Andrew Scheer has decided to resign as Conservative leader after a disappointing election loss and facing internal party divisions over his ability to lead the party.
Mr. Scheer made the announcement in the House of Commons on Thursday after calling a special caucus meeting earlier that morning.
He said he has asked the party’s governing council to immediately begin the process to elect a new leader.
He called this one of the most difficult decisions of his life.
“I just informed my colleagues in the Conservative caucus that I will resign as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and I will be asking the Conservative Party National Council to organize the process of a leadership election,” he told the House.
“As our party embarks on this exciting opportunity, electing a new leader and Canada’s next prime minister, I intend to stay on as leader of the party and the Official Opposition.”
However, the party constitution says it is up to caucus to make that decision on an interim leader.
The decision comes as former Conservative cabinet minister John Baird has been briefing Conservative MPs this week about his review of the party’s election campaign.
Mr. Scheer, who has five children, said the hectic pace of leading the Conservative Party – especially during the election campaign – took a toll on his family and his wife, Jill, who he called “heroic.”
“In order to chart the course ahead, this party needs a leader who can give 100 per cent to this effort. So after a conversation with my kids, my loved ones, I felt it was time to put my family first,” he said.
Mr. Scheer urged party faithful to “stay united” and focus on winning the next election – something he realized he was unable to do after he failed to defeat the Trudeau Liberals in the Oct. 21.
Although the Conservatives reduced the Liberals to a minority and gained more seats, party members expressed deep anger at the way the campaign was run.
Mr. Scheer won the leadership of the party in 2017.
WestJet Airlines Ltd. shareholders won’t be receiving a quarterly dividend this month after Onex Corp. announced the completion of its acquisition of the Calgary-based airline. WestJet and Onex say the payment won’t be made because the deal has closed before Dec. 18.
The airline’s board of directors had declared a 14 cents per share dividend on Oct. 28 to be paid on Dec. 31 to shareholders next week. The Toronto-based private equity firm and its affiliated funds say the deal closed following a final regulatory approval Tuesday by the Canadian Transportation Agency that found WestJet continued to meet Canadian ownership and control requirements following its purchase by Onex.
Onex says its portion of the total equity investment is about $345 million as a limited partner and largest investor in Onex Partners V. It declined to disclose further terms of the transaction. WestJet shareholders will receive $31 in cash for each share and the shares will be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange within a few trading days.
New York (CNN Business)Auto workers at Fiat Chrysler have ratified a new four-year contract, closing the door on the possibility of another strike like the one that shut down rival General Motors for six weeks.The United Auto Workers union said that 71% of members at Fiat Chrysler voted for the contract. It was a much easier vote than four years ago when membership voted against the initial contract proposal brought to them for a vote.The tentative deal was reached late last month.
The relatively quick ratification vote means that the more than 47,000 workers represented by the UAW union will get a $9,000 signing bonus before the Christmas holiday. Members will also receive raises equal to 6% of wages over the life of the contract, and two lump sum payments equal to 4% of annual wages. In all, the union estimates the average factory worker will see $29,500 in economic gains during the life of the deal. The biggest change is that workers hired since 2007 will collect the same pay and healthcare benefits as more veteran workers by the end of the four-year contract.
Fiat Chrysler (FCAU)made far greater use of those relatively new hires and their lower pay scale than its rivals did, giving the company a competitive cost advantage over GM (GM) and Ford (F). Now there will be a more level playing field.
The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday night began the first phase of a fiery “markup” process for the two articles of impeachment against President Trump that they have settled on, barreling toward a final floor vote even as moderate Democrats have floated the idea of backing down in favor of a censure resolution.
Almost immediately, the evening proceedings broke out into heated disagreement, as the panel’s top Democrat declared that it would be unsafe to wait until the 2020 election to remove Trump, and another claimed Trump’s actions were an “affront to the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” Meanwhile, the ranking Republican slammed Democrats for attacking Ukraine’s leader because he had undercut their case against Trump.
