This necessitates
a public service wholly integrated and accountable to the passengers
and people of the city. This means having a Transit (TransLink) Board
elected by residents and an executive management that renders account
and takes actions based on the needs and agenda of the people. This
would mean creating a vastly improved
mass transit system and in particular, improvements with regard to
those residents who need special services related to their temporary or
permanent disabilities and to the workers who provide that service. It
means to have all services integrated into a main public mass transit
system without discrimination to users
or workers who provide the public service.
Vancouver, October 24, 2009: HandyDART clients and others rally in support of transit workers prior to the strike.
(Photo: Straight.com)
2) A U.S. monopoly seized the right to take public money out of the operating budget of this public service in late 2008 through a form of privatization of HandyDART and a for-profit $113 million three year contract. This U.S. monopoly is now demanding concessions and trampling on the dignity of workers who are defending their right to Canadian standard wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions. The U.S. monopoly wants more of the $113 million contract diverted to profit to be taken out of BC and deposited in California. At present, HandyDART workers do not even receive wages similar to other mass transit drivers and workers in the city, as the public service they provide has been ostracized and belittled because it serves a vulnerable minority with disabilities either permanent or temporary.
From a capital-centred perspective, the segregation of this public service from the mass transit service provider, TransLink, exposes the service to privatization and reduces the apparent value of the paratransit service and consequently the value of the wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions of paratransit workers in comparison with other workers providing mass transit. The segregation and devaluing of the paratransit service is a smokescreen for privatization and devaluing workers and absconding with money that should stay in the province.
3) A public service, in this case a part of the public transit system has been separated off and made the object of direct profit by a monopoly controlled in California. Public money to run a public service is being taken out of the city by criminals posing as entrepreneurs who have usurped a public enterprise that provides a public service and adds value to the socialized economy. The workers who actually provide the service and create material value in the form of passenger rides have now found themselves in contradiction with a criminal foreign gang that is taking public money out of the service and out of the city in the name of profit. In this case, the so-called profit is a dubious contract handed over to a monopoly gang in California that has no business taking public money out of Vancouver, which is earmarked to provide a public service. Many in Vancouver suggest a corrupting neo-liberal influence came from a U.S. imperialist agent called Tom Prendergast, the recent CEO of TransLink. This U.S. agent of monopoly capital, who left December 1 to head the mass transit system of New York City, originates in the neo-liberal bastion of privatized public services in the U.S. and reportedly has close links with the California monopoly to which TransLink gave the right to profit directly from Vancouver public funds. Seizure of public enterprises and taking money out of the economy in the form of a claim by owners of capital on budgets earmarked for public services represent neo-liberal corruption and often the annexation of Canada by U.S. imperialism.
Human-centred proposal: the provision of public mass transit service to residents of Vancouver who require special buses and flexible routes should be integrated into the mass transit system of TransLink. The contracting out of the public service should be halted immediately and declared illegal and a corrupt business practice. The equipment, buses and workers of HandyDART should be integrated into TransLink and operated as a seamless whole without any reduction in quality of service but rather through improved service using the existing expertise and dedication of HandyDART workers and others from TransLink and its computer equipment and technology to enhance the service to Metro Vancouver residents. Workers for HandyDART should immediately receive the same wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions as workers who are now employed directly by TransLink, including the Municipal Pension Plan.
In the meantime until HandyDART has been integrated into TransLink and the strike settled on a new basis of equality with TransLink workers, and given the reality that during the strike most HandyDART workers are not being paid neither should the California company be paid. The municipal and provincial governments should force TransLink to withhold payments to MV Transportation Inc. on a pro-rated basis during the strike, as full services are not being provided due to the intransigence and unjust demand for concessions by the U.S. monopoly. Further emergency measures should be taken at City Hall and the Legislature to negate the contract with the U.S. monopoly MV Transportation Inc. and begin a process to integrate the service into TransLink and end this unequal and unhealthy segregation.
Victory to the
HandyDART Workers!
From ATU Local 1724 Website
HandyDART workers have been struggling for almost three decades for recognition within the "TransLink family."
At present we fight a David vs. Goliath battle against MV Transportation, an American corporation. TransLink awarded a three year contract to this company that wants to decimate working conditions, wages and benefits in order to export profit to their home base in California.
