OPSEU Region 4

Family Day in Region 4 – 2013

admin — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:25:19 +0000

Free to all OPSEU Members and Their Families

Merrickville Blockhouse Park

Enjoy the summer weather Alongside eastern Ontario’s world Heritage site, and the great shopping in Canada’s prettiest village!

Join us Saturday June 29th, 2013 from 1200pm till 430pm at Region 4s Fifth Annual Family Day BBQ and Picnic featuring Hamburgers, watermelon, and roasted corn on cob!

RSVP Chris at Chrisopseu@hotmail.com Or

Dave at davidlundy@sympatico.ca

Please bring children’s life preservers if you have them!

: Click here to download the PDF poster

Watch for this “Making Life Work” proposal to surface here in Ontario under Hudak’s Banner

admin — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:51:36 +0000

Originally posted on the HuffingtonPost.com

Leo W. Gerard: GOP Forcibly Making Working Families Flexible

May 6, 2013

A century ago, workers were a lot more “flexible” than they are now. Veritable Gumbies in the mills and mines and factories they were, distorting their lives to slog 10 or 12 hours a day, six — even seven — days a week.

Then came the 40-hour week. And weekends. And eventually sick days. And paid vacation days. Now, bosses at mills and mines and factories regard these rules as coddling and consider the workers accustomed to them as unyielding to corporate demands.

The GOP has an app for that. It’s called the Working Families Flexibility Act. This legislation that the Republican majority in the U.S. House is expected to pass this week would force some old-time flexibility into 21st century workers. The forced flexibility act would award bosses the power to “offer” compensatory time off instead of overtime pay. Bosses, not workers, would determine when the comp time could be taken. The proposal puts control in corporate hands, obliging wage earners to bend over backward for bosses exactly like their Gumby ancestors were compelled to.

Trade unionists and labor rights activists died to achieve the goal of eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks. They were shot and beaten in the streets during demonstrations organized by the eight-hour movement. Their slogan was: “Eight hours for work; eight hours for rest; eight hours for what we will.”

Finally, in 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as part of the New Deal, which gave workers and families rights and security that previously had been exclusive to the wealthy.

FLSA enforces the 40-hour week with a simple measure. It requires employers to pay time and a half to wage earners for each hour worked beyond 40 in a week. That creates a financial disincentive for bosses to order work beyond 40 hours. That also creates a financial incentive for companies to avoid overtime pay by hiring more workers. That was a significant bonus during the Great Depression.

Employers still could require overtime when they needed it, but it cost them, the way it costs workers who must pay extra for child care or miss coaching a Little League game or forego Sunday dinner with parents.

Now, Republicans want to relieve corporations of their share of the cost. In fact, the GOP scheme enables corporations to profit on overtime at the expense of workers. It would reduce the financial disincentive of requiring work beyond 40 hours, which means it would also reduce the financial incentive to hire more workers. That would be a tragedy during the Great Recession.

The forced flexibility act would enable employers to give workers comp time off instead of overtime pay. Republicans contend it would be the worker’s choice, but in reality bosses foreclose options when they make it extremely clear they want comp time selected.

And they’ll want workers to “choose” comp time. That’s because workers won’t be able to specify when they’ll take the compensatory time off. Bosses will have veto power on those requests. And as workers accrue more and more hours of overtime – up to 160 a year – to be compensated later as time off, the corporation retains an increasing share of the value of their labor.

With overtime pay, the worker gets the money in the next paycheck and spends or saves it as he pleases, earning interest if he banks it. Under the GOP forced flexibility proposal, the boss can deny time off requests for as long as a year, after which the company must pay the wage earner for the extra time worked. By then, the corporation has kept the workers’ earnings, and the interest on them, for 12 months.

And if the company goes bankrupt before paying for the accumulated overtime, the GOP provides no protection for workers. Workers would lose the earnings that they would have received immediately if they had been paid time-and-a-half in the next check.

The GOP is hyping their forced flexibility bill as a measure to help women. On websites and blogs popular among women, the GOP bought ads asking Democrats if they will “stand up for” working moms by forcing women to contort themselves to employers’ whims. The same party that defeated equity measures for women like the Equal Rights Amendment and the Paycheck Fairness Act now wants the women who voted against them big time in the last election to believe the GOP forced flexibility act is good for them.

Republicans are right that women need flexibility it their work lives. The flexibility to earn 100 percent of what men do in the same jobs, instead of 23 percent less, would be great. But not so great would be a federal law giving bosses the flexibility to force women to work extra hours with a vague promise of compensatory time off some day in the future if the boss feels like granting it.

