Ori Freiman: Canadian workers shouldn't be forced to fund NDP-aligned activism - "the anti-capitalist Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) held its biennial national convention at the luxurious Metro Toronto Convention Centre. There, the national union, representing 800,000 public employees, spent its time debating Canada’s withdrawal from NATO, pledging funds for legal defences of activists who protest foreign conflicts, and passing resolutions disconnected from everyday workplace realities. At this point, it’s fair to ask whether mandatory union dues still serve their purpose... Labour agreements in Canada tend to follow the historic Rand formula, established in a 1946 arbitration decision by Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand, which requires all employees in a unionized workplace to pay dues. The idea was to avoid “free riders” benefiting from collective bargaining without contributing financially. While this arrangement might have been defensible when the labour movement focused on labour issues, it now functions as a forced subsidy, diverting money from employees to fund ideological and geopolitical causes unrelated, and often harmful, to their own employees’ interests. The Supreme Court’s 1991 decision in Lavigne v. Ontario Public Service Employees Union upheld the legality of mandatory dues, even when used for political campaigns that individual workers may oppose... CUPE National’s latest constitutional amendments show that the need for change is urgent and unmistakable. Instead of focusing on pressing labour issues, CUPE leaders and delegates doubled down on ideological and geopolitical activism. Their positions often mirror those of the NDP, which CUPE delegates and leadership largely endorse. In this way, CUPE’s international advocacy functions as a foreign affairs arm aligned with the NDP’s policy agenda paid for by taxpayers and 800,000 public employees, whose political views vary widely. Those mandatory union dues enable activists to exploit union structures, concentrate power among a select few and create a toxic organizational culture for anyone who seeks change. Instead of a movement labelled “Labour for Canada,” they fund “Labour4Palestine.” Meanwhile, the shortage of skilled workers and lack of craft training went unaddressed at the national convention. In fact, the delegates reflected a hostility to technology so severe that it bordered on technophobia and Luddism, rather than presenting a plan to provide employees the skills needed to thrive in a digital economy. Canada aspires to strengthen its economic sovereignty, use its resources, advance domestic innovation and integrate AI responsibly. That requires a public sector equipped to modernize, not one preoccupied with a divisive geopolitical agenda that entertains extremist ideologies and radicalization. The only way to ensure that public‑sector unions stop misusing employees’ dues is to eliminate mandatory union dues. Stop this abuse. Reform the Rand formula. This would not be an attack on unions, but an assurance that public employees shall decide for themselves whether to finance agendas beyond the workplace. If unions want to engage in global politics, they should do so with voluntarily raised funds, not compulsory contributions from taxpayer‑funded paycheques."
Left wingers love unions because they can hijack them to push the left wing agenda
Opinion | Why the UAW strike might be demanding too much - The Washington Post - "even employers agree that autoworkers deserve major pay increases. The Detroit automakers have offered raises of roughly 20 percent in hourly base pay. But the union’s president, Shawn Fain, says that offer is a “no go”; the union demands twice that. Fain says his demand is based on the pay increases that automaker chief executives have received in recent years. These execs are “already millionaires,” he notes. If they got a 40 percent raise, the company can surely afford to give more modestly paid workers the same thing. It’s a good line, but the math doesn’t quite work that way. The compensation packages received by these CEOs are indeed enormous. But the millions they make are still dwarfed by the billions these companies spend in overall labor costs — which can’t be scaled up by 40 percent so easily. Put another way: Even if General Motors CEO Mary Barra gallantly forfeited her entire $29 million pay package and redistributed it to every rank-and-file worker, that would come out to … a few extra pennies per hour per employee. This is nowhere close to the scale of the additional compensation the union is asking for. The union wants not only that 40 percent base-pay hike but a litany of other pricey changes, too. These include a restoration of defined-benefit pensions, which had been phased out for new workers in 