The Magna Corporation is the largest supplier of parts to the auto industry in Canada. It employs more workers than GM Canada, all non-union and all working below union rates putting downward pressure on wages in the industry. (It will come as no surprise that CEO Stronach takes home higher than union wages –...
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Labor
The Magna/CAW Deal
Only Workers are Productive
“Irish workers are second most productive in the world” headlined the business section of the Irish Times (4 September) reporting on an International Labour Organisation (ILO) study on productivity in various different countries. Productivity as measured by the ILO is a pretty nebulous concept. They take a country’s total GNP and divide it by...
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Zimbabwe workers win court case , face violence
A court has dismissed charges against three top officers of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), ruling on March 29 that the government failed to present evidence proving the union federation had violated “exchange control” regulations to affect the market. ZCTU secretary-general Wellington Chibebe, Elijah Mutemeri and Vimbai Mushongera were involved in an...
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The Online Picket Line
Why unions must set their own agenda in online campaigns Knee-jerk assumptions undermine working class solidarity I have been helping organize online campaigns in support of workers’ rights for several years now. The latest campaign I’m helping with concerns Zimbabwe. It supports a call by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions demanding that President...
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Child Slavery and the Chocolate Factory
The BBC is reporting that child labour , in fact , near enough actual slavery , remains an unresolved problem in the Ivory Coast , the world’s biggest cocoa producer. A 2002 report by the industry body, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, put the number of children working in dangerous conditions in cocoa...
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Nonprofit Production: Wave of the Future?
Each year half a million people in India and other tropical countries catch visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. Infected by the bite of a sand fly, they rapidly weaken and lose weight before dying with painfully swollen livers and spleens. A safe and effective treatment for black fever was found long ago:...
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Interview With a WSPUS Union Organizer
R. What is the condition of the working class today? How do you see the status of people who work for a living? W. Speaking very generally, in the early 21st Century, it’s true that certain luxuries are more easily available: it seems that everybody has television, running water, electricity. Certain consumer goods are...
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“Better I die of radiation than my children of hunger…”
In the village of Orlovka, in the Chui region of Kyrgyzstan in post-Soviet Central Asia, there used to be a uranium mine. Its closure in the early 1990s led to massive unemployment in the area. But now the desperately poor local residents have found a new way to survive. They sift through the waste...
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Labour without end?
Futurologists, Alvin Toffler being the best known, have long heralded the imminent arrival of the “post-industrial society” – an arcadia in which automation has almost done away with work and our main problem will be how to cope with an excess of leisure. Indeed, labour productivity has risen steadily and at an accelerating rate...
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Typical Corporate Insanity
I used to work on the help desk of the top software producer in the world. You know the one. The one that produced the worlds richest man. Microsoft. I was a contractor as were most of us on the desk. This was the arrangement so the large, multinational corporation, HP, that manages the...
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