"The incredible economic leverage of First Nations today"

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Published on Monday, 14 January 2013 20:04

Written by Administrator

"News reports are ablaze with reports of looming Indigenous blockades and economic disruption. As the Idle No More movement explodes into a new territory of political action, it bears to amplify the incredible economic leverage of First Nations today, and how frightened the government and industry are of their capacity to wield it." Read Shiri Pasternak's article "The Economics of Insurgency" here.

Injured Workers and the Austerity Agenda in Ontario

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Published on Sunday, 13 January 2013 17:01

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By Bruce Allen

Injured workers, their plight and their issues are rarely if ever considered in relationship to the global austerity agenda and the ongoing fight against it. Yet what is happening in Ontario reveals there is compelling reason why they should be.

An analysis of what is happening at the WSIB in Ontario lays bare the obvious fact that the trajectory of the changes being made at the WSIB to the overwhelming disadvantage of injured workers parallel the trajectory of the austerity agenda involving a process in which wealth is systematically, brazenly being redistributed away from labour and into the pockets of those who own and control capital.

So how is this evident in Ontario’s workers compensation system? It is personified in a former bank executive named David Marshall who was hired by Ontario’s Liberal government to eradicate the WSIB’s so called unfunded liability; the projected gap between revenue going into the WSIB from employer premiums paid into the system and the projected benefits to be paid out to injured workers by the WSIB. Significantly this gap was caused by major cuts to the premiums employers pay into the system. Yet Marshall’s mandate is not to eliminate the gap by adjusting employer premiums upward but by instituting a multitude of measures slashing the various benefits paid out to injured workers. I effect injured workers are being made to bear the burden of a crisis created by concerted government efforts over the past two decades to line employers’ pockets by slashing the WSIB premiums they pay. This exemplifies wealth redistribution in line with the austerity agenda

The logical result is a more lucrative business climate for employers causing declining living standards for injured workers and more widespread poverty among them as well as cuts in WSIB costs via intensified efforts to get injured workers off of benefits and back to work with less and less regard for injured workers’ physical wellbeing particularly by employers.

One could go on at length with examples of how this is unfolding. It is sufficient to limit onself to touching on one pivotal example. Namely the dwindling compensation paid to injured workers for permanent injuries.

Workers have gone from having a pre-1990 system of pensions for life to compensate for injuries for life to a very inferior system of Non Economic Loss (NEL) awards worth only a fraction of what the pre-1990 pensions were worth and from there to WSIB Operational Policy changes making it harder to get NEL awards and now to policies making it much harder to get increases in those awards to compensate for significant deterioration in the condition of permanent injuries and finally to unprecedented efforts to reduce the size and cost of NEL awards ostensibly by taking into account non-occupational age related changes in our bodies regardless of whether they were a health problem prior to an injury or not.

Simply stated these changes slash the costs of compensating workers’ for permanent injuries in order to help resolve the fraudulent funding crisis of the compensation system caused by government efforts to cut employer WSIB premiums.

To sum up the obvious implication of this one example of wealth redistribution towards Capital is that the fight for just compensation for injured workers must be more than integral to the fight against the austerity agenda. It must be front and centre in that fight. In waging it we clearly must fight to win.

Idle No More: more must-reads

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Published on Wednesday, 02 January 2013 00:47

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Glen Coulthard's "Idle No More in Historical Context" is just one of the recent pieces worth reading on the Decolonization blog.

Harsha Walia takes on some of the racist ideas (expressed by journalist Christie Blatchford and many others) that act as obstacles to understanding that Canada is a colonial-settler state here.

Idle No More!

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Published on Thursday, 20 December 2012 21:20

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"Canada's placid winter surface has been broken by unprecedented protests by its aboriginal peoples. In just a few weeks, a small campaign launched against the Conservative government's budget bill by four aboriginal women has expanded and transformed into a season of discontent: a cultural and political resurgence." Read the rest of Martin Lukacs' very good piece here.

On how Idle No More started, check out this article. Its main website is IdleNoMore.ca

What would it take to begin to do away with the oppression of indigenous people in Canada? This leaflet (easy to print and distribute!) points to five radical reforms. As people mobilize to demand such changes, we also need to discuss the question of strategy: what it would take to implement them?

Monsters of the Market: An interview with David McNally

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Published on Thursday, 20 December 2012 02:47

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David McNally speaks to Ali Mustafa about his award-winning book Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism

You can find the interview here.

Stop a New Israeli Massacre in Gaza: Boycott Israel Now!

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Published on Monday, 19 November 2012 16:30

Written by Administrator

Read the call to people around the world in this new statement from the Palestinian BDS National Committee.

Remembrance Day: challenging the right

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Published on Sunday, 11 November 2012 15:32

Written by Administrator

The Tory government is working hard to propagate views of history that fit with its agenda of austerity and militarism today, so for Nov. 11 here are a selection of articles that challenge the Tories' use of Nov. 11 and right-wing interpretations of World Wars I and II:

The misuse of November 11: How the Harper government exploits Remembrance Day

A letter from a British socialist student on why he declined to lay a wreath at his university's Remembrance Day service (about WW I)

Their war and ours: the people and the Second World War

Campaigning against the China-Canada investment pact

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Published on Saturday, 20 October 2012 22:53

Written by Administrator

"The campaign against Canada-China FIPA is being promoted as if though Canada is being “sold,” is “selling out,” or is “for sale,” with the implication that only China will benefit from this agreement but Canada will not. The reality is that the Canadian state and corporations, as well as the Chinese state and its corporations, both benefit from this agreement.... We need an alternative approach to the current anti-FIPA campaign." Harjap Grewal's article opens a discussion on such an approach -- read it here.