“We cannot rely on an election to solve our problems, when the president threatens the very integrity of that election,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said in his opening statement, claiming Trump’s discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings in the country, and the White House’s temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine, constituted an “urgent” threat to national security.
“This committee now owes it to the American people to give these articles careful attention,” Nadler added at the beginning of the markup for the impeachment articles, which included obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.
“We cannot rely on an election to solve our problems, when the president threatens the very integrity of that election.”— House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.
Nadler, who lamented that he had a “heavy heart” over the ordeal, said there were three key questions for Congress to evaluate: whether the evidence clearly showed that Trump committed the acts alleged in his dealings with Ukraine, whether the acts rose to the impeachment standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and what the consequences for national security were if Congress failed to act.
The top Republican on the panel, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, shot back that Democrats have been trying to impeach Trump since he took office. He echoed the White House’s argument that the impeachment was politically motivated theater, long in the works and foreshadowed openly by Democrats for months, if not years.
Collins noted that Zelensky has repeatedly denied Trump ever pressured him, and that Democrats then turned on Zelensky to call him a “liar.” Collins went on to slam the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee for hosting a hearing with three anti-Trump law professors with no personal knowledge of any relevant conduct by the president; Republicans invited one professor.
Former President Barack Obama, Republicans have said, also withheld lethal military aid to Ukraine, amid concerns about the country’s documented corruption and the potential risks of escalating conflict with Russia.
As the members debated, the White House Office of Management and Budget released a lengthy legal justification for the withholding of aid to Ukraine, which was obtained by Fox News. OMB classified the temporary pause in providing the aid to Ukraine as a “programmatic delay” that was necessary and proper under the law to “ensure that funds were not obligated prematurely in a manner that could conflict with the President’s foreign policy.”
Collins and Wisconsin GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner each observed that unlike previous presidents who have faced impeachment, Trump was not accused of any offense actually defined anywhere by law: neither “abuse of power” nor “obstruction of Congress” is a recognized federal or state crime. (The separate charge of contempt of Congress, according to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, exempts the president for separation-of-powers reasons.)
The late-night markup session marked something of a doubleheader for Congress, after Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz’s testimony dominated most of the day. The night consisted almost entirely of opening statements. The markup of the impeachment articles will resume in earnest at 9 a.m. ET on Thursday; during markup sessions, representatives typically fine-tune legislation or other resolutions, offering amendments, debating, and settling on final language.
Texas GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert, in his opening statement at the markup, noted that Horowitz had confirmed that the FBI violated its own procedures in 2016 and 2017 by relying extensively on an unreliable and since-discredited dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to secure a surveillance warrant to monitor former Trump aide Carter Page. In at least one case, Horowitz said, an FBI lawyer falsified a document to get the warrant, potentially committing a crime in the process.
Prior to the FBI’s warrant application to monitor Page, the FBI reached out to the CIA and other intelligence agencies for information on Page, Horowitz discovered. The CIA responded by telling the FBI that Page had contacts with Russians from 2008 to 2013, but that Page had reported them to the CIA and was serving as a CIA operational contact and informant on Russian business and intelligence interests.
An FBI official then essentially doctored the CIA’s information to indicate only that the agency had said Page was not an active source. And, the FBI included Page’s contacts with Russians in the warrant application as evidence he was a foreign “agent,” without disclosing in any way to the secret surveillance court that Page was working with the CIA concerning those foreign contacts.
For several years, Democrats and left-wing analysts at The Washington Post and CNN have repeatedly and falsely claimed that key claims in the dossier had been corroborated and that the document was not critical to the FBI’s warrant to surveil the Trump team.
Even as Drew Lake spoke alongside Wexit founder Peter Downing, scanning the crowd before him, he was unsure what he really wanted. Days after the Trudeau Liberals won re-election—and the Conservatives won 84 per cent of the vote in Lake’s riding—he co-organized a public discussion with the separatist activist at the exhibition hall in Lloydminster, the city straddling the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. Lake titled the event “What’s Next for the West?” Armed with swipes at central Canada and the nascent party’s slogan “the West wants out,” Downing had answers to that question. Lake didn’t.
