Share
Unifor Western Regional Director Gavin McGarrigle delivered his report to the 4th constitutional convention on Tuesday, August 9, 2022.
He began by thanking frontline workers for their service during the pandemic and noted that, in several sectors such as courier and aviation, exhaustion and overwork is still a serious problem.
Much of the union’s work in the west has centred on fightbacks against regressive governments, and McGarrigle reviewed all the ways in which Prairie premiers failed workers.
“Even though we saw terrible performance pre-COVID by Jason Kenney, Scott Moe, and Brian Pallister, they sure doubled down during the pandemic and showed how incompetent and ideological they truly are, even when people were dying at higher numbers than needed,” he said.
Despite a trio of hostile, incompetent premiers, there were many highlights from Unifor members’ hard work campaigning for workers’ rights. McGarrigle said that members’ success with paid vaccination leave was evidence that there’s room to win even under difficult circumstances.
One of the stand-out battles in the west is the resistance to the Alberta government’s unprecedented so-called “right to work” legislation that seeks to make significant portions of union dues optional, effectively silencing workers’ collective voice.
“From free speech, to bargaining rights, to workplace health and safety, laws in Alberta are being tilted against workers and making employers more powerful than ever,” he said. “Bill 32 in Alberta is the biggest legislative attack on workers that we’ve seen in decades and why we have to kill it here before it spreads to other provinces.”
McGarrigle concluded by sharing the many workers victories with the B.C. NDP government to show that a better path is possible, and mobilizing matters:
“Protecting and respecting workers, their safety and the most vulnerable among has to be an ongoing effort and we will not be satisfied with tokens, we need change. Our equity and justice demands are not mere words, they are calls to action and we insist on action, not symbols… We can see a better world. We can win together.”
Watch the full speech online.
