Remember those Porter
Airlines workers who have been on strike since 10 January? How the
employer was offering tiny or no wage increases and no improvements to the
workers’ (and by extension all our) safety?
To that anti-union behaviour
you can add the fact that Porter is listed as a user of the Temporary Foreign
Workers Program (see HERE).
As is now well-known, thanks to a few brave RBC employees, this program allows
employers to import workers rather than recruit Canadian residents. More
importantly, those workers arrive and stay at the whim of their employer,
making the abuse of their rights, including their right to organize,
inevitable.
Any which way you cut it,
Porter is a bad employer. But it gets even worse. Adding insult to
injury, a major investor in Porter is OMERS, the pension plan for municipal and
school board workers in Ontario. Workers in the plan and their unions
don’t control OMERS, so OMERS is happy to take union members’ money and invest
in anti-union companies like Porter.
In just a few seconds you can
send a protest message to OMERS telling them what you think of their investment
in this company and asking that OMERS put pressure on Porter to behave
reasonably and return to the table with the intent of reaching a reasonable
settlement.
Just go HERE.
And please: tell you friends and encourage them to sign-on to this
campaign. It is about the Porter strike, but it’s also about how union
member’s pension money is invested and why we need to control our own pensions.
