LABOR

By MIKE PHILLIPS

OTTAWA — The 500 and more
women who took part in the
CLC’s Affirmative Action con-
ference, Sept. 25-29, came
determined to get at the heart of
making the Congress’s policy
work.

It was clear as the delegates to
the Canadian Labor Congress’s
fifth biennial women’s conference
Wrapped up the four-day meeting
that they wanted the trade union
movement leadership to em-
Phasize action in the same way
workers throughout Canada are
looking for their leaders to put the
€conomic alternative and action
program into motion.

The conference participants
concentrated on examining the
Toadblocks to implementing af-
firmative action, how to move
trade union members into action
Over the issue, and how to draw
the issue into the centre of labor’s
fightback, legislative and collec-
tive bargaining programs.

Affirmative action is defined by
the CLC in a conference policy
Paper as ‘‘any action designed to
temove barriers to equality, over-
Come past and present. dis-
Crimination and improve the
€conomic status of women’’. To
be effective such programs must
include non-discriminatory hiring
and promotion practices, equal
Pay for work of equal value, train-
ing Opportunities, paid education
leave, child care, parental leave,
measures against sexual harass-
ment and accumulated seniority
during leave.

The conference also focussed
on the equal rights battle on the
legislative front, revealing at once
Satisfaction by the delegates for
victories achieved and a militant
Impatience with governments’
Slowness in creating anti-dis-
Criminatory laws.

This was most evident when
Judge Rosalie Abella was put on
the hot seat over the Employment
Equity Act, introduced in the

Ommons for first reading last
June, and which falls far short of
the extensive recommendations
detailed in a Royal Commission

she headed on employment
equity,

Under fire from the participants
Who wanted her to comment on
© inadequate legislation, Abella
repeatedly refused, claiming that
a8 a judge she was not permitted

to express any views on
legislation.

That didn’t stop the delegates
from airing their views on the Act,
however, and they hammered it
for lacking any specific provisions
requiring employers to negotiate
equity programs with the unions,
for not containing timetables and
goals for implementation, and for
failing to provide enforcement
agencies to monitor results and
respond to non-compliance.

Also, the Act only applies to
federally-regulated businesses
and crown corporations with
more than 100 employees.

‘The proposed law allows em-
ployers to claim they have af-
firmative action programs when
in fact they don’t’’, one delegate
told the Tribune. ‘‘It’s not even a
good reporting mechanism be-
cause it lets the employers report
statistics in a misleading way.”

Frances Lankin of the Ontario
Public Service Employees Union
took the floor tocompare Abella’s
report to the Macdonald Com-
mission report on the Canadian
economy. “I only wish the Mul-
roney government would have
embraced Abella’s report with
the same fervor it showed for the
Macdonald Commission’, she
said.

Noting how the Macdonald re-
port totally contradicts Abella’s
recommendation for equal pay for
work of equal value, and manda-
tory affirmative action, Lankin
charged that continued dis-
crimination: against women is a
key requirement of the Tory
government Free Trade strategy.

‘‘Free trade is a very critical
women’s economic issue”’, Lan-
kin said.

Earlier in the conference CLC
secretary-treasurer Shirley Carr
gave labor’s perspective on the

_ equality of rights provisions in the

Canadian Charter of Rights and
their impact on unions, women
and collective bargaining.

As it stands, Carr pointed out,
domestic and agricultural work-
ers are excluded from the charter,
public sector workers suffer dis-
crimination because they’re de-
nied the right to strike and are
susceptible to wage controls, and
soon, mandatory retirement legis-
lation will come under attack as
violations of the Charter.

She also noted the frustrations
the CLC has felt beforethe courts,

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Kresge’s signs pact
By PAUL PUGH

THUNDER BAY — Workers at Kresge’s Port Arthur store,
0 Strike since April 18, ratified a first collective agreement Sept.

