CAW leader betting no-strike contract will create opportunities for workers. Some call it a thinly-veiled dues grab

Oct 20, 2007 04:30 AM
Tony Van Alphen
Business Reporter

A controversial agreement between Magna International Inc. and the Canadian Auto Workers that eliminates the right to strike is a "betrayal" of labour principles and a blatant "dues grab," say some past and current leaders of the union.

Read on at The Star's Website.

University Fees

The Globe and Mail highligted a seies of hidden service charges in Canadian universities today that should be considered tution increased by stealth. The highest comes in at an insitution in Nova Scotia where students pay $1,960 on top of average tutition fees of $6,000 all to subsidise the sort of community and work faciltiies you'd think the original fees were covering: technology, gyms, funding student associations and other core supports to student life. The article really highlights how modern education systems can contribute to excess credit card debts, double jobbing and ridiculous work hours rather than the assumed social mobility associated with them.

As usual Toronto's free cultural weekly NOW carries some articles of interest to readers of this blog. First up is a rather telling sequence of articles advocating some rethinking within the NDP.

Mainly the pieces address a problem of image rather than leadership or politics, arguing they should "spent less time at the Labour day march at the CNE and more at VFest on Centre Island" as well as oddly advising a turn to the sort of on the edge workers being organised by the IWW in NYC - "those long suffering franchisers" - this it seems will be done best by ignoring their condition as labourers and increasing the party's work on consumer rights.

CAW decries exporters' proposals that would cut workers' pay if currency rises above a pre-set level

High dollar may hit wages

From traffic stop to taser death, Mounties answering questions over routine traffic stop death.

The Toronto Star also carries a special on Canadian troops in Afghanistan today.

Widespread poverty in Canada, particularly among aboriginal peoples, is tarnishing the international reputation of a country that considers itself a moral beacon to the rest of the world leading CUPE to condemn a "Conspiracy of silence."

Mute which I drew attention to on this blog before also tends to publish some quality articles that don't make it into the print version, here are some recent ones..

In the Bowels of the Fun Palace
By Mark Crinson

Architect Cedric Price's designs were seldom realised but his vision
inspired 'fun palaces' from the Beaubourg to the Millenium Dome. Mark
Crinson looks at two recent publications which deal in different ways
with Price and his legacy

French Banlieues and Urban Guerrillas
By Yves Coleman

Mute recently published Italian sociologist Emilio Quadrelli’s long
text
on the 2005 riots in the French banlieues, ‘Grassroots Political
Militants: Banlieusards and Politics’. Here, Parisian activist Yves
Coleman responds to the claims and arguments made by Quadrelli and the

Chiefs of the information ages Google are set to launch a technological fix for the uploading of copyrighted material to sites like Youtube. Might be an article worth reading in mind of James W. Lindenschmidt contribution to the Commonor on Revolution and Counter-Revolution In The Information Age

Google Steps Up Video Copyrights.

In what I believe to be a Unite Here campaign, hotel workers at the downtown Toronto Holiday Inn are rising to man a picket daily over parity of pay with other workers in the downtown core and are currently locked out.

22 hotel workers in wage fight