“I’m not a separatist at heart but I’m starting to run out of ideas,” the oil worker told 80 attendees, according to the local newspaper. Lake wore a maroon blazer atop a black T-shirt emblazoned with “I (heart) oil and gas”; the crowd was largely ball caps and jeans. Over five years, the energy sector got relentlessly battered by low commodity prices, pipeline delays and policies seemingly designed to frustrate it. And with no change to the national policymakers, he felt Albertans and Saskatchewanians were backed into a corner, worried about economic survival. “We’re here out of desperation, wouldn’t you agree?” he told the crowd.
A few weeks later, Lake is a bit more clear-eyed. He’s encouraged by demands on the part of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe for a fairer deal on equalization and other files. He’s stopped kicking tires on Wexit and its leader’s firebrand rhetoric, which to Lake evokes too much of the worst “angry westerner” stereotype. He hasn’t slammed the door entirely on the idea of breakaway Prairie provinces—especially if conditions don’t improve. But he admits he welcomed Downing to a Lloydminster event largely because he wanted to help Conservatives raise political pressure on Liberal Ottawa. “To give them an extra tool. They can go back to Ottawa and say, ‘We’ve got folks that are ready to leave Canada; this has gotten so bad that we really need to do something about it.’ ”
There are few better perches than Lloydminster from which to hear the sirens and sighs of oil country. Fiftieth Avenue cleaves the 31,000-person city into coarse halves—one in Alberta, the other in Saskatchewan. But it’s an interprovincial compromise zone where (as in Alberta) stores don’t charge provincial sales tax, clocks turn to daylight time (unlike in Saskatchewan) and young families tend to prefer settling on the city’s east side to save on auto insurance (through Saskatchewan’s public insurer).
Lloydminster is represented by two conservative premiers who sound the drumbeats of pro-energy, anti-Trudeau frustration; whose provinces now have zero Liberal seats, provincially or federally. Their populaces now are more likely than Quebecers to believe that they’d be better off if they separated (33 per cent in Alberta and 27 in Saskatchewan, compared to 26 per cent in Quebec, according to an October poll by Ipsos).
Oil is Lloydminster’s economic lifeblood, and its pulse has sputtered since the 2014 price crash. The city went from full employment during the boom to 11.4 per cent unemployment by the 2015 census. By no accounts have things improved since. On a tour of industrial parks dotted by empty lots, Mayor Gerald Aalbers notes vacancies in several buildings and drives past a field of 150 disused heavy-oil trailers. He’s begun hearing, he says, from oilfield workers who trucked up to northeastern British Columbia for work and are sending their cheques back home to Lloyd—a reversal of decades of outward income flow from the resource towns of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
The real estate market has plunged, as few homeowners are willing to leave and take a loss unless they’re forced to. One quarter of the Lloydminster homes that have sold in the last two years were foreclosures, says agent Jennifer Gilbert. The struggles she’s seen clients go through have been traumatizing. In a resource-dependent city, she was told, things would go in waves. “But this has not been a wave,” she says. “This has been a parting of the waters.”
Lake, a friend of Gilbert’s, invited her to his event to provide a counterpoint, but she didn’t want to be associated at all with the inflammatory Wexit movement. She terms herself a fed-up federalist who doesn’t know the right way forward: “People are angry, frustrated and lost. And they feel like their voice is not being heard.”