2007; a 32-hour workweek, compensated at 40-hour pay; and a guarantee that workers will continue to be paid even if the plant employing them permanently closes. (That last item is similar to the “jobs bank” that contributed to the industry’s near-collapse 15 years ago.) For context, right now, the Detroit Three automakers shoulder about $64 per hour per worker, including all wages and benefits. The UAW’s suite of compensation-related demands would roughly double that total hourly labor bill to about $130, according to calculations from Colin Langan, an analyst at Wells Fargo. Now consider these firms’ competitors. Foreign automakers operating in the United States (Toyota, Hyundai, etc.) pay their workers about $55 per hour all in. Tesla is estimated to pay workers somewhere in the mid-$40s. In other words, the legacy manufacturers are already at a significant cost disadvantage compared with their biggest competitors. Doubling employees’ total compensation costs would make them even less competitive. The union counters that the companies have profits to spare. “Record profits mean record contracts,” repeats Fain, a slogan President Biden echoed in his own remarks supporting the workers. And it’s true that we’re coming off a period of unusually high demand for cars in the United States. But there’s good reason to believe these record-high auto profits could soon, ahem, disappear in the rearview mirror. These legacy car companies have proved notoriously dysfunctional in the past. And today, they seem to be struggling to adjust to the transition to electric vehicles... Ford CEO Jim Farley recently said accepting all the union’s demands might send his company into bankruptcy; it was clearly a self-serving claim, but given all the other challenges facing Detroit, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched."
From 2023. Left wingers have very poor maths skills
Starbucks responds after protestors block trucks from York distribution center
Unions once again showing how they are gangsters. And of course left wingers cheer this on. Of course, if you stop them blocking the road that is union busting and you're a scab
Lost Nursing Role After Union Grievance—Looking for Advice : r/OntarioNurses - "I recently went through a really upsetting experience in a unionized hospital in Ontario, and I’m trying to understand what I can do differently in the future—or if anyone else has dealt with something similar. I was offered a nursing position in a clinic setting (had a great interview, was an internal candidate) after interviewing. I was told I’d have to give full-time availability for orientation and was scheduled through to September. I was also placed on an on-call rotation, registered for specific clinic training, and had nearly completed a full month of orientation. At the time, I was working part-time at another hospital, but I resigned from that position in good faith because this seemed like a secure opportunity with a clear schedule and plan. Then I was told that a more senior nurse had filed a union grievance, claiming the position based on seniority. The grievance was upheld, and I lost the job, despite already having started and integrated into the team. I haven’t gotten any specific documentation about this as of yet, I just had a conversation with the manager. Now I am being told I have to return to my old unit. I understand that seniority matters in unionized environments, but this situation has completely shaken my confidence in applying to any other clinic/nursing roles internally. It feels like no matter how well I do in an interview or how much I commit to the job, I can be replaced after the fact because I don’t have enough seniority :( I’m hoping someone here can help me understand: How do I protect myself from this happening again? Is there any protection or support for staff who lose their roles after orientation due to a grievance? Does the union ever weigh interview performance or clinical fit? Has anyone ever fought the outcome of a grievance ( grieved a grievance) I don’t even know if that’s a thing. I plan to contact the union president directly, but I’d appreciate any advice, similar experiences, or insight into how to avoid this happening again.
TLDR: I was offered a clinic nursing position (internal job), left another hospital job (at a different hospital) completed nearly a month of orientation, and was then displaced due to a union grievance from a more senior nurse. I’m now being sent back to my old floor. Looking for advice on how to protect myself from this happening again and whether I can do anything."
Workers who are anti-union are idiots who don't understand that unions protect their interests
BC Government workers claim picketing is harder than their actual job. : r/ilovebc - "Does anyone wonder why BC is falling apart?"
