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October 20, 2020 - No. 71
November 1 Day of Action in Defence of Migrant Rights
Raise the Call: Status for All!
Anti-Worker Schemes Using Pandemic as Pretext
• The Defence of Workers' Rights is Key to Stop the Propagation of
COVID-19 - Pierre Chénier
• Letter to the Editor
Workers' Actions in Defence of Rights
• Solidarity Action for Striking Ledcor Workers
- Roland Verrier
• Striking Dominion Workers Face Intransigence of Loblaw
Monopoly
- Louis Lang
November 1 Day of Action in Defence of Migrant Rights
Migrante and la Association de Mexicanos en Calgary
visit an Alberta farm on Thanksgiving, share a meal, games
and karaoke before the migrant workers return home for the season.
The Migrant Rights Network has called for a national day of action
on Sunday, November 1 to once again raise the call for Status for All!
Actions will include pickets, rallies, online events, banner drops,
postering, leafletting and phoning the office of the Prime Minister and
of local Members of Parliament. Migrant Workers Alliance for
Change has announced a live facebook event -- Niagara: Mourning the Dead,
Fighting for the Living -- Status for All. The
Workers' Centre of CPC(M-L) has called for a picket in front of the
Toronto constituency office of the Minister of Immigration, Refugees
and Citizenship at 11:00 am. Worker's Forum calls on
our readers to take up the demand of Status for All and organize or join in the actions.
Participants in the November 1 actions will be collecting signatures
for the Status for All open letter initiated by the Migrant Rights
Network before the recent Throne Speech and opening of Parliament. Over
350 organizations, including the Communist Party of Canada
(Marxist-Leninist), signed the open letter which states, "We the
under-signed call for a single-tier immigration system, where everyone
in Canada has the same rights. All migrants, refugees, students,
workers and undocumented people in the country must be regularized and
given full immigration status now without exception. All migrants
arriving in the future must do so with full and permanent immigration
status." The government has failed in its duty. The rights of all must
be recognized!
 Status
for all would, for example, end the situation where a worker is tied to
a single employer. It would allow migrant workers a pathway to
permanent residency, remove the obstacles that currently restrict the
labour and collective bargaining rights of agricultural workers and
enable access to supports that are available only to those with
status in Canadian society.
Denial of status is a significant factor in the spread of COVID-19
among agricultural workers. In Ontario alone there have been 1,100
COVID-19 compensation claims from agricultural workers -- 17 per cent
of the 6,600 COVID-19 compensation cases in the province -- and,
according to the Toronto Star, many cases were
simply not reported. The overwhelming majority of these claims were from
migrant workers. Neither the government nor the agribusiness owners
took the measures necessary to protect these workers. The United Food
and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), together with the Agricultural
Workers Alliance took it upon themselves to distribute thousands
of masks to temporary and migrant agricultural workers -- as well as
all other workers in need of protective equipment for work -- at the
union's Agriculture Workers Support Centre in Leamington.
In Alberta, UFCW recently reported that, because of the work of
the union and migrant rights advocacy groups, conditions have improved
in the meat packing plants which were so hard hit with COVID-19
outbreaks earlier this year. However, two outbreaks were declared in
August, this time at the Cargill case-ready meat packing plant and at
the Harmony Beef plant in Calgary, both of which are now over. An
outbreak has now been reported at Capital Fine Meats in Edmonton. More
than 1,600 workers in total had been infected earlier at
Cargill's High River plant and the JBS Canada plant in Brooks, east of
Calgary.
 Foreign
students have also faced great difficulty due to lack of status during
the pandemic. There are nearly 700,000 foreign students in Canada on
post-graduate work permits and study permits. Foreign students pay
nearly four times the tuition paid by domestic students, adding an
estimated $22 billion to the Canadian economy in the 2016-17
academic year. Their tuition fees account for roughly 30 per cent of
total undergraduate tuition fee revenues of Canadian universities.
Their fees are sustaining post-secondary education in Canada yet they
are bearing a tremendous burden and difficulty because of their
precarious status. Their study programs were disrupted. Their
employment
opportunities were disrupted. Their study visas and work permits
expired. It is completely unjust.