Seldom have the anxious wails come in unison like this from Canada’s two landlocked provinces—a descriptor often applied now amid controversy-mired attempts to build pipelines. Political alignment has helped: Kenney’s victory last spring over the Alberta NDP made him and Moe leaders of the Conservative fight against carbon taxes. Over the next year, Canadians can count on these two leaders teaming up to assert their will in increasingly tough terms. Kenney won by projecting strength against a Trudeau-led Ottawa, a durable Prairie whipping post; Moe, whose Saskatchewan Party is the overwhelming favourite in next fall’s provincial election, will campaign from the same posture. Both demand reform to Ottawa’s equalization formula—and after Kenney announced a panel to study replacing the Canada Pension Plan and community RCMP branches with Alberta-only versions, Moe said his province may pursue similar forms of autonomy.
Nearly two decades ago, when Alberta last entertained these so-called “firewall” measures, Saskatchewan was uninterested (and NDP-led). It was also less enthused than Alberta by western separatism in the 1980s, when Pierre Trudeau and his detested National Energy Program gave rise to the short-lived Western Canada Concept party (the Saskatchewan PCs were in charge, back then). Now, Saskatchewan’s economic fortunes are more in sync with its western neighbour’s. Booms in oil and potash liberated Saskatchewan a decade ago from economic “have-not” status. It gained an Alberta-like swagger it never before possessed. Where Alberta once felt left out of decision-making but didn’t mind because it was strong and confident, Saskatchewan felt left out and too poor to do much about it, says Andrew Parkin, executive director of Environics Institute for Survey Research. The oil bust and the loss of a western-based Conservative federal government changed things for the provincial siblings. “They’re now feeling both politically and economically left out. Alienated and aloof,” Parkin says.
Brad Wall, the former Saskatchewan premier, now works as a law firm adviser in Calgary. He’s also a key figure behind the “Buffalo Project,” an executive-heavy group pushing for greater national clout for Alberta and Saskatchewan; Buffalo was the proposed name of a single province that was actually formed as two in 1905. He’s discussed the grievances with each current premier, and says he backs the two forming a common front. The frustration, as ever, is hotter in more oil-reliant Alberta, Wall observes. “But I’ll say this: the intensity is greater in Saskatchewan than it’s ever been.”
In an industrial park on the Alberta side of Lloydminster, Daniela Tobler works in sales for Classic Oilfield Services, a firm that shed one-third of its staff in recent years but feels better off than most. She teaches yoga on the side and has joined colleagues at pro-pipeline rallies. Proposals to detach Alberta from Canada worry her—“It would be so much better if we could work as a team”—but she feels isolated from much of Canada when she sees anti-oil or anti-Alberta rhetoric, especially in online comments. “We can see people laughing and enjoying this economic downturn that we’re experiencing, and it’s like being kicked when we’re down.”
On a quiet weeknight in a bar at the western edge of the city, Lake is sipping beers with Dwight Newman, who lives in a nearby Alberta village but owns struggling oil wells in Saskatchewan. Newman was at the Wexit event and found the pitch unconvincing—he doesn’t think many people are serious about separating. But ideas like the Alberta Pension Plan appeal to him. “I think we need to do that because we cannot control federal politics,” he says. “We might as well control what we can control.”
They’re asked how the mood might improve under a Trudeau government. Economic growth would obviously help, but with investor and corporate confidence remaining low (like prices), nobody’s forecasting a big upswing in Canadian oil and gas. Like almost everyone else in these parts, Lake and Newman say a completed pipeline would ease the pressure—the PM has redoubled his commitment to the Trans Mountain expansion since his re-election, and the First Nations and environmentalist court challenges standing in the way of the government-owned pipeline project are fewer and narrower than the ones that thwarted it in 2018. But trust in Trudeau remains at record lows, like his dad’s unpopularity. “Here, he’s immediately seen as a negative right off the bat,” Newman says.
Even if Trans Mountain does go ahead, Newman worries that tensions may keep growing, as climate change becomes an increasing priority elsewhere, to the detriment of a fossil fuel sector striving to make itself greener.
But everyone here seems more anxious about the short term—how they can hang on if the half-decade slump keeps going. A federal Conservative win was supposed to provide a pick-me-up to the many local Trudeau skeptics; other material changes seem even further beyond Lloydminster’s influence. “People are Canadians, but they’re against the wall and they’re running out of options,” Lake says. “And they’re running out of time.”