Canada Post lost $407M in 2nd quarter, says customers seeking out other parcel carriers - "Canada Post continues to hemorrhage money, losing $407 million in the second quarter of 2025, the beleaguered Crown corporation announced Tuesday. It's the largest quarterly loss as parcel revenue plummets, the postal service said. Canada Post attributed the before-tax loss to uncertainty stemming from lengthy contract negotiations between it and its union... Workers rejected Canada Post's latest offer in a majority vote earlier this summer. The union said it did not meet its members' needs and said it will continue to maintain its national ban on overtime."
Clearly Canada Post is at fault for not agreeing to everything the Union wanted
Time for more subsidies
If Canada Post won’t deliver the mail – or can’t without losing billions – let someone else do it - The Globe and Mail - "Whether or not Canada Post’s workers decide to go out on strike this week will matter a great deal to those who depend on its services. It will not, alas, matter a great deal to many Canadians, who have long since given up on the post office. Neither will it matter a whit to the corporation’s survival, which is in grave doubt, strike or no strike. In part, that is a function of Canada Post’s long history of previous strikes: at least 12 since 1965, depending on how you count these things. After each, the post office loses thousands more customers to competing services, never to return. But this is only an acceleration of trends that would be in force regardless... Every one of Canada Post’s main lines of business is in jeopardy. Letter mail, which accounts for a third of its revenue, is rapidly disappearing: Canada Post now delivers just two billion pieces of mail annually, barely a third as many as it did 20 years ago. Direct mail is headed in the same direction. Parcel mail volumes are up, especially post-pandemic, but market share is down, sharply: from 62 per cent in 2019 to less than half that today. Strikes have been part of that. So has the corporation’s between-strikes history of shrinking service and escalating prices. The last strike, six months ago, was cut short by a back-to-work order from the Canada Industrial Relations Board, which appointed a commission of inquiry into the corporation’s future. The commission, led by veteran labour arbitrator William Kaplan (disclosure: we are friends), issued its report last week. It makes for grim reading. Had the government not granted the corporation a billion-dollar emergency lifeline in January, the commissioner writes, Canada Post would have soon found itself “unable to meet payroll and its other current obligations” – broke, in other words. Having suffered losses in each of the past six years – $3-billion in total – with no prospect of turning things around, “Canada Post is facing an existential crisis,” he writes. “It is effectively insolvent.”... the corporation and its union are essentially on the same side: The corporation should continue as a going concern, and somebody else should be forced to pay for it. For the union, the corporation should dig itself out of its current troubles by expanding into more services – banking, issuing passports and other government documents, even grocery delivery – with any resulting losses covered by the taxpayer. For management, the solution involves further cuts in service – door-to-door service delivery, already restricted to fewer than one in three Canadian homes, would be eliminated altogether, in favour of community mailboxes – coupled with accelerating price hikes... The commissioner’s recommendations take a little from each... insisting on door-to-door letter mail delivery is an exercise in futility: the decline in letter volume is irreversible, which will end not in “a levelling off, but almost certain and eventual extinction.” Union dreams of invading other markets are fantasies: they are either “unrealistic or would duplicate services already provided by others.” Management must have a freer hand to compete in the freewheeling parcel delivery market, including by delivering (gasp!) on weekends; it must also be able to (horrors!) reassign workers who finish their rounds before their shift is over. On the other hand, “preserving this public service will require significant capital expenditures … There is little prospect of Canada Post not depending on government appropriations for years to come.” What all sides in this debate take for granted is that the problem to be remedied is Canada Post’s finances... No one, possibly not even the union, wants Canada Post to go on losing billions of dollars, in perpetuity, at the