The GOP forced flexibility act is part of a list of proposals House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) calls “Making Life Work.” That’s right, Republicans intend to make life nothing but work. No eight hours for sleep. No eight hours for anything you will. Just work, Gumby, just work.

About the cover photo:

The Original Caption read: Maple Mills, Dillon S.C. Soarbar Seris has worked off and on in the mill for 5 years. Winds. Gets 70 [cents] and up. “Reckon I’m about 14.” Didn’t look it. Has worked more nights than day time. Dillon, S.C., December 1908

Harry Leslie Smith reminds us why our grandparents fought WWII & why they did not give up the fight for equality

admin — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:26:16 +0000

Originally posted on New Left Project

Is This What We Fought For?

Every year, the spring rains fall hard and heavy to a parched and hungry earth. Life is reborn from the long slumber of winter. For me the beauty in this annual transformation stings as if I caught my finger on a thorn from a rose. These lengthening days remind me of another time when I was a young man. Back then the sun’s rays were just as warm and sensuous but the splendour of nature being reborn was tainted with death. It was 1945 and Europe was still caught in the dying grasps of a cruel and unforgiving World War.

It was a conflict that consumed tens of millions lives through military battles, air bombardment and pure and simple mass murder. For five years of war, through defeat and bitter struggle, the calendar changed from humid summers, to crisp fall days, to the bitterness of winter and then back to the optimism of spring. As clocks in every household and in every town square moved forward, day by day, marking our mortal time through this struggle between good and evil, soldiers were maimed or killed on all our military fronts, convoys sunk in the cold North Atlantic, cities reduced to rubble and children left hungry orphans.

Across the world death moved, for too many years in lock step with both the season for sowing and for reaping. We were a World at War and for those of us in Britain the cost was enormous in lost and ruined lives. But it didn’t matter because we believed that the cause was just and that whether we came from humble or refined stock, we were all in this war together. It was that common and shared faith in ourselves and in the notion that everyone’s contribution large or small was important to the war effort that saw us through those dark hours. It was what kept us buggering on until our fortunes turned and the war against Nazi Germany reached its bloody end in the spring of 1945.

In those heady days leading to peace, I was just twenty-two and as green as the grass that had started to shoot up across the silenced killing fields. As I travelled from liberated Holland to the crumbling remnants of Nazi Germany, I was sure of one thing: I was a lucky man. I had what was called back then a good war and I was not disappointed by my survival. I had done my bit and I never shirked my paymaster’s orders but I was one of the fortunate few; death had eluded me while I served in the RAF.

I felt blessed by luck because so many others—friends, neighbours, acquaintances and complete strangers—had not been so lucky. They were never going to see twenty-five or be able to put down roots and raise a family and enjoy the fruits of peace. I knew like the rest of my compatriots knew, the dead had reluctantly sacrificed their existence to preserve civilisation for the living.

Perhaps that is why even though I am now 90, I still go every spring to my local cenotaph and commune with unfamiliar names etched in stone. I read out their simple epitaphs, their age and wonder, what if these young men had lived? What would their lives have been like? Would they have found true love, happiness, a rewarding profession and had healthy children? Would they have felt content with the democracy they had fought so selflessly to preserve? It has been almost 70 years since the guns of the Second World War fell silent and I am no longer sure if the dead would agree that their lives were worth the price of today’s society.

To me, this brave new world feels all wrong, out of tune with what the men and women of World War Two accomplished with our “blood, sweat and tears.” It just seems too flippant, too easy, too profane in this present world; for our politicians, our media pundits, and our industrial military complex to intone the beaches of D Day, Sword, Juno, Gold and Omaha as if it were the catechism for freedom, when our individual and collective liberty is more at risk now than it has ever been since the end of Nazism.

We have somehow broken our solemn bond with those warriors of yesterday and forgotten that when the survivors of the Second World War returned to their homes, they were like a tide that raised all boats. My generation’s shared experience of suffering, of witnessing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and enduring unspeakable privations as both soldiers and civilians made us vigilant when it came to demanding our peace dividend. We knew what we deserved and that was a future that didn’t resemble our hard scrabble past. The Green and Pleasant land was for everyone after the war because we had bled for it and died for it. We demanded a truly democratic society where merit was rewarded and no one would be left behind because of poverty, poor health or an inadequate education.

After the war we revolutionized the Western World and introduced the notion that all human beings deserved dignity, freedom of movement, due process before the law, and social safety nets to protect those affected by economic uncertainties. We knew the cost of not creating a just society was the end for democracy, and a life sentence of misery for too many people in our country. We knew the price of failing to create and maintain universal health care was a return to a two-tier society where the few held dominion over the many.

