[ L4B0R == CFL champions Tory game pian for free trade According to Jim McCambly, free trade between Canada and the U.S. wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing as long as we know more about “‘the game plan’’. McCambly presides over the 217,000-member Canadian Fed- eration of Labor, a splinter from the Canadian Labor Congress that was chipped away a few years ago by the U.S.-appointed Canadian leaders of the inter- national building trades unions. Traditionally, the building trades leadership have been the cutting edge of business unionism in the Canadian labor movement and more-often than not, the will- ing carriers U.S. foreign policy positions into our house of labor. While the AFL-CIO’s anxious resistance to the growing trend for Canadian autonomy among the affiliates to the CLC wasn’t the only reason the CFL breakaway was engineered, it was an impor- tant consideration. The cushy jobs of the ‘anointed and ap- pointed”’ rest squarely on a struc- ture where power only flows from, top to bottom and where the dom- ination over the Canadian organ- ization by U.S. labor leaders is complete. The CFL president’s openness to free trade is consistent with the rotary club boosterism expressed in “Ensuring Our Future’, a document, one grassroots build-. ing trades leader aptly described, as drafted by the Canadian Con- _ Struction Association and signed by five of the top building trades leaders in Canada. The 28-page booklet calls for cuts in wages, benefits and work- ing conditions by the construction unions in order to prevent the un- Organized contractors from _ undercutting the organized sec- — tors. part in the job action. _ convention next April. week in December. SGEU protest lagging talks REGINA — The Saskatchewan Government Employees Union launched a series of rotating strikes throughout the province Nov. 25 to protest the Tory government’s refusal to get down to serious P To the membership ‘‘Ensuring Our Future’ is an abject sur- render by their leaders to the con- tractors’ systematic attack on the trade union movement in the con- struction industry. What's even more outrageous is the fact that the same policy has already proven to be an unmitigated disaster with U.S. On arare occasion where work- ing members were able to express their views on the document, the recent Ontario building and con- struction trades council conven- tion, they denounced it in the an- griest and strongest terms. Unlike CFL gatherings where the participants are mostly hand picked, the few provincial coun- cils remain the only bodies where working members can be-elected to policy making forums. While McCambly searches for a successful game plan that will implement free trade with protec- tion built in for selected indus- tries, the mainstream of Canadian labor is sizing up the critical job of rallying the country against the dangerous policy. Labor leaders like the CLC’s Dennis McDermott and auto workers president Bob White, who’ve been warning that free trade could eventually undermine Canada’s very existence as an independent country, are being joined in their concern by the cul- tural community, women, the churches and even sections of the business establishment who see their interests being savaged by free trade. According to the SGEU’s job action committee more than 700 government employees in centres throughout Saskatchewan, took - McDermott steps down OTTAWA — Canadian Labor Congress president Dennis McDermott announced Nov. 22 that he will not seek re-election to + the presidency of the two-million member congress at the biennial The two candidates most often discussed as possible successors | to McDermott are CLC secretary-treasurer Shirley Carr who is a member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and United Auto Workers president Bob White. So far McDermott has indi- | cated that Carr is the obvious front runner and that he would | support her, but that White would be his first choice if he chose to ven : For his part the auto leader is keeping silent. It is expected however, that if he decides to run his announcement would likely come at the forthcoming CLC executive council in the second The 63-year old McDermott rose to the CLC presidency through the ranks of the UAW from a welder’s job at Massey Ferguson in Toronto, to the Canadian director’s job of his union. He cited personal reasons for stepping down. News Analysis Mike Phillips A recent study for the Ontario industry ministry warns that as many as 281,000 jobs could be lost to the provincial economy, ruin- ing 53 manufacturing sectors, if Canada enters into a free trade agreement with the U.S. U.S. branch plants in Ontario would emigrate back to home base in droves, with industries such as home appliances, cloth- ing, furniture, shoes, leather goods, textiles, sporting goods, printing and