Every year, Canadians gather in early September to celebrate Labour Day. For many, it serves primarily as summer’s last hurrah. But Labour Day transcends barbeques and the back-to-school blues, stretching as it does back to the nation’s infancy, when the government of John Thompson, Canada’s fourth prime minister, made it a national holiday in 1894. Ever since, it’s been a day to think about how workers and the labour movement have made Canada a better place.
But it must be stressed that the role workers and unions play is not merely a relic, but is part of an ongoing saga. Indeed, Canada’s major unions see Labour Day as a chance to showcase existing battles left to fight, including the implementation of a national universal pharmacare programme—and the major questions that loom about the future of work.
Indeed, while automation and the fear of a world without jobs is nothing new, it is a phenomenon given new life by the recent rise in artificial intelligence and machine learning. With that has come a perception—alarmist or not—that technological leaps not only endanger manual labour, but also professional positions that would potentially be replaced by machines that can process immense amounts of data and have the potential to learn in a manner once thought impossible.
So what should Canadian unions, workers, and policymakers be doing to prepare for a future where work is either substantively transformed, or rendered largely obsolete for millions of people? The answer is multifaceted, but must include both short and long-term policy prescriptions rooted in the lessons of working-class history.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution and earlier, workers have faced the spectre of machines that could do work cheaper and more efficiently, thus rendering their services obsolete. While efforts by groups like the United Kingdom’s so-called Luddites to wreck the machines were perhaps more infamous than effective, more pronounced was the shift by unions away from an organizing model fixated on skilled craftsmen and toward one that targeted the waves of workers flooding into new mass industries. This was known as industrial unionism, and it organized workers on a scale never before seen. The proliferation of technology in the 19th and early 20th centuries forced unions to change how they operated, and so they did, often with success.
Even if one subscribes to the idea that work is an endangered species, it isn’t gone yet, and workers still need unions to represent their interests. Much like industrial unionism did in the 1930s and 40s, today’s unions need to explore how best to defend workers in the service sector and within precarious employment more generally. This will require not only legislative reform to make unionizing easier, but the unions themselves will have to get better at communicating with a new generation of workers facing different sorts of employment contexts than their parents.
One of Canada’s earliest high-profile labour disputes might be instructive here. In 1872, workers made an intensive demand for a nine-hour day, as at the time, workdays were far longer than they were today, leaving little time for leisure, rest, family, or engaging in any sort of self-improvement through training or education. These workers made the argument that not only was the shorter workday a matter of human dignity, but that new technological advances meant each worker was producing more per hour, making such a request more reasonable than ever before. The nine-hour movement failed in the short term, but over the ensuing decades, workers through bargaining and legislation saw workdays become shorter, often without wage losses.
But it’s been a long time since we’ve seen any further successes in shortening the work week, even as productivity has spiked since the 1970s. One solution to the continued advance of technology could be to shorten workweeks without decreases in pay. This would not only act as a re-distributive force from profits to wages that many feel is long overdue, but would share the dwindling pool of work that may arise in the coming years and decades. This is all on top of the increased realization that the eight-hour day may not be conducive towards productivity maximization. Already, some unions are choosing to prioritize shorter workweeks in bargaining, and this tactical approach may become more popular should machine displacement intensify.
New organizing models and shorter workdays are both viable solutions to address the struggles of encroaching automation, but neither strike to the heart of the matter that AI exposes. In our current capitalist system, the politics of automation are inherently adversarial, because while productivity increases and cost savings are consistently sought by owners, managers, and shareholders, the workers themselves don’t want to be displaced from the job that provides them their livelihood. Historically, many workers and socialists have acknowledged the immense social value automative processes have had in eliminating the most tedious and dangerous of jobs, meaning that we can shift our human resources in more productive and fulfilling directions. But automation driven primarily by profit motives serves to further concentrate power and wealth, making our society more unequal, and our democracy more imperilled. Even things like the basic income guarantee may fail to solve this issue, because putting the masses of people on mere subsistence incomes while an increasingly small number of owners and technical workers reap riches is more likely to lead to Elysium than to a just society.