Today, however, in a world where our reservoirs of wealth are as deep and enormous as all the mighty rivers of the world combined, our politicians, financial institutions and megalithic industries tell us we can no longer afford these human rights that men sacrificed their lives for: the freedom to live with dignity in a compassionate society. We are told by those in charge that we can no longer live with luxuries like healthcare, proper state funded pensions, decent wages, trade unions and most aspects of our social safety network.

At 90, I am too old to take up the fight, too old to stand in demonstrations with a placard denouncing this madness. All I can do is bear witness to my times and our heroic struggle fought so long ago against Hitler and against men who would wreck the foundations that made civilisation tolerable and decent for its inhabitants.

The problem with society, today, is not lack of money or debt but lack of ideas, lack of commitment by our government to realise that its constituents are the people, not city bankers and hedge fund managers whose loyalty is to their ledger books rather than to the community. I don’t know if we will come out of this present darkness. Perhaps humanity will simply retreat into the caves whence our ancestors came because we were cowed by self serving political parties and dubious leaders of business. I hope not, for the sake of the generations to come, but there is one thing I am certain of: had the politicians and business mandarins of today been in power in 1939, they wouldn’t have had the bottle to fight Nazism. There would have been no Dunkirk, no Battle of Britain, no Finest Hour. Our leaders today on either side of the house would have allowed the lights across Europe to grow dim, because after all that would have been the cheapest and most prudent solution to Hitler’s tyranny.

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War RAF veteran and at 90 an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has authored numerous books about Britain during the Great Depression, World War II and post-war austerity.

About this article

Published on 07 May, 2013
By Harry Leslie Smith

Harper relies on stoking resentments in discreet class war

admin — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:53:22 +0000

Thatcher-style attempt to crush unions would leave Canadian workers powerless.

Originally posted on SGNews.com by Linda McQuaig

The willingness of much of the Canadian media to go along with the Conservative narrative about Stephen Harper’s “moderation” has allowed the prime minister to wage a discreet class war against working people without attracting too much attention.

Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a huge public outcry since the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.

Apart from this clumsy fiasco, the Harperites have been adroit at keeping their anti-worker bias under the radar. Instead, they’ve directed their attacks against unions, portraying them as undemocratic organizations run by “union bosses” who ignore the interests of ordinary workers.

Of course, this harsh critique of unions largely comes from business think tanks and conservative politicians – folks who aren’t generally known for championing workers’ rights — but who apparently can’t sleep at night at the thought workers aren’t being well represented by the people they elect to run their unions.

Breaking the back of public sector unions is key to any plan to smash labour power in Canada, since the public sector is much more unionized — 75 percent, compared to just 16 percent of the private sector — and therefore better equipped to withstand attacks.

Obviously, the real reason Harper attacks unions is because they’ve been effective in promoting the interests of working people over the past century. By establishing norms for higher wages and benefits in the workplace, and by pushing governments to implement universal social programs, unions are largely the reason we have a middle class in this country.

But Harper has long aspired to crush the power of unions – as his hero Margaret Thatcher did in Britain. Thatcher’s legacy is severe inequality in Britain, just as Ronald Reagan’s anti-unionism promoted extreme inequality in the US. Canada is rapidly catching up to both.

Since winning his majority, the prime minister has increasingly given vent to his anti-union venom. Last fall, he brought in a bill placing an onerous and unnecessary financial reporting burden on unions, while sparing professional and business associations a similar burden.

So Harper’s latest salvo – legislation enabling the cabinet to intervene directly in collective bargaining at Crown corporations – is aimed at revving up his campaign against public sector unions.

Business think tanks, like the Fraser Institute, are helping out by generating papers showing that pay is higher in the public sector.

That’s true; that’s what collective action achieves. But the difference is not dramatic, and is mostly due to higher public sector wages for women and minorities in low-paid jobs. This is offset by generally lower pay for public sector professionals and managers, compared to their private sector counterparts, notes Andrew Jackson, senior policy advisor to the Broadbent Institute.

Harper hopes to stoke resentments in struggling private sector workers, duping them into thinking the big rewards have gone to public sector workers rather than to where they’ve actually gone – into corporate coffers and CEO pay.

But harping on the allegedly overpaid public sector allows the Harper team to do what it does best: drive a wedge between people. Harper hopes to stoke resentments in struggling private sector workers, duping them into thinking the big rewards have gone to public sector workers rather than to where they’ve actually gone –into corporate coffers and CEO pay.There are raw emotions at play here. Knocking down public sector workers a peg or two might provide satisfaction to private sector workers who’ve seen their own wages and benefits eroded, and yet have to pay taxes that fund public sector salaries.