publishing either disappearing or being reduced to warehousing operations. This is the most likely game plan. Even federal Tory Trade Minis- ter James. Kelleher admits that some seven per cent of the Cana- dian work force could lose their “= : Militant bank workers shouted: “Shame on the Comm want a contract”; while they pounded on the windows of this bus downtown branch, last summer, just before going inside. Mass ‘bank-in’ for VISA strikers jobs, adding close to another mil- lion to the present million and half Canadians already out of work. Yet McCambly waits by the phone for the call from his Tory friends to take the seat on the so- called advisory committee on free trade that the CLC refused. The Tories’ headlong flight into free trade with the U.S. demon- strates that the Progressive Conservatives are indeed the American party in Canada. The call for concessions and free trade is in fact the game plan of the American party within labor’s ranks. So, it doesn’t come as a great surprise to see the Jim McCam- blys of the trade union movement play it; they’ve had lots of prac- tice. into a private business. A recent study commissioned by mittee drawn from private industry recommends operating Canada Post as if it was a private concern and on a profit making basis. CUPW leader Jean Claude Parro office is a public service and that improving postal services to the public should take priority over cutting the Canada Post deficit, the result of a legacy of bad management and federal government restraint policies. Parrot said the deficit could be reduced if Canada Post were allowed to invest in expanding its parcel business, moving into electronic bulk mail and using post Ontario Liberals break teachers’ strike . TORONTO — With only the New Democrats opposing, the Ontario Legislature under the Liberal government voted mas- sively in favor of ending a 52 day high school teachers strike in the Guelph area, and imposing a contract settlement. The Wellington County teachers, members of the Ontario Sec- ondary School Teachers Federation walked off the job Sept. 16 demanding a wage increase that would raise them to the provincial average and that the board hire 12 new teachers during the life of the contract in order to lower the pupil to teacher ratio. The emergency bill passed by the Assent almost immediately, imposed a 4.8 per cent wage increase next year, increased benefits and added four new teachers. Under the legislation teachers can be fined $500 a day for not returning to work while the OSSTF could be hit for $10,000 a day. Keep Post Office a public service: CUPW OTTAWA — As the federal Tories were pondering who to slot into the presidential office at Canada Post, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers was warning against trying to make the post office TORONTO — Branches of the Canadian Imperial Commerce throughout Ontario will be under seige Dec. 6 as the first province-wide ‘‘bank-in’’ to support striking Commerce and Commerce VISA workers gets under way. The idea was launched at an activists meeting during the re- cent Ontario Federation of Labor the government from a com- t has countered that the post offices as catalogue stores. Legislature and given Royal 6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 4, 1985 Bank of Jane Armstrong said last week. erce”’: and, “We Convention, strike co-ordinator Since then the co-ordinating committee, with the assistance of | the OFL has been contacti local labor councils to lay th plans for the solidarity actior which will be timed to take plac between 4 and 6 p.m. The bank-in’s evolved as an ef- fective tactic in Toronto as hordes of VISA and Commerce strike supporters packed selected branches demanding. manage- ment negotiate with the Union of Bank Employees. — CIB still refuses to negotiate seriously with the union despite | the fact that the strikers have been out since mid June. Last week the bank’s officials gave a stunning public display 0 the arrogance and ruthlessness the workers have long had to to NDP provincial ML David Reville found that as a re- sult of supporting the Commerce — strikers in a recent solidarity demonstration, the CIBC can-— celled his accounts with the bank gave him two days to re-pay $1,000 loan and ordered him t stay off of bank premises, fo! ever. The information came to ligh when Reville raised the matter i the Legislature. Under intense public pressure the bank lat apologized. “The strikers feel that the Commerce really exposed itself in this instance’, Armstrong said “They feel that what they’ ve been trying to get across to the public about what management 1 like at the Commerce was finall exposed in what they did to Davi Reville. If they'd go to suc lengths to get a private citize they don’t like, imagine whe they’re like to work for when the have the power to fire you?”’.