taxpayers’ expense. But the first priority is to provide better service to the post office’s consumers. That, surely, is the point of having a post office: not to give postal workers something to do, but to deliver the mail as swiftly and cheaply as possible. If the post office cannot do that in a financially sustainable way, then it is not financial sustainability we should give up on: it’s the post office. Or at least, it’s the post office’s monopoly. This is described, cursorily, in the commissioner’s report – the “exclusive privilege,” guaranteed by statute, to carry a letter within Canada (that is, for anything up to three times the prevailing postage rate: Private couriers are allowed provided they charge more than that) – together with its accompanying responsibilities, known collectively as the Universal Service Obligation (USO). These include the requirement to provide the same service to every one of Canada’s 17 million addresses, and, crucially, to do so at exactly the same price... These work together in an interlocking, mutually reinforcing way... Officially, the argument is that Canada Post’s monopoly is needed to sustain the universal service obligation, including universal pricing. But what’s clear is that it is universal pricing that sustains the monopoly. Without it, the argument for monopoly collapses... the post office is not providing universal service now... most people in Canada do not receive home delivery today. The second point, as the commission’s report is at pains to emphasize, is that the cross-subsidization model is breaking down. Put simply, “fewer letters must now be delivered to more addresses”... Private couriers will deliver to every address in Canada, provided they are allowed to charge – and consumers are willing to pay – a price sufficient to cover the cost. If consumers don’t want to pay the full cost, it’s not clear why they should be subsidized to do so – especially when the price of subsidy is the maintenance of a monopoly that serves nobody well. And especially when Canada Post increasingly refuses to do so, even with the subsidy, and the monopoly... Letter mail volume, it is true, has declined in other countries, where competition has been legalized. But not by nearly as much as it has in Canada. Maybe a little competition – faster, more frequent delivery, at lower prices – might get us back in the habit. Rather than presenting Canadians with a false choice between billion-dollar deficits and the end of home mail delivery, why not address the problem at its roots, abolishing both the monopoly and the universal pricing regime that is its rationale? Or are we really going to pursue the current policy to its absurd conclusion – enforcing a legal monopoly for Canada Post on a service it refuses to provide?"
Canada Post Strikes—Again - "Taking Kaplan’s recommendations to heart, Lightbound has encouraged Canada Post to bring to their home delivery service to a close. “We’re talking four million addresses that will be converted to community mailboxes,” Lightbound said earlier this month. “To give [the public] a sense of the reason why we’re doing this, it costs significantly more to deliver mail to an individual address than it does to a community mailbox. Seventy-seven percent of Canadians already receive mail through rural or community mailboxes or department buildings. So… allowing Canada Post to make these changes over years will save the corporation about $400 million.”1 Another $20 million could be recouped, he added, by using ground instead of air to move nonurgent mail. He added that it’s time to lift the 1994 moratorium on closing rural post offices, many of which have since become urban locations. The CUPW argues that the same Canadians who fund the publicly owned corporation will be the first to lose if Lightbound gets his way. “When public services are cut, inequality grows, and it’s the public that suffers,” reads a statement by CUPW. “Postal workers are fighting to not only keep reliable and affordable services in communities across the country, but to provide even more services. Unlike private companies that deliver only where it’s profitable, Canada Post keeps communities linked and Canadians connected and that matters.”"
Time for more subsidies!
Left wingers usually take "record profits" as proof that workers are being stiffed and need a pay raise. But somehow, record losses don't mean that workers need their pay cut
Air Canada meeting disrupted by flight attendants amid growing tension - "A demonstration by union members prompted the airline to shut down a press conference as tensions between the two sides continued to mount."