So the rise of AI may well provide the conditions for a reinvigorated challenge to capitalism. Unions must not only bargain for better wages and conditions, but must push for mechanisms that give workers greater say in the direction of their workplaces, and a greater share of the value derived from actions which have traditionally served to unemploy them. But beyond bargaining, labour must align with politicians seeking to democratize workplaces and the wider economy by increasing the proportion of our economy owned not by capitalists, but by cooperatives and the public. If we are indeed at the precipice of a new industrial era, the only way to ensure 90 per cent or more of the population isn’t permanently marginalized from economic life is to demand that our democratic levers extend into the operation of industry. Put another way: in the automated age, democracy will need socialism.
Some might scoff at the idea, saying that the rabble would be doing little more than siphoning wealth from those whose rugged individualism has ushered in wondrous new technologies. But as Sir Isaac Newton once said, even the brightest stand upon the shoulders of giants, meaning that no man or woman succeeds on their own. Some lucky few may own tomorrow’s means of production, or have the skills to operate them, but the path toward that future is impossible without the masses doing all sorts of work, celebrated or otherwise. Humanity’s success has always been a collective one, and that applies now more than ever given higher levels of connectivity, and the greater complexity of our aims. Simply put, today’s trade unionists and their political allies must lay the groundwork for a new economic order, where no matter what happens to the concept of jobs as we understand them, there will be a social and economic role for the Canadian working class.
On the morning of Nov. 6, a group of Foodora food delivery workers arrived for a “breakfast rally” in front of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, which is holding a series of hearings through early 2020 on their right to join the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).
Clad in a telltale pink jersey, one Foodora worker told a CityNews reporter that he is semi-employed by five different “gig economy” companies, and that he was fed up: “It’s just gotten worse and worse and worse,” he said, “and we’ve gotten to the point where we need to fight for our rights.”
Uber drivers are also pushing to unionize, hoping to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). Uber Black, a pricier premium ride-sharing service that promises professional drivers, recruited Ejaz Butt seven years ago while he was working as a limousine driver at Toronto Pearson Airport, and he says that he now works 12-hour shifts, sometimes seven days a week. “We are workers, just like at any other company,” he says, noting that he hopes a union will give drivers “a voice.”
Buried in the details particular to Foodora workers and Uber drivers—concerns about cycling injuries, about unpaid time while waiting for delayed flights to arrive—are the underpinnings of every class conflict: the idea that people are being exploited, exhausted and underpaid by profitable companies.
Collective action has become a rallying cry around the world for people employed in the gig economy (where freelance workers take on short-term assignments, sometimes navigated through an app, for one or more employers). Once hailed as innovative, the gig economy is now the target of some tough questions about its reliance on a labour force that usually receives no protections like paid time off, benefits or parental leave. But there are questions about exactly how a more conventional union model can be applied to the future of work, and whether new ways of protecting workers are needed as work becomes increasingly fragmented.
So how can workers retain the things they like about gig-economy work—namely, the flexibility and independence—while also enjoying the protections traditionally extended to full-time employees?
Linda Nazareth, an economist in Toronto and author of Work Is Not A Place: Our Lives and Our Organizations in the Post-Jobs Economy, has concerns about Uber and Foodora becoming representative of the gig economy. While we tend to think of app-based work, the term actually encompasses a wide variety of workers who face a number of uphill battles when it comes to things like securing bank loans and determining parental leave. “If you’re a graphic designer going from employer to employer, you may be entitled to nothing and that’s not right,” she says. “We need to figure a different way of doing this.”
