Time to send a message to Canada's postal workers

By the editors - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 909 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Rain or snow or sleet or hail can’t disrupt the mail. But what rhymes with seven weeks of annual paid vacation, out-of-whack pay scales or infinitely bankable sick days?

While the rotating strike by workers at Canada Post has proven to be a hardship for many Canadian businesses, it is also shining necessary light on the massive disparity between postal employees and workers in the private sector. Outside of bureaucrats in France, it is hard to imagine a more coddled, out-of-touch and overcompensated group than postal workers.

Canada Post’s efforts to bring labour costs in line with common sense, modern technology and market rates should be supported regardless of the strike’s immediate implications. A successful conclusion to this strike might even spark a broader rationalization across all Crown corporations and government operations.

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What's Toronto Mayor David Miller doing with his garbage?

By Tom Henheffer - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 5:57 PM - 70 Comments

David Miller’s garage stinks. It should—it’s full of trash.

The Toronto city workers’ strike has already dragged on for a month. As a result, municipal services like pools, daycares, kids camps, and garbage collection have been shut down. (Grab a copy of this week’s Maclean’s for more on the strike.) If residents want to get rid of their refuse they have to take it to one of the city’s management-run temporary dump sites, 19 of which are still accepting garbage. But the Miller family has held on to their trash, and plan to continue adding to the garbage heap until the strike ends. Hauling it to a temporary dump site isn’t an option. “That’s sort of like giving in to the strikers,” says Miller.

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Demanding times

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 11:40 PM - 90 Comments

The three-week-old strike by municipal workers in Toronto has spawned mountains of stinking garbage, left public swimming pools empty and wreaked havoc for working parents who rely on city-run daycares. But the strike has also brought with it something else: the sudden realization that not all jobs in Canada are created equal.

In what many would call the real world, an economic earthquake has shattered lives, erased nearly 400,000 jobs, and obliterated a lifetime of retirement savings, hopes and dreams. Yet despite that, public sector workers with iron-clad pensions and rock-solid job security have opted to wage a battle for pay hikes and the type of arcane perks that were almost unheard of in the private sector, even when times were good. “Everyone who works within a large apparatus like the government believes the whole world works that way, when in fact it doesn’t,” says Ted Mallett, chief economist with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). “There’s a distinct lack of appreciation for what’s changed outside in the real world.” Continue…

How has the recession affected your view of workers’ strikes?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 3:36 PM - 23 Comments

Hooliganism prisoner free after 20 years

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Chinese government has never given a full account of what happened on June 4, 1989, when pro-democracy protesters were shot down in Tiananmen Square. Yet as the 20th anniversary approaches, a small piece of good news emerged: Liu Zhihua, the last activist known to be jailed on the now-defunct charge of “hooliganism,” has finally been released.

Liu was just 24 years old when he helped incite workers to strike at a state-owned factory in Xiangtan, Chairman Mao’s hometown. Over 10,000 employees participated, showing their solidarity with demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. According to the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based human rights group, Liu was convicted of “hooliganism,” a poorly defined offence frequently used against workers. (It was removed from China’s criminal law in 1997.)

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Another year, another labour dispute at a Quebecor paper

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, January 26, 2009 at 3:21 PM - 1 Comment

Staff at the Journal de Montréal, the biggest newspaper in Quebec, have been locked out. Unable to come to terms on a deal to replace the contract that expired Dec. 31, both sides had walked away from the table last week. The workers were formally told not to show up to work until a deal is in place on Saturday morning.

(Fellow Concordia grad) Fagstein has the best writeup around. Here are some of the juicy bits—make sure you hit up Fagstein for the rest: Continue…

If Mrs. Kotter Doesn't Want An Actors' Strike, Who Can Argue?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 15, 2008 at 6:13 PM - 1 Comment

Shallow and superficial I may be, but when a bunch of prominent Hollywood actors signed a petition opposing the authorization of a Screen Actors’ Guild Strike, the thing I was most interested in was not their arguments why a strike would be a bad idea at this point in time, but which actors signed the letter.

Some of the bigger names on the list have already turned up in news stories about actors who are urging a “no” vote on a strike authorization: George Clooney, Steve Carell, Tom Hanks, Glenn Close, Alec Baldwin. But it’s fun to look at which names turn up on the list and in which combinations. Alan Alda and Mike Farrell are on the list — but not Wayne Rogers! Donald Sutherland, but not Kiefer! You’ve even got your married couples who both affixed their names, like Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. And then there are the people who used to be kind of famous, like Heather Graham, star of the tremendous hit Emily’s Reasons Why Not, and, as the subject says, Marcia Strassman of Welcome Back Kotter. But I didn’t see a single Sweathog’s name on that petition.

Being ignorant about such things, I wonder exactly how these names get there — do they just send it around to anybody who’s interested and might be famous enough to sway a rank-and-file SAG member, or is there a method to which names wind up on the document? Well, whatever the process, any document signed by Helen Mirren and Marilu Henner must be treated with a certain respect.

It's Not Cricket To Picket, Not Cricket

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 at 11:36 AM - 1 Comment

According to Nikki Finke, the Screen Actors’ Guild strike authorization vote will take place in January (75% required to pass) and the results will be in on January 23.