Clearly they are negotiating in good faith. The only reasonable thing to do is to agree to everything the union demands
Jesse Kline: CUPE made dupes of us all with phoney 'unpaid work' claims - "“Canada’s biggest airline is hiding a secret,” warned unfaircanada.com, a website campaigning on behalf of Air Canada flight attendants and their union during recent contract negotiations. “Their cabin crew is being forced to work for free during the most critical moments of your flight experience.” Except it wasn’t exactly true that they were being forced to work for nothing, and it was never a secret. In the end, it didn’t matter that the Unfair Canada campaign wasn’t being completely honest. What mattered was that the union’s message — “Tell Air Canada and the Carney government unpaid work is a true crime” — had its intended effect on Canadians and their elected officials... Air Canada’s pay structure was the industry standard, and that the practice dates back around four decades. It only became an issue in 2022, when Delta Air Lines agreed to pay its cabin crews for boarding in a bid to prevent them from unionizing... By making it sound as though your friendly stewardesses were being treated no better than the children at a Bangladeshi garment factory, the union knew it had a winning public-relations strategy... According to a press release issued by Air Canada at the start of the month, “Time spent onboarding and similar tasks performed on the ground (are) captured within the formula pay defined by the collective agreement, which covers the duty period (commencing one hour prior to flight departure / ending 15 minutes after flight arrival). If the employee is requested to be on duty outside of these times or to perform service to passengers on the ground, the collective agreement provides for additional compensation.”... The risk for flight attendants, however, is that if they get too greedy, many of their jobs could one day be automated, at least as soon as someone realizes that much of what they do could be replaced by a vending machine strapped to a Roomba and sent down the aisle to serve food and drinks. Heck, the service on some flights may even improve! Perhaps the solution is to allow them to accept tips. I’m fully aware that we’re all sick of being asked to tip every time we reach for our credit cards, but I’d certainly be willing to chip in a few extra bucks if it meant someone would actually come when I press the flight attendant call button and stop giving me excuses about why they can’t pour me a double gin and soda."
When you agree to a pay structure then complain it's unfair
Crémieux on X - "This is peak government program LA's worst slumlord is a charity that the government provides with cheap HIV medication, which they then sell with a markup that they use to buy homes that they don't maintain and to lobby for restrictions that lead to fewer new homes. DEMOCRACY!"
Moses Kagan on X - "Oh it's so much worse than that. He also advocates against HIV prophylaxis, to the disgust of pretty much everyone else involved in HIV advocacy. The allegation is that he does so to protect the revenue of his pharmacy chain. A real prince of a guy."
Time to tax churches!
Michael A. Arouet on X - "This is probably the scariest chart you'll see today. Let me translate it for you: only one-third of French people have a private-sector job. How are they supposed to feed the remaining two-thirds with their taxes? It’s starting to feel like a failed state."
Unequal and Unsupportive: Exposure to Poor People Weakens Support for Redistribution among the Rich - "Do the rich become more or less supportive of redistribution when exposed to poor people in their local surroundings? Most existing observational studies find that exposure to poor individuals is positively associated with support for redistribution among the well-off, but one prominent field experiment found a negative link. We seek to resolve these divergent findings by employing a design closer to the studies that have found a positive link, but with more causal leverage than these; specifically, a three-wave panel survey linked with fine-grained registry data on local income composition in Denmark. In within-individual models, increased exposure to poor individuals is associated with lower support for redistribution among wealthy individuals. By contrast, between-individual models yield a positive relationship, thus indicating that self-selection based on stable individual characteristics likely explains the predominant finding in previous work."
space cadet 🇪🇺🌐🇩🇪 on X - "think this is one of the funniest social sciences results"
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "Contact hypothesis in action. Poor people are portrayed as better than they are so when you experience them close up, the illusions break."
The implications for diversity are interesting. That explains why the wokest white left wingers only mix with other woke white left wingers
Meme - "ONLY IN AMERICA CAN SOMEONE DRIVE A $40,000 CAR, WEAR $175 SHOES, SIP A $6 COFFEE, AND POST FROM A $1200 PHONE THAT THEY'RE "OPPRESSED" BY CAPATALISM."
Keywords: They're oppressed by capitalism
Harry Eccles on X - "Does capitalism create wealth? Capitalism doesn't create air, water, berries, or people. Mama earth provides us with exactly what we need. Every time someone takes more than their fair share, someone else will go without. If we eradicate excess, we eradicate poverty."
