Walton has been rewarded with her new six-figure position in the union bureaucracy after proving her anti-worker bonafides by selling out a strike by 55,000 education workers and scuttling a general strike movement which threatened to bring down the hated Ford government.
A class confrontation is rapidly coming to a head in Canada’s second-most-populous province, with major implications for workers across North America and around the globe.
Although inflation is officially running at over 7 percent, the ATU bureaucrats have accepted an agreement that would impose a 1 percent annual pay cap for Go bus workers.
Worker anger over the education unions’ refusal to oppose the Ford government’s onslaught on their wages and conditions found expression in a recent exchange between a rank-and-file OSBCU member and Laura Walton, the union’s president and lead negotiator.
Report documents Ontario government’s ruinous role in pandemic’s ravaging of long-term care homes
Ontario’s Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission submitted its final report to the province’s hard-right Progressive Conservative government at the end of last month. Its findings constitute a cogent condemnation of the failure of the Doug Ford-led Tory government to protect the province’s tens of thousands of elderly care home residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both Canada’s first and second waves of the pandemic Ontario’s chronically underfunded and profit-driven long-term care sector became the scene of mass infections and death.
A member of the Canadian Armed Forces working at a Quebec nursing home (Canadian Dept. of Defence)