Unifor applauds rule change in Ontario budget: ‘They had the courage to make change’

Unifor president Jerry Dias has praised this week’s Ontario budget for putting in place a provision to keep local unions from being bullied by U.S. counterparts.

In the past, any sign of Canadian workers hoping to break away from a U.S. parent union was often dealt with in a punitive fashion. Local chapters placed in trusteeship by their parent union essentially lose control of any democratic process and, potentially, all their assets.

Last year, Toronto Transit Commission employees who were members of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) 113, got caught in a scuffle between the ATU and Unifor, which is Canadian. With 10,000 members, the Toronto chapter is the largest Canadian affiliate of the ATU.

TTC Union leader Bob Kinnear got tossed aside in February 2017 during a dispute with ATU, after he asked the Canadian Labour Congress to step in. Kinnear and 16 other members of the executive board were fired and the union office was placed under a trusteeship.

Some of those fired quickly signed a loyalty pledge to the ATU to keep their jobs, said Dias. “Those who didn’t sign got dumped,” he said.

Kinnear had wanted the workers to leave ATU and join Unifor. Dias said that of those 10,000 members, if 10 want to stay with the parent union and the rest want to leave, “they couldn’t make the change.”

Now, Dias is hopeful that Canadian unions will have more power.

“The government changed a regulation,” Dias said. “Now, the only way workers can be put into trusteeship is for a bona fide reason. It can’t be used to quell dissent or to control. I give the Liberals full credit — they did what the labour movement didn’t do. They had the courage to make change.”

Henceforward, a trusteeship must be justified to the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

Unifor represents 300,000 Canadian workers and 750 local unions.

According to Dias, for U.S. parent companies to interfere as they do in union business in Canada is “bizarre and outrageous.”

Workers who leave U.S.-based unions to join Unifor can face steep challenges.

“They confiscate their assets, seize their union hall, liquidate all their assets and send the cheque to the U.S,” Dias said.

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