Tuesday, October 15, 2013

From the slippery slope into the abyss; where Stephen Harper's government has put workers

There's a confluence of threads all leading to the same place; the massive screw-over Canadian labour has taken at the hands of the Harperites these last eight years.

Here's a story about Humber College farming out their hospitality students to up-scale hotel chains as free labour.

What's wrong with that picture?

Free labour? How does this throw-back to the middle 19th century rear its ugly head 150 years later? With the connivance of the educational establishment no less!

Sign on for hospitality studies at Humber and you can scrub toilets for free!

Ain't that great!

Hard to say if the BC government has outflanked Humber in the douchebag sweepstakes. In BC the PR apparatus has been behind the massive media penetration that stories like this have achieved.

Yup, those hard-done-by contractors are so hard done by, because they can't find any skilled workers anywhere in BC, they are reluctantly forced to go all the way to Ireland to hire carpenters and electricians.

Every union official in the province claims there's lots of carpenters and electricians in the province just waiting for a phone call.

But they can keep waiting. Carpenters and electricians tend to want union scale.

There's plenty of carpenters and electricians in Ireland, where the economy has been in the shitter for five years, who would jump real high for a chance to make a third of what the Canadians think they're worth.

The entire "skills shortage" trope may have a grain of truth behind it somewhere, but it is first and foremost about busting unions and driving down wages.

The fact that these stories are popping up six months after the temporary foreign worker scandal at RBC tells you that the Harperites and their sponsors in the ownership class have not veered one degree from their course.




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