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JAKE MOGGERIDGE IS NOT YOUR AVERAGE DISHWASHER. He gets paid $16 an hour at the Union Local 613 restaurant in Ottawa. He’s probably the highest paid dishwasher in the city, maybe the province, maybe the country.

“I feel very appreciated,” says Jake. But he’s not alone: all the workers at the Union  recently got a raise to $16 per hour. Thanks to owner Ivan Gedz.

Gedz wanted to be fair to his workers and prove it wouldn’t cost him—contrary to all the hand-wringing over the new Ontario law that will raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2018. Gedz crunched his numbers and discovered the raise in pay wouldn’t drive his prices up.

“We raised a few prices here and there,” he said in a tweet. “You wont notice. I didn’t....To all those local restaurateurs that said a fair living wage couldn’t be done well, frankly you are full of shit.”

Union Local 613, despite its name, isn’t unionized. But workers say it’s a good place to work.

The restaurant employs eight kitchen workers, more or less full time, three to five bartenders, and 4-5 servers. Some part-timers are employed, many former workers coming back for a shift or two.

The kitchen staff gets a share of the tips at Union, plus some other perks—a drink per shift, a staff meal—along with access to a medical/dental plan. It all makes the restaurant a place where people like to come to work.

“Management wants feedback at all times, and the employer is not afraid of criticism,”says line cook Peter Webster.

Webster, formerly a computer technician, has worked at Union Local 613 since January, making $14 per hour until the recent change. Cooks tend to stay at Union for years—“a little unusual in the industry,” says Webster.

They pay a lot of attention to making the staff comfortable, says Jake Moggeridge. The workplace atmosphere is very friendly. He notes that while sexual harassment is widespread in the industry Union 613 management is aware and pro-active about that sort of thing. Respect is a dominant workplace value there. “You just get written off at other places.”

The idea that restaurant workers don’t deserve a fair, living wage irks Webster. He points out his job can send him home with sore knees and sore hands—not to mention the occasional burns. The raise to $16 per hour makes it all seem more worthwhile. “I’m happy to be there,” he says.

• UNION LOCAL 613 RESTAURANT

GETTING FIRED IS BAD ENOUGH. Calling it a “layoff,” when we all know the jobs are never coming back, is twisting the knife and then spinning it as a good thing, is twisting it again.

But Sobeys Inc. twisted away when it fired 800 more workers in November—a key part of their “corporate turnaround strategy” called Project Sunrise with a final goal of firing 1200 workers in all.

The broad public acceptance of the duplicity, doublespeak language, and hypocritical hand-wringing over it all is common to such corporate actions. It’s all part of our “you can’t say shit, even when you’ve got a mouth full” relationship demanded by our corporate overseers. Something that usually slides by unnoticed. But not this time.

This time Mary Campbell noticed. She edits the Cape Breton Spectator, a great online newspaper on the people’s side in Sydney, NS.

Here’s what she wrote about it all on November 24 in her column “Fast & Curious: Short takes on random things.”

First, Sobeys is firing 800 office workers. (Why do some news outlets persist in calling these things “layoffs?” Do they really believe these are temporary measures?) This will affect its corporate offices in Stellarton, among others.

It’s part of something called — I kid you not — “Project Sunrise,” which Sobeys Inc launched in May 2017 and which is intended to “deliver $500 million in annualized savings by 2020.”

The press release announcing the project contained this incredible quote from Sobeys President and CEO Michael Medline:

"We have an aggressive goal to transform our organization, better serve our customers, empower our employees and assuredly move from defense to offense in the market. To do this we need to unleash the talents and scale we already have at our disposal. The future Sobeys will operate with a simpler, leaner structure, more efficient core processes and tools and will better leverage its $24 billion national scale. This will free us up to be extremely nimble, thrill our customers and grow market share. Results of this transformation will take time, but we are committed to seeing them through given the compelling prize."

CLICK AND JOIN. UNIONS ARE READY TO MAKE IT THAT EASY. Labour Relations Boards are not.

Matthew Byrne shows there is no good reason for this. Bryne details exactly why there is not in Modernizing the Union Certification Process: The Benefits of Electronically Signed Union Membership Cards, the brand new research paper he wrote for the Canadian Foundation for Labour Rights and the Canadian Labour Institute.

Refusing to allow unions to use up-to-the-minute digital technology is just one more example of how difficult it is to join a union in Canada—and is meant to be.

Regressive labour laws and various technical requirements have always made it difficult for workers to join a union—even when they overwhelmingly want to, and despite the fact it is their unquestioned right embedded in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Ya gotta sign the card to get ‘certified’

To be legal, unions have to be certified (except in the rare cases when an employer voluntarily recognizes one). Certification is awarded by Labour Relations Boards (LRBs) in our provinces, territories and the federal public sector.   

There are two ways in which certification can be achieved in Canada, depending upon jurisdiction:

1. By obtaining a majority of cards signed by employees who want to join a union (“card-check”); and,
2.  After obtaining a minimum of signed cards, by winning a vote held under the auspices of a LRB to determine whether a majority of those who vote support unionization.

In each case, however, the process begins with the signing of cards. LRBs consider these cards to be evidence that the signatories want a union. But this initial organizing task is made more difficult by the refusal of most LRBs to accept electronic signatures. Even now, they require a physical card with a written signature and date.

Matthew Byrne argues the boards just aren’t keeping up with the times.

The electronic union card

The difficulty to overcome with electronic signing is to establish two things at once: the identity of the signatory, and the date of signature. Cards must be dated when they are signed, and that date must fall within the allowable period for a unionization campaign.

JANICE MARTELL FOUGHT AND FOUGHT AND FOUGHT—AND WON BIG. Workers made ill by breathing in McIntyre Powder will finally be taken seriously in two big ways.

First, they will be allowed to make claims for worker compensation. Second, the Ontario government will spend $1M on research that workers could turn around and use to support their claims for compensation.

Both wins are the direct result of years of effort put in by Janice Martell and the support she won for the McIntyre Powder Project she founded in 2015.

The project’s first big win came in August when the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) cancelled their policy of automatically denying workers’ claims related to aluminum dust and the development of neurological disorders.

Along with this, they commissioned an independent study by the Occupational Cancer Research Centre that will examine historical records, including the files of over 90,000 Ontario miners, to determine if there is a link to increased risk of brain damage.

The project’s second big win came on October 11 when the Ontario government announced it would spend $1 million to fund a review by the  Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) of the information collected from miners across the country who participate in their intake clinics.

According to the Ministry of Labour, the workers “could then use this information to make claims to the WSIB for potential compensation.”

Janice Martell is clearly elated: “I didn’t think it would happen quite as quickly as it has.”       

Forced to take the ‘cure’ that could kill

McIntyre Powder was supposed to keep miners safe. The powder’s producers claimed that breathing in the aluminum dust deeply before a shift would protect miners from developing silicosis of the lungs, also known as black lung disease, a disease for which miners could claim compensation. It was a lie.

Between 1943 and 1979, over 27,500 miners in Ontario alone were deliberately exposed to this dust.

Most miners had no idea what the powder contained. But even if they had know it was dangerous to their health it wouldn’t have mattered. They had no choice. They had to inhale it.

“There was absolutely no informed consent,” said Martell. “Some of them were locked in. One of the guys told me that they would put chains on the door so nobody could get in or out. It’s forcible confinement is what it is.”