ATU local 1724 is a "grass roots" local that has maintained solidarity under vicious attacks from MV Transportation. We are all blue collar workers fighting for our future. We love our jobs. We love our clients and we love the service that we offer.
We will not be divided!
Picket Lines
Surrey Depot -- 17535 55B Street, Cloverdale
Vancouver Depot -- 3450 Kent Street
New West Depot -- 225 North Road, Coquitlam
Public Mass Transit Creates Material Value
The common thinking on public mass transit is of a service that does not produce material value and therefore represents a service requiring material support from the goods producing sectors similar to the government bureaucracy. This is not true and workers in public mass transit and transportation in general including paratransit workers should not regard their industry in that manner. The passenger rides workers produce represent additional material value to the socialized economy. Those passenger rides are exchanged for other material value within the socialized economy such as food and lumber. The gross value of an average passenger ride expressed in work-time is calculated on an annual basis in the following manner:
- add together the total work-hours transit workers have worked during one year with the work-time consumed from previous workers mainly in the form of wear and tear on machinery and wholly used material such as fuel and electricity;
- then divide the total work-hours by the total number of passenger rides for the year (to reach an average in Metro Vancouver, one average ride is calculated as "on and off" regardless of zones);
- the result or quotient is the material value of an average passenger ride expressed as work-time;
- to find a monetary equivalent of the value expressed in work-time requires additional calculations.
Transit workers add material value to the socialized economy. Their wages, benefits and pensions are a legitimate claim on the material value they produce. They are not a labour cost or cost of production. Any profit seized by owners of capital likewise comes out of the value transit workers produce. Most of this profit is taken without being recognized in the form of moving workers and people from point A to point B. Monopolies profit from this movement of their workers and others coming to and from their businesses. Other forms of indirect profit are seized by real estate developers as increases in property value serviced by mass transit and in the financial sector. All this is hidden by the fact that big business does not pay directly for the material value produced by mass transit workers. The material value produced by mass transit workers is exchanged for user fees and government grants. The government grants are obscured as so-called operating costs, which distorts the reality that mass public transit workers produce added-value for the socialized economy.
What the Workers Have to Say
Privatizing Compassion:
Squeezing a Profit from HandyDART
- Dean Brown, HandyDART
driver -
A chilling rain falls in
the Vancouver night. I sit in a
bus outside St. Paul's Hospital preparing to board a group of kidney
dialysis patients and take them home. Exhausted by their ordeal of
being hooked up to a machine for four hours, some of them shuffle
forward on their own steam, determined and steady
in their step, not too advanced in the disease. Some are slumped half
asleep in a wheelchair. They are quiet, leaning on my arm, humbled by
the unwanted circumstance of kidney failure.
It's a busy and sunny afternoon at GF Strong Rehab Centre. All sorts of passengers board and unboard my bus. Some are in complicated chairs with respirators, gamely overcoming head injuries. Some wobble along with walkers while others dart around in sleek, manual wheelchairs, long recovered from that devastating back injury. There are myriad mobility aids that need to be folded, secured, tied down and belted.
My passengers include a federal civil servant, clearly a professional in his prime, who needs me to attend to that one simple but crucial detail of opening his front door; an old man, who although unsteady in his gait and sometimes incontinent, insists on attending night school; a woman, who, post-stroke, insists she is fine and then collapses weeping into the snow and must be lifted onto her porch.
Someone will fall asleep, perhaps even fall unconscious, and need step-by-step assistance to their front door. And they'll get it, all for the price of a single zone bus ticket. In our corporatized, networked, worked-out, buffed, polished and gleaming city of glass, we can sometimes avoid the world of the imperfect and the slow or those who have been humbled by circumstance, age or something unwanted and unexpected. We might manage to bypass the people who can't just stroll down the street and board a bus, jump into their shiny SUVs or run up a set of stairs. But there it is, that less than perfect world, and we'll all be surprised when we arrive there too.
However, there is an effective and civilized resource that currently serves those who find themselves outside the fast paced norm. A long-standing part of the transit system, HandyDART is a Metro Vancouver-wide service that offers people a connection to movement, life, dignity, work and recovery and to being human.