The agreement provides workers an immediate six per cent
Wage increase, (25 cents an hour), and includes language cover-
ig essential questions of seniority, non-discrimination, and

defending fundamental trade
union rights like the right to
strike, to bargain, and to or-
ganize, under the Charter’s free-
dom of association provisions. In
every court except a divisional
court in Ontario, labor’s case has
been rejected.

Such an attack on labor’s rights
doesn’t surprise the CLC. **From
their very beginnings trade unions
have been viewed by the courts as
illegal conspiracies in restraint of
trade, and it took repeated pres-

sure by working people on elected
representatives to overturn judi-
cial decisions and to protect trade
union activities from constant at-
tack in the courts,”’ Carr said.

Chaviva Hosek of the National
Action Committee on the Status
of Women spoke of the need for
unity between labor, the women’s
and human rights’ movements in
the fight for affirmative action and
for adequate employment equity
legislation.

UAW — parity or strike

TORONTO — If the contract Chrysler Canada tries to give
10,400 workers by Thanksgiving turns out to be a turkey, auto
workers in Windsor and Southern Ontario will hit the streets.

United Auto Workers president Bob White delivered that mes-
sage last week when he announced the union’s decision to set

> Oct. 15 as the strike deadline in contract talks aimed at wiping out

the 55 cent wage gap between Chrysler workers and their
counterparts at Ford and General Motors.

White told reporters that anything less than parity would be a
strike issue for the workers at Chrysler’s Windsor, Ajax and
Etobicoke plants.

The UAW points to the company’s $2.4-billion U.S., and
$280-million Canadian profits last year, and the $8 an hour cost
advantage Chrysler Canada enjoys over the company’s U.S.
operations to support the workers’ determination to finalize the
catch-up in wages and benefits that was needed after massive
union concessions, primarily in the U.S. during the late 70s.

Chrysler is not only demanding sweeping concessions at the
bargaining table’ on work practices, seniority rights, job
classification and union representation in the plants, but has
refused to talk money so far.

A practical list of the company’s takeaway demands include:
reducing, job classifications from 70 to 15; demanding mandatory
overtime; extending the probationary period and cutting union
representation from one rep for every 15 workers to one for each
250. ,

Snevance procedure. -

TRIBUNE PHOTO — MIKE PHILLIPS

SSH

OTTAWA — Braving a steady downpour,

=e
3.5 million Canadian families, for

Hands off family allowances!

a total of $55-

“f rally
pact resulted from talks held a week following a
ae the launching of a boycott of the Kresge and K-Mart
Chains.
: _The 14 Kresge strikers who had maintained a firm, determined
Picket line during the almost six months strike voted 12-2 to
accept the new company offer.

Credit for achieving the agreement, despite Kresge manage-
Ment’s opposition, was given to the boycott s growing Schon e
the retail chain and the outstanding picket line efforts by t
: Strikers, who throughout the struggle, kept business at the Port
hur outlet to a trickle.

women picketed Parliament Hill, Sept. 27, to pro-
test the federal government’s plan to partially
de-index family allowances and the child tax
credit.

million by 1987. :

The measures are expected to hit at low and
middie income the hardest. Low income families
with two children will lose $22 as early as next
year.

By lowering the income threshold from $26,300
a year to $23,500 where family allowance bene-
fits begin to diminish, families earning $26,000 a
year will lose $125 in 1986.

Also included in the campaign against the Mul-
roney cuts is a petition being circulated across
Canada. The aim of the campaign is to generate
the same kind of opposition on family aliow-
ances as was successful, in forcing the Tories to
retreat from their planned pension cuts.

As they marched around the eternal flame at
the Confederation monument outside parlia-
ment’s centre block building, protesters
chanted: “Thirty-one twenty-seven won't get us
to heaven; but de-indexing — well, could put us
through hell.” The current basic family allow-
ance benefit is $31.27 per child.

blic support for the strikers was evident throughout the It’s estimated that the proposed cuts by the
Strike and especially notable from the area-local unions, Lake- Mulroney government will grab some $15-million

_head University’s Students Council and some area clergy. in 1985-86 and $40-million in 1986-87 from about
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PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 9, 1985 e 7