Syncreon Automotive workers vote 99.9% in favour of strike action
Employees at Syncreon Automotive have voted 99.9 per cent in favour of strike action.
The more than 400 workers at the Windsor logistics firm voted Sunday at the Fogolar Furlan Club.
Syncreon is the last stop in the supply chain to the Windsor Assembly Plant — meaning a strike could put thousands of people out of work.
Autoworkers rally at Oshawa GM headquarters to protest assembly plant closure
Autoworkers are rallying outside General Motors Canada headquarters in Oshawa on Wednesday to protest the impending assembly plant closure.
“Workers in Canada will not forgive GM if it continues with the plan to close the Oshawa Assembly Plant and decimate the wider community,” Jerry Dias, Unifor national president, said in a media release.
Unifor statement on Oshawa GM plant
OSHAWA – Unifor received notification today from General Motors that the company will make a major announcement tomorrow that will impact its global operations.
While the union does not have complete details of the overall announcement we have been informed that, as of now, there is no product allocated to the Oshawa Assembly Plant past December 2019.
Based on commitments made during 2016 contract negotiations, Unifor does not accept this announcement and is immediately calling on GM to live up to the spirit of that agreement.
Union ready to fight too-restrictive workplace rules on cannabis
As workplaces across Canada scramble to create rules to deal with legalized cannabis, labour experts are predicting there will be plenty of push back, including legal challenges.
Canada will become the second country to legalize recreation cannabis on Wednesday, prompting public- and private sector companies to modify existing substance-use policies or draft new ones.
In response, the country’s largest private-sector union, which represents thousands of workers in Southwestern Ontario, already has filed several grievances and is gearing up to take employers to court.
“We’re seeing zero-tolerance policies, but it’s not just zero-tolerance for impairment, it’s zero-tolerance for use,” said Niki Lundquist, a lawyer for Unifor, a union representing 315,000 workers across Canada.
“It’s as though an employer suddenly thinks it has the right to police off-duty conduct.”
A leading labour lawyer says the rules governing what employees can do during work hours are straight forward, but the issue gets trickier when it comes to mandating what workers do in their own time.
“It’s going to be really difficult to regulate what you do off duty.” said Mario Torres, an Ottawa-based labour-employment lawyer.
Rather than craft new policies to deal with cannabis, most employers are relying on established legal principals already in place that can apply to cannabis. Just how strict the marijuana-use rules are will depend on nature of the work, Torres said, noting riskier jobs will come with tightened rules.
“The culture of the workplace should determine whether you’ll have an issue as to the time period before your employee arrives to work before consuming cannabis,” he said.