According to Statistics Canada, temporary employees have been growing at a faster pace than permanent employees over the past 20 years. In 2018, 13.3 per cent of employees worked in a temporary job, up from 11.8 per cent in 1998. The Bank of Canada estimates that the gig economy represents the equivalent of 700,000 full-time jobs, or 3.5 per cent of the total workforce. “Unions have struggled to adapt to a modern worker who isn’t pegged to a single employer or location,” says Maurice Mazerolle, associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at Ryerson University.
But the circumstances that make the gig economy a tough place to organize—unspecified schedules, independence and the tendency to work from one’s own home or car—are also the circumstances that entice workers. “I see everything from students who are using Uber as an extra gig and retirees who want social interaction to newer immigrants who can’t find other work,” says Nura Jabagi, a doctoral candidate at Concordia University who studies the gig economy.
The concept of independent work has also been increasingly romanticized, with narratives about “digital nomads” who polish marketing materials while sitting on the edge of a white-sand beach. Foodora’s recruitment efforts, for instance, lean heavily on the idea that app-based work is a way to “reclaim your time” and “explore your city,” all while making your own hours. Sylvia Fuller, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, says that is an incomplete picture, noting that while the gig economy might be a dream for workers who have skills that are very much in demand, “for the vast majority of folks, that so-called flexibility feels a lot more like instability.”
The pushback has already started and pressure on gig economy employers will likely intensify in the year ahead. Recent legislation—notably in California and New Jersey—require a reclassification of many independent contractors as employees. Foodora workers in Norway and Uber Eats couriers in Japan formed unions in September and October respectively, earning injury compensation and wage increases. The Foodora union would be the first of its kind in Canada, and could serve as a precedent for other precariously employed groups.
According to a statement issued to the CBC, Foodora has argued that unionizing may limit flexibility and that paying union dues would be harmful to many workers.
But Ivan Ostos, a Foodora courier in Toronto, balks at the idea that pressing for greater rights means sacrificing the appeal of gig-economy work. “The model that these employers sell to us is flexibility, be your own boss,” he says. “But there’s nothing that says we can’t earn a minimum for the hours we put in, there’s nothing that says we can’t have health and safety coverage, or grievances so that some people aren’t suddenly fired by an algorithm.”
While some unionization efforts have been based on the premise that most people would prefer conventional full-time work for a single employer, others maintain that protections can be implemented for those who prefer to work on a per-project basis.
Mazerolle notes that some unions, like Unifor, have introduced an “association model,” where multi-employer workers can benefit from things like group purchasing power and access to legal resources. Organizations like the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists collect dues, offer benefits and negotiate wages on behalf of over 160,000 members with widely varied employers.
In good times, as Mazerolle points out, workers can vote with their feet. But when decent jobs are scarce, collective action can help protect and amplify a single voice. “The fissuring of the workplace and the increase in precariousness is only going to continue,” he says. “Unless public policy catches up with reality, which it hasn’t, you’re going to find a lot more frustration out there.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said Wednesday that the FBI was justified in opening its 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign, but he told sharply divided lawmakers that he could not vindicate the bureau’s former leaders because of other major errors — effectively offering both political parties fresh ammunition in their feud over the Russia case.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Horowitz revealed that a prosecutor handpicked by Attorney General William P. Barr to review the same issues had failed to convince him that the FBI lacked a valid reason to initiate the probe. But just as importantly, Horowitz emphasized what he saw as myriad failures by the FBI after opening the case and said officials had not adequately explained their actions.
Since his 434-page report was released Monday, Democrats have emphasized its conclusion that political bias did not drive the investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia; Barr and fellow Republicans have said the report found so many flaws that the investigation should have never happened.
The House Judiciary Committeeon Wednesday evening weighed articles of impeachment accusing President Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, with both parties girding for a spirited debate about his conduct toward Ukraine.
Trump is just the fourth president in U.S. history to face the prospect of such a sanction for misconduct in office, which could be approved by next week on the House floor.
At the heart of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
