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Unifor National President Jerry Dias opened the first Unifor Skilled Trades Conference by calling on the 300 delegates to continue their work to build a better Canada through good jobs and training opportunities for our youth.
“We need to keep pushing, because we are making a difference,” Dias said this morning at the inaugural Unifor Skilled Trades Collective Bargaining and New Technology Conference in Toronto.
This conference will set out the priorities that skilled trades will take into bargaining over the next year, including the Detroit Three auto talks to begin this summer, Dias said.
“More importantly, we need to lead the debate about what the jobs are going to look like in the future,” he said, calling on the Skilled Trades to remain leaders in the fight for good jobs in Canada.
Dias said there is much work to be done to repair the damage done under the former Harper government, which dismantled sector councils and cut training programs – making it easier for companies to argue that they needed temporary foreign workers to fill skills gaps.
While acknowledging that the new Liberal government in Ottawa won’t do everything the labour movement might like to see, make no mistake, “there is a change, a huge change” in Ottawa, Dias said.
“For once we have a chance as a labour movement to take back our country,” he said.