Workers' Forum once again calls on our readers to take up
the call of Status for All! Visit the Migrant Rights Network website migrantrights.ca for more information on how you can be involved.
Anti-Worker Schemes Using Pandemic as Pretext
- Pierre Chénier -
 
Quebec
health care workers defend their rights and affirm; "We are the
solution," "Demand a better health care system."
The
COVID-19 crisis continues to be used as an excuse by government
executives to attack workers and people and further privatize health
care and social services. Thirty years and more of the anti-social
offensive has resulted in the normalization of practices which divert a
massive amount of state funds from patient care to the coffers of
multinational corporations in construction and support services
including food services, housekeeping, IT, nursing care and others. It has also
resulted in the proliferation of private-for-profit operators in
seniors' care. The system is in crisis and the norms for which workers
fought are being eroded. This anti-social offensive is being
strengthened in the conditions
of the COVID-19 crisis and this is having a dramatic effect on the
lives of the people, increasing the danger during phase two of the pandemic
that has already set in.
For example, the number of resignations of health care staff has hugely increased all over Quebec.
 Just
in Montreal, it is now estimated by the unions representing workers in
the Integrated University Health and Social Services Centre (CIUSSS)
of Montreal East that more than 1,800 workers have resigned
since the beginning of this year. These are workers from all categories
-- nurses, housekeeping staff, food service workers,
clerical and administrative support workers, etc. They either leave the
sector, take early retirement (with the penalty it imposes on their
pension benefits) or stay in the sector but go to work for private
hiring agencies. If they go to work for private agencies, workers
sacrifice their benefits, including pensions, because the income they
get from the
agency is not pensionable, in order to have what the agencies call
freedom of choice in hours of work. This means that their hours are
scheduled ahead of time by contract and cannot be extended through
mandatory overtime.
Workers
also report that more and more of the private hiring agencies are
involved in human trafficking. Through a system
of subcontracting, the agency that contracts with the public authority
subcontracts to others who may again subcontract and the end result is
that there are many health care workers who are undocumented, with no rights
whatsoever. The numerous demonstrations of migrant workers without
permanent status or who are undocumented have amply shown the
systematic mistreatment that these workers are subjected to as a
disposable workforce and the role that the private hiring agencies
play. The number of unorganized and precarious workers in health care
is constantly increasing.
As private hiring agencies proliferate in the conditions of the crisis in the
public health care sector, it is becoming more and more common for
managers of public integrated health and social services centres to
themselves become owners of private hiring agencies. A strata is being
groomed from within the leadership of the public health care system to
become the owners of private agencies so as to increase the number of
workers hired through them and to dismantle norms and standards and
continuity of health care. For example, private hiring agencies can
send workers to one health establishment one day and to another the
next day, and in this way workers become potential vectors in the
propagation of the virus.
As well, the collective agreements of Quebec public sector workers
expired on March 31 and the unions report that negotiations are
going nowhere because the government is ignoring the workers' demands and is trying to impose concessions that will only further
aggravate the situation in the sector.
 For
example, the Fédération de la santé du
Québec has revealed some of the government's concessionary
demands. One of these demands is to redefine overtime by averaging the
hours of work over more than a week. The current
work week is defined as a five-day week. Any hours over the agreed upon
regular hours have
to be paid at the overtime rate. Averaging the hours of work over more
than five days will make it possible for employers to pay regular rates
even when workers are forced to extend their hours of work in a day.
Meanwhile, in the name of "flexibility," the government wants to create
work schedules in which the number of days could vary from
one week to another. These are not only serious economic attacks
against workers but also provocations that contribute to the burnout
and
resignations of health care workers.
Health care workers are rejecting this provocation and blackmail and
insisting that immediate improvements must be made in health care
and social services on the basis of their demands. Workers are
defending their ability to act collectively through their defence
organization and to speak as one to defend themselves and protect the
people they care for. The collective action of workers and
their implementation of safety measures is a key factor in stopping the
propagation of the virus. The situation clearly shows the need to
change the direction of health care and social services, to completely
eliminate private profiteering from the system.
As workers are stepping up their fight for their rights and the rights of all Workers' Forum opens its pages to make the voice of the workers heard.