Again, if the actors vote to authorize a strike, that doesn’t mean there will be a strike immediately, just that the union’s leaders will have the power to call a strike if they want to. This means that if a strike does happen, it’ll probably be some time after the end of January — since negotiations will have to break down completely before that can happen. This suggests the possibility of a weird sort of stalling process; if the producers don’t think SAG’s demands are acceptable, it’s still in their interest to draw out negotiations as long as possible so they can get as much material in the can as possible. An actors’ strike is more immediately damaging than a writers’ strike, because there’s no possibility of continuing production after the strike begins (so if the actors go on strike in, say, March, shows can still write the scripts for the rest of the season, but a fat lot of good it’ll do them), but it won’t be quite as damaging if TV shows have a chance to complete their season orders before it happens, so I could see a scenario where you get a lot of false starts and stops to the negotiations, until they finally break down in April or something.

The most disruptive actors’ strike in recent memory was the 1980 strike, which started after the end of the TV season but ran into the fall, delaying the beginning of the TV season and causing every show to end up with smaller-than-usual episode orders. That strike was about, you guessed it, new media — the actors demanded a cut of the proceeds from commercial videotapes and pay TV re-broadcasts.Of course that strike was easier to sustain because AFTRA, the other actors’ union, was in on it, whereas this time it won’t be.

Of course, if there is an actors’ strike in 2009, the picket lines will be on the whole a lot prettier than the writer pickets of 2008.

CanWest gets scabby with it

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, October 9, 2008 at 9:12 PM - 0 Comments

Members of the Montreal Media Guild, which represents Montreal Gazette employees in editorial, advertising and reader sales, voted to strike last month. (The Gazette is owned by Winnipeg-based CanWest Publishing Inc.) The most evident sign of this was the decision of its editorial members to withhold their bylines last week in protest. I’ve always doubted the efficacy of byline strikes–-the only people who care about bylines are journalists and the parents of journalists–but apparently the whiff of a strike has pressed CanWest brass into action. Should there be a strike, there will be a whole lot of white space to fill. So CanWest News Service Editor-In-Chief Gerry Nott did the obvious thing: he called up the local university and offered to make scabs out of several journalism students.

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It's In the SAG

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 20, 2008 at 1:16 PM - 0 Comments

Will the Screen Actors’ Guild go on strike? I still lean toward “no,” but Hollywood is certainly getting nervous. The studios tried to use the same method they used with the Writers’ Guild, reaching a deal with another, smaller union (in this case AFTRA, the other actors’ union) that would then become the basis for a deal with the bigger group. But SAG is taking the position that AFTRA settled for a bad deal, and it wants something better. The studios will make another offer to SAG before its contract expires at the end of the month, and then….

The tension here is heightened by the fact that, because the last strike did so much economic damage to Hollywood, both parties are undoubtedly certain that the other will back down rather than risk being blamed for another strike. You’d think that the potential disaster of two consecutive strikes would make the parties less likely to play hardball, but it may actually make the studios feel more emboldened to make take-it-or-leave-it offers and SAG feel better able to demand something better than the previous deals.

The last actors’ strike was in the summer of 1980, and it delayed the start of the season by a month or two — which is why any show from the 1980-1 season is short a few episodes. Time Magazine wrote about the actors’ strike in August 1980, and it gives some idea of what could happen if there’s a strike this time around.

AFTRA is to SAG as DGA is to WGA, IMHO

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments

The studios have come to a deal with AFTRA, the “other” actors’ union (the less powerful one) for the terms of a three-year contract. The terms on online content are essentially the same as in the deals the studios made with the directors’ guild and the writers’ guild earlier this year. The studios’ strategy is also familiar: the idea is to break off talks with the more powerful union (WGA, SAG), turn their full attention to a deal with the union that’s more pliable (DGA, AFTRA) and then use that as the basis for a deal with the bigger union. And while a SAG strike has not necessarily been avoided, this deal certainly seems to make it less likely.

The thing about all this, of course, is that the terms of any deal on online content would pretty much be the same in any case, or at least very similar. (Things that AFTRA didn’t get are things that nobody’s likely to get this time around, like an increase in residuals for home video; it’s not that that issue is “off the table,” it’s just on the list of issues that the unions are willing to put aside for now to get the online stuff.) You have to wonder, as with a lot of negotiations, if the studios’ strategy is less about the actual terms and more about appearances: it just looks better if they’re the ones handing a deal to WGA/SAG, rather than being seen to accept a deal. It’s a cynical way to look at it, I know, but appearances mean a lot, especially in Hollywood.

For less cynical and motive-based analysis, Mark Evanier explains what this deal does and does not mean.

Yowp

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 11:00 PM - 0 Comments

The current talks between the studios and the Screen Actors’ Guild have broken off without a deal. The SAG contract doesn’t expire until June 30, so this doesn’t mean there will be a strike; as someone says in the article, two months is a long time in negotiation-land. It means, for now, that warning clouds are on the horizon, a storm’s a-brewin’, and any other meteorological cliché I’ve left out.

I’m not going to try and predict if there will be another strike or not — I have my doubts, if only because the studios’ “make a deal with a smaller union” strategy worked during the writers’ strike (the deal with the directors was in large measure what the WGA might have accepted before the strike), and they’re planning to try it again with the the other actors’ union, AFTRA. Also, the studios really did seem to be acting like they wanted a strike back in November, if only to teach the unions a lesson and get an excuse to re-structure; I don’t get the same impression now, though I may be wrong. But we can all predict that the next month or so is going to be pretty tense.