I'm a HandyDART bus driver. Driving for HandyDART is to navigate through a series of different cities within Vancouver itself -- the Vancouver of schedules, appointments, heavy traffic, and of hurry. The Vancouver of the imperfect. The Vancouver of back alleyways, back entrances and of residential streets. Of passengers that need constant attention and those who can operate their own chairs, thank you very much. All these cities demand a level of care, competency and attention that remains high, every day that I drive.
Perhaps you have heard that we are on strike. This is the reason: TransLink recently privatized the operation of HandyDART, a publicly funded transit system that is, by nature, heavily subsidized. The motive is profit, a powerful force. And to generate this profit, the new, private operator, MV Canadian Bus, wants to lower labour costs.
It's a lot to swallow. The company wants to pay HandyDART workers much less than other transit workers, reduce their benefits, and strip away a pension plan that provided some measure of security for the future. The HandyDART labour force has a sterling reputation (ask virtually any HandyDART passenger) and a high skill level and it is dispirited and dismayed by such treatment. MV Bus is a large US company and at some of its operations south of the border, staff turnover approaches 100 percent annually. What kind of future is being offered to us here?
What is the nature of our right to movement? Is it less when we are less than perfect? Look into the polished glass city and ponder the unexpected.
I am angered that the ideology of profit is being forced upon HandyDART, to the detriment of workers and passengers. HandyDART users, vulnerable for many reasons, have the right to be attended to by a workforce that is skilled and adequately paid.
(Common Ground)
For Your Information
Vancouver HandyDART Facts
HandyDART provides specialized public transit services for passengers with physical or cognitive disabilities which make them unable to use the other existing transit services.
525 workers in Metro Vancouver area, represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) local 1724 have been on strike since October 26. The vote to strike was 97 per cent in favour. Essential services are being maintained.
TransLink, which is Vancouver's public mass transit system, contracted out HandyDART's public service in October 2008 to MVT Canadian Bus Inc. for $113 million over three years.
MVT Canadian Bus is based in California (MV Transportation Inc.) with mass transit contracts throughout North America.
ATU Local 1724 attempted to bargain for eight months with MVT but was met with nothing but demands for concessions especially the elimination of the existing defined-benefit pension plan and its replacement with a savings plan. Workers want all HandyDART workers to be eligible for the Municipal Pension Plan.
History of HandyDART
Prior to 1981 Para-transit in Vancouver was done by small non profit organizations. The disabled community mounted a campaign to have the government provide public transportation for people with disabilities. Thanks to the efforts of people like Tim Louis they were successful. A public transit system for people with disabilities labelled "HandyDART" was created in 1981. It was a disappointment to the disabled community that this new service was to be contracted out.
Workers and clients in HandyDART were marginalised under ridiculous contracts that split the lower mainland into fragments. Vancouver City alone, until 1984, was divided into multiple service providers. Workers for the largest provider, Pacific Transit Cooperative were organized into the Amalgamated Transit Union.
Disabled people have always been poorly served by the contracting system. HandyDART workers under this contracting system have never been given the respect for the professionals that they are. Multiple contractors and a bulging bureaucracy in TransLink created unbelievable barriers to both the workforce and its client base.
The unfairness of the contacting system boiled over in 2004. TransLink proposed to give the Vancouver contract to GVCSS. In that proposal, long time workers in Vancouver were to be discarded like yesterdays trash. A campaign was mounted by ATU local 1724 against this disgusting initiative. When the ridership discovered TransLink's plan they took the reins of a grass roots fight back that shook the halls of one of B.C's largest Crown Corporations. TransLink was forced to rescind their decision and began a lengthy review that included input from the disabled community.
In 2008 TransLink opened bidding for the HandyDART system in Metro Vancouver. A single company was given the contract for the whole lower mainland excluding the maintenance contract in Cloverdale.
The amalgamation was long overdue, but true to form TransLink discarded its workers and clients by awarding the contract to an American based multinational corporation. Since January 1 2009 this corporation has bullied its workers. MVT has patronized its clients with public relations while deteriorating service.
On October 23, 2009 members of ATU local 1724 voted 97% in favour of a strike. This is the first strike that ATU workers have endured in almost three decades! On October 30, 2009 MVT attempted again to denigrate our substandard contracts further by submitting a "final offer." HandyDART workers voted 409 to 23 to turn down this insult.
Currently our workers battle against two monoliths, TransLink and MVT. Reluctantly we strike for quality of life for our passengers and our families.
(ATU Local 1724 website)
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