I read with interest the articles you published on the Legault
government's decrees in response to the pandemic. I too believe that
they are not a solution to this serious crisis. It doesn't bode well
because it takes away workers' rights. When you force workers to
observe rules they had no contribution in adopting, the measures cannot
be
implemented.
In addition, decrees take away citizens' freedoms. Mandating
the police to enter homes with telewarrants to see if there is an
illegal gathering does not make any sense and does not bode well for
the future either.
I think a lot of people are starting to think that the COVID-19 problem
is not being well managed, that decisions are being made too late in
the name of not hurting the economy. And now the government is trying
to catch up with its new decrees. My impression is that Public Health
is being contradicted by the government in order not to harm
the economy. The problem of COVID-19 is more complex than a question of
government decrees. We are falling into abuse of power.
 For
example, they still haven't solved the problems facing nurses. Nurses have
crying needs that are still not being addressed after months of
pandemic. The government calls them our guardian angels but the angels
are on the front lines and are exhausted and many are resigning.
Mandatory overtime still exists. Nurses are not allowed to speak up
when faced with situations that don't make sense in hospitals. If they
do speak, they are disciplined by employers. It's like the code of
silence, the omerta. Let's put ourselves in their shoes. In a
democratic country we cannot accept this.
In the mining sector, we were in favour of adopting certain measures
because we decided them together with the company through consultation.
Now the tendency is developing that they inform us that they are going
to put measures in place and we are just supposed to apply them. That's
not consultation. We have the right to give our views
because we have to live with the measures. For example, employers in
the mining sector are talking about making masks mandatory in the
mines. Did they think about the fact that underground we work at 38
degrees Celsius and 100 per cent humidity? The workers are not going to
wear them. Moreover, it has already been proven that ordinary masks
will not protect us from the droplets through which the virus is
transmitted. Will they give us N95 masks? The measures must be
scientifically proven and the workers must be mobilized in the solution
of the problem.
If we want the measures to be applied but workers are not involved
in the decision-making process, it is doomed to fail. If you proceed by
imposing measures, workers will challenge you. Workers must be involved
in the decision.
 If
health measures are put in place, workers must be given information and
on-the-job training on the application of those health measures. In our case,
when we adopted the measures at the beginning, after consultation with
our workers, we even toured with the foremen in the mine to promote the
measures. The purpose of the tours was not to say
that we were very satisfied with the measures, but that we thought they
were the best measures available to us in the current context to
prevent people from contracting COVID-19.
To be able to do this, the workers' representatives must have
cutting-edge information to make decisions that provide
the best possible prevention. Because in fact, it is prevention that we
are talking about here. If the employer alone decides on the measures,
prevention will not take place. We are talking about the health and
safety of the workers and communities. Workers must have a say
in what is going to happen.
A mining worker in Abitibi
Workers' Actions in Defence of Rights
- Roland Verrier -
Workers on strike against Ledcor Technical Services (LTS) were joined
on their picket lines outside the LTS production facility in Port Coquitlam
and the Ledcor head office in downtown Vancouver by dozens of
supporters on September 30. That day was the first anniversary of
the start of the strike by members of IBEW Local 213. The
year has been marked by expressions of support and solidarity from the
New Westminster and District Labour Council, which was the main
organizer of the September 30 action, as well as the BC Building
Trades, United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1944, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the BC Teachers'
Federation, the Hospital Employees' Union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and others. Besides the
workers who joined the picket lines with their union flags and banners,
dozens more joined a caravan of cars in response to the call of the
local and the labour council.
 The
workers at Ledcor and their supporters make the point that what is
happening in the telecommunications industry with monopolies like Telus
and "subcontractors" like Ledcor, which are contracted to do some of the
fibre optic cable installations that Telus employees also do, is
happening in other industries as well. The contractor's
workforce is unorganized, paid at piece work rates that the company can
unilaterally change, pressured to work at an unsafe pace, without
stable and predictable schedules, disciplined or even terminated
without recourse. Besides the toll this takes on the workers
themselves, this arrangement is used to put downward pressure on the
wages and
working conditions of the Telus employees who are members of USW Local 1944. The Ledcor workers organized so that they
could act collectively to improve their conditions. As one of the
striking workers put it, "We are not just fighting for me or the guy
next to me. We are fighting for the technician in five years from today
and the
technician 15 years from today."