The problem is that once the powerful public sector unions are gutted, there won’t be much left of the Canadian labour movement, leaving workers not much better protected than their predecessors in the early industrial era who risked their lives battling for the right to unionize.

Of course, without unions, working people will be able to rely on new tools like… well ….social media.

As Harper draws on the full resources of the state to ramp up his class war, workers can count on tweeting any of their concerns or sharing Facebook photos of their friends working longer hours for less.

About Linda McQuaig

Linda McQuaig is a journalist and author. Her most recent book is The Trouble with Billionaires, (co-authored with Neil Brooks). This column originally appeared in The Toronto Star. eMail: linda@lindamcquaig.com

Website: lindamcquaig.com

Cover photo by BrianR on Flickr

Building A House of Cards: Public Meeting with Dr. John Lister

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 03:17:42 +0000

“We encourage you all to attend this very important information session on the ongoing failure of P3s to deliver on their promise of savings for the taxpayer. In this age of government imposed Austerity it is more important than ever that we be informed of how 100’s of millions of our scarce Public Health Care dollars are begin squandered on P3 schemes which have proven and continue to prove to be enormously expensive financial white elephants.”

Your Board Members

Smokey, Chris and Dave

Building A House of Cards

A conversation with Dr. John Lister

International expert on privatized P3 hospitals and health care reform

How England’s Privatized P3 hospital schemes are toppling & what this means for Kingston’s new hospital

7– 9 p.m. Thursday, May 9th

Kingston Frontenac Public Library

Delahaye Room, 130 Johnson Street, Kingston

: Click here to download PDF Flyer

Basic Certification Training (Part 1)

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 01:08:28 +0000

June 4-7, 2013

8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. each day

Pembroke

REGISTER NOW – SAVE 10%

Reduced price $382.50 (+HST)

(Quote Promo Code MS03 when registering)

or by completing the attached registration form & forwarding with payment.

: Click here to download PDF application

EASTERN ONTARIO LABOUR EDUCATION

admin — Thu, 02 May 2013 01:25:01 +0000

EASTERN ONTARIO LABOUR EDUCATION

WORKERS HEALTH & SAFETY CENTRE – OTTAWA REGIONAL OFFICE ONTARIO FEDERATION OF LABOUR – OCCUPATIONAL DISIBILITY RESPONSE TEAM

FALL 2013 HEALTH & SAFETY/WSIB EDUCATIONAL

Isaiah Tubbs Resort & Conference Centre RR 1, West Lake Road, Picton Ontario K0K 2T0

Visit them at www.isaiahtubbs.com Full Residential Shared Accommodations Wednesday November 13th – Sunday November 17th,2013

COURSES OFFERED (all 30 Hours except where noted):
1. WHSC Level I Basic Occupational Health & Safety Awareness No prerequisite to register.

2. WHSC Level II Committees Provincial You must hold a Level 1 certificate to enrol 3. WHSC – Enhancing the Skills of Joint Committee Worker Members

New Composite Program: Documentation, Appeals, Occupational Disease, & Hygiene Monitoring

4. OFL-ODRT WSIB Program Level 1 & 2 No prerequisite to register.

5. OFL-ODRT Compensation 4 Work Sickness – (Mental Stress Claims, Environmental Illness, Occupational

Hearing Loss, Written Submissions.) No prerequisite to register.

6. OFL-ODRT(36 Hour) Level V–Return To Work ( Level 1& 2 is prerequisite)

REGISTRATION DEADLINE Wednesday October 2

Detailed Fall 2013 School Schedule

Available on our website

http://laboureducation.webs.com/index.htm

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE APPLICATION

Region 4 delegates and alternates to the CLC and NUPGE Conventions

admin — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:32:20 +0000

Please see attached the official list of delegates and alternates to the CLC and NUPGE Conventions.

CLC Convention

NUPGE Convention

May Day Ottawa 2013

admin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:38:57 +0000

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Weekend Educational – May 31st to June 2nd, 2013

admin — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:46:35 +0000

The courses being offered are:

Stewards 2: Facing the Employer, Building Member Involvement
Union Skills for Workplace Investigation
Labour History – Strategies for Today Through the Lens of the Past
Human Rights, Union Rights and Global Solidarity
WSIB – Level 1

Applications must be approved by one of your Local Officers (ie. President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer), and must be received in the Kingston Regional Office no later than Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

For more details and application, click here.