By now, many people in the province are very familiar with ‘The Big Reset’ – the plan put forward by the Premier’s Economic Recovery Team (PERT) meant to stimulate the economy, create jobs and attract young people to the province.

If the government thinks that the PERT plan will accomplish this goal it is sorely mistaken and workers will pay the price.

As Unifor marks National Indigenous Peoples Day and we come together to celebrate the heritage and history of the first peoples of this land, our thoughts turn to the continuing barriers that Indigenous people face in Canada due to structural racism and the violent and ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.

Federal legislation on the use of scabs includes a big escape clause that effectively renders any supposed ban in federal law useless.

Canada’s social safety net - including Employment Insurance – has been dismantled bit by bit as part of a deliberate restructuring of our economy to suit the needs of business, not workers.

It was a failed experiment, and needs to be reversed.

There was a philosophical and ideological shift over a generation that put individualism first and foremost - a belief in working strictly for wages, rather than passion or principle, and shamed anything that looked like getting something for nothing.

This column from Unifor National President Jerry Dias and Daniel Bernhard, executive director of FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting, first appeared in the Toronto Star.

If Facebook’s latest plan to pay 14 Canadian media outlets for their content was a good-faith effort to support Canadian journalism, it would not have sworn participating outlets to secrecy, just to kick the tires on their offer.

Facebook is hiding these deals behind non-disclosure agreements because its real intention is not to pay for news, but to avoid paying for it.

By Navjeet Sidhu

One of the policy measures announced in the recent 2021 Federal Budget was the introduction of a $15 federal minimum wage.

This column originally appeared in the Toronto star.

There’s a reason why they’re called scabs.

“Just as a scab is a physical lesion, the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labour,” writes Stephanie Ann Smith in Household Words.

I could not have said it better myself. Scabs tear apart communities, pull down workers and prolong disputes – something, we at Unifor, know all too well.

It seems Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives just can’t pass up any opportunity to feed the party’s right-wing base and do some fundraising.

The Conservatives are standing in front of microphones and e-mailing supporters spinning a myth that the CRTC is going to police the YouTube and Facebook video uploads of everyday citizens.

If Bill C-10 – legislation updating the long-standing Canadian content obligations of commercial broadcasters for the modern era of Internet streaming - gets caught in this political crossfire, O’Toole doesn’t mind.

We have a national childcare plan at long last, and we cannot afford to lose it to political games in Ottawa.

It’s just too important.

It has been more than 16 years since the previous Liberal government tried to bring in a national childcare program, only to see Stephen Harper’s Conservatives kill it after Jack Layton helped them defeat the Paul Martin government

This column originally appeared in the Toronto star.

To hear executives at two of Canada’s largest retailers and a private long-term care home chain tell it, they did a pretty bang up job handling the pandemic – and promptly wrote themselves hefty bonus cheques to prove it.

We’re talking about millions in bonuses, on top of salaries that already put them in the top one per cent.