Throughout the strike the company has been using scabs to do the
work of the striking workers which it claims is legal because the
telecommunications industry is federally regulated and federal law does
not prohibit the use of scabs. The union is asking that Telus
customers requesting installation of residential or business
telephones,
Internet, television, or alarms "insist that the services be provided
by unionized Telus employees.
Customers might have to wait a bit longer for their service, but they
will have less risk of damage to their homes or businesses, and support
striking IBEW Local 213 workers at the same time."
The union's request for the Canada Labour Board to intervene and
settle the terms and conditions of a first collective agreement is to
be heard by the board this month. Until that time everyone is
encouraged to continue to support the demands of the striking Ledcor
workers through sharing information on social media and joining them on
their
picket lines at Ledcor's new production facility at 2120 Vintner Street
in Port Moody or Ledcor's corporate office at 1055 W. Hastings Street
in Vancouver.  
 
- Louis Lang -
Striking Dominion workers' picket line in St. John's, Newfoundland, October 15, 2020.
Eleven Dominion stores across Newfoundland have been closed as 1,400
Dominion workers, members of Unifor Local 597, have been on strike
since August 22. The workers voted to strike in June, calling for
more full-time jobs after 60 were cut in 2019, leaving its workforce at
more than 80 per cent part-time employees. Parent
company Loblaw Companies Limited also ended its $2-an-hour pandemic
wage increase. Workers have been without a new contract since October
2019.
In interviews with the Canadian Press over the holiday weekend,
Dominion workers said they're fighting not only for themselves, but for
retail workers across the country. The vote to strike came after
Loblaws, Sobeys and other major grocery store chains eliminated a
$2-an-hour pay increase offered during the height of the first wave of
the pandemic. The Newfoundland workers have rejected a contract offer
from
Loblaw Companies Ltd., Dominion's parent company, that included a pay
raise of $1 an hour over the next three years.
At the end of August the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador
granted an injunction against striking grocery store workers. The
injunction states workers cannot interfere with Loblaw's right to
remove inventory that is or may become stale-dated, or with
contractors who are entering the property to replenish fuel for
refrigeration
of inventory in tractor trailers, or who are delivering or removing
cash.
Immediately after the injunction was granted the company declared in
a letter to the union that because "competition is fierce, business at
Dominions across Newfoundland is in decline," the company would not
change its offer and has refused to participate in any further negotiations.
A October 8 union press release quotes Unifor Local 597 President Carolyn Wrice: "Over the past six weeks Loblaws has continued
to sell its products at No Frills and Shoppers Drug Mart. While the
company continues to rake in increased profits during the pandemic,[1]
it also continues to refuse to pay its frontline workers a living
wage. [...] The workers have received tremendous support
from the public during this strike and today we are asking them to join
us in sending a message to Loblaw and its Chairman Galen Weston." 
Dominion workers hold Thanksgiving food
drive on picket lines across the province.
In addition to maintaining picket lines, striking Dominion workers
are helping to provide meals to food insecure people across
Newfoundland and Labrador with a Thanksgiving food drive at picket
lines across the province. Members of the public donated non-perishable
food items at picket lines at the 11 Newfoundland Dominion stores.
Faced with the refusal of the company to negotiate, workers are
determined not to accept the company's claim that "reduced
profitability due to the pandemic," justifies turning 80 per cent of
the workforce into part-time staff and refusing to pay the workers a
living wage. Dominion workers in
Newfoundland have declared
that the strike will continue and this issue will be raised nationally,
calling on the workers at Loblaws brands across the country to stand in
support of the right of workers to negotiate acceptable wages and
working conditions. 
Picket at a No Frills store in St. John's.
Note 1. From March to September,
during the first wave of COVID-19, the Weston family's net worth
increased a whopping $1.6 billion dollars, reports a Unifor Media
Release, September 29, 2020.
(To access articles individually click on the black headline.)
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