The Venezuelan elections

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Published on Thursday, 11 October 2012 23:58

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Jeff Webber writes, "Chávez’s victory straightforwardly represents a stinging blow to the domestic right, represented through their candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, and a setback for the interests of the United States in the region, a region which has – in no small part due to the ascendancy of Chávez, and the oil power he exercises – established a new relative autonomy from its Northern neighbour since the late 1990s." Read the rest of Jeff's article here.

The 2012 Toronto Palestine Film Festival: A Preview

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Published on Sunday, 30 September 2012 18:28

Written by Administrator

"The 2012 Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) is finally set to hit theatres this weekend. Launched in 2008 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of al nakba, TPFF aims to showcase the vibrant cultural heritage, resilience, and collective identity of the Palestinian people through film, art, and other events." Read the rest of Ali Mustafa's article here.

Auto Concessions Signal Need For A Sharp Left Turn

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Published on Friday, 28 September 2012 23:33

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By Bruce Allen

Three years ago General Motors and Chrysler workers made massive contract concessions. In fact, GM workers experienced two rounds of concessions bargaining in less than a year, the Harper government enforcing even greater roll backs than GM said it needed. Following that enormous, historic defeat the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) leadership loudly but unconvincingly assured their members that we would fight again another day.

Three years later "another day" has come and gone, without a fight and with more concessions at GM, Ford and Chrysler. The latest concessions are unprecedented, particularly with respect to new hires.

The CAW long denounced the two-tier wage agreements accepted by the UAW in the U.S.A. Now the CAW has all but completely acquiesced to that type of arrangement. New hires will be paid approximately $14.00 per hour less than regular workers. It will take them 10 years to attain the full rate, which will remain virtually unchanged for many years to come - plus it will take a full six years just to reach 70 per cent of the full rate. Worse, new hires will see deductions from their wages go towards the cost of their pensions, which will be seriously inferior to those available to current employees, while current employees experience no wage deductions going towards their pensions. In effect, the CAW has accepted a blatant system of two-tier pensions. New hires will also get much less vacation time.

All of this will result in a windfall of additional profits for the Detroit 3 auto corporations' Canadian operations, and it will accelerate the general decline of living standards for industrial workers in Canada. The time when autoworkers led the way in raising the living standards for industrial workers in Canada are long gone. Now they are leading the way downwards. And the CAW is functioning like a conduit for Capital's onslaught against labour.

Current active employees at the Detroit 3 in Canada will share in the pain of these long term collective agreements - in force until 2016. There are no wage increases at all. There will only be one cost of living increase - in the last quarter. Built-in COLA is replaced by lump sum payments cynically timed to be paid just before Christmas when autoworkers used to get a seasonal bonus. Simply stated, this means autoworkers will experience a steady decline in real income over the next four years. So will retired autoworkers. They have already been stripped of COLA on their pensions and they suffer a very inferior two-tier benefit package which is eroding.

None of this has been justified by declarations that new product investment has been acquired. There are no new products to be built in Canadian auto plants. Now the sorry, but all too familiar refrain is that we are living in tough times, faced with policies from hostile governments, including a high dollar. These excuses simply signal that there is no reason to expect anything but more of the same even with the aproaching CAW - CEP merger, with very serious consequences for labour as a whole, particularly in terms of living standards. No one is proclaiming we will 'fight again another day'.

A very bleak future lies ahead, unless we see the emergence of a rank and file based left opposition to the current leadership - a class conscious movement which recognizes that calling a halt to the ongoing retreat is imperative to keep us from going from very bad to even worse.

What does the CAW-CEP merger mean?

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Published on Friday, 28 September 2012 22:58

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"At a time where the Canadian union movement is at a strategic impasse and a steep organizational decline, the new union they will form is being touted as a key element in turning the situation around, through a larger project of union renewal and a major response to the attacks on the working-class and labour movement," writes Herman Rosenfeld. Read his analysis of the merger here.

Learning from the Chicago teachers' strike

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Published on Saturday, 22 September 2012 02:27

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"This strike pushed the boundaries of contract unionism and took a moment in which the teachers union in Chicago was battling concessions and a mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who was intent on further eroding the power of the union and advancing a billionaire backed “education reform” agenda even further and turned it into a movement to fight for an improved education system and more broadly to fight for a city that puts people ahead of profit. It has been a long time since people have seen a union, in the public or the private sector, use the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of labour, the strike, to fight back... The biggest lesson for labour, especially public sector unions, is that reaching out to the public for support is all well and good but really winning their support requires that you make your struggle their struggle by fighting on broader class and antiracist terms."

Read Peter Brogan's article about the Chicago teachers' strike here.

Teachers strike in Chicago: a crucial battle

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Published on Tuesday, 11 September 2012 00:54

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The Chicago Teachers' Union strike that began Sept. 10 could have a big impact -- read about it in this article in Labor Notes and check out this piece from a teacher's blog.

Understanding capitalism -- a video series worth watching

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Published on Friday, 24 August 2012 15:36

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Check out Kapitalism101 for an ongoing series of videos that aim to introduce people to Marx's analysis of capitalism in a way that tries to be both accessible and serious about sometimes-challenging concepts needed to understand what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life in capitalist societies.