The default state of nature is poverty, and before capitalism most people were dirt poor, so as usual left wingers have no idea what they're talking about
Lindsay Owens on X - "Companies no longer price according to how much it cost THEM to make something. Instead, they price based on what YOU are willing to pay. An army of pricing advisers–a cross between the Geek Squad & Seal Team Six–is helping them to execute these high-tech pricing experiments."
Chris Conlon on X - "Look I am sure that if you believe in the labor theory of value it must be jarring to learn that prices depend not only on costs but also consumer willingness to pay. We should come up for a word to explain this phenomenon. Maybe we can call it “demand”?"
Inquisitive Bird on X - "Very strong new evidence against the notion that poverty causes crime. *Experimental* data on unconditional monthly payments to poor individuals in Finland, finds that the treatment (payment) has no causal effect on criminal perpetration or victimization."
Clearly, because we Know that poverty causes crime, the problem was that they didn't give them enough money
En(during COVID) on X - "being trapped in a capitalist system none of us ever consented to."
Rock Chartrand🤑 on X - "Capitalism is the system of consent. You aren’t “trapped” in voluntary exchange. You choose your job, you choose your employer, you choose what to buy, you choose what to offer. The only thing you never consented to is the state taking your money, regulating your life, and forcing you into systems you didn’t want. The irony is that the people who scream about non-consensual capitalism always defend the one thing that actually removes consent. They want a system where your work, your time, and your property are taken from you by force, and they call that liberation. Nothing reveals the mindset faster than someone claiming they were “forced” into a system built entirely on voluntary relationships, while advocating for one that doesn’t include a single voluntary relationship at all."
Warren Gunnels on X - "This is what oligarchy looks like: Jeff Bezos, the 3rd richest man in the world worth $231 billion, can afford to sail into Venice on his $500 million yacht for his $20 million, 3-day wedding to give his bride a $5 million ring because his real tax rate is 1.1%. Tax the rich!"
Left wingers don't understand the difference between income and wealth/net worth. They should be taxed on the value of their homes, then they'll be forced to sell them and will become homeless. Oh wait, many of them just rent because they can't buy a home
Caleb Hammer on X - "Bruh. I literally just tell people to spend less than they make, pay off bad debt, and talk a little tea. I guess I’m a nazi 😞"
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "Caleb is rapidly learning from interviewing hundreds of guests who have zero self-control over their lives and blame everything on society that “not being a total degenerate who contributes nothing to civilization” is inherently Right-wing coded. Watching his videos and seeing so many self-describe Liberals and Progressives make the worst possible life choices and then blame society for their destructive choices is like taking the red pill all over again."
Tectus on X - Yup. Personal responsibility? Right-wing. Government dependency? Left-wing. When you realize the left is just against any form of responsibility, all their political positions become obvious."
Zach on X - Personal responsibility is right wing. Blaming others is a key aspect of the leftist worldview."
Nathan on X - "Also fascinating that Dr. Phil—who rose to prominence on a folksy, common sense "Get your life together" and "How's that workin' out for you?" approach—is now right wing coded."
Paul Hughes on X - "There is no “welfare” in America today you dunce. There is no program that just gives poor people money."
Grant Cardone fires back at Billie Eilish over her billionaires remarks: “Why not make all the seats free?” - "Billie Eilish’s moment in the spotlight quickly turned controversial at the 2025 WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards. While accepting the Music Innovator Award at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the 22-year-old singer appeared to lecture an audience filled with billionaires and industry icons — including Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and George Lucas — sparking backlash for what many saw as a tone-deaf and self-righteous message about wealth and responsibility. “Love you all,” Eilish said, “but there's a few people in here who have a lot more money than me. And if you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? And no hate, but give your money away, shorties.” Entrepreneur and motivational speaker Grant Cardone was among the first to respond — and he didn’t hold back... “Hey Billie, big fan here. I noticed you’re playing in New Orleans next week, on of the poorer cities in USA and the lowest prices seat is $129. Why not make all the seats free?”"
