Speech at June 1, 2023 Injured Workers Day in Toronto

 

       To begin with I bring you greetings and solidarity from Sue James in Peterborough who is the principal spokesperson for the Occupational Disease Reform Alliance (ODRA).  What is ODRA?  It is a coalition of occupational disease victims, the widows of occupational disease victims, trade unionists and workplace health and safety activists.

      The ODRA was formed in response to the emergence of clusters of occupational disease cases in cities across Ontario resulting in the deaths of large numbers of workers.  One of these clusters was located in the city I am from, St. Catharines, where dozens of workers employed by GM died of diseases like mesothelioma and lung cancer due to prolonged exposure to asbestos in their workplace.  For me, this has meant representing workers dying of these diseases and meeting with them in cancer wards of hospitals, hospices and in their homes after they were sent home to allow them to die in familiar surroundings with family members by their side.

      My experiences are only too familiar to the members of ODRA.  Collectively these experiences, fuel our activism and our outrage at the murder of workers by employers.  But what particularly enrages us is the knowledge that only a small percentage of the workers who develop occupational diseases will file a WSIB claim in response and get their claims allowed.  This means they are being denied justice.  This is what must change.

      This means that the legislation pertaining to workers compensation and the WSIB’s Operational Policies must be changed to finally enable the allowance of far more occupational disease claims at the WSIB.  This can be done.  It has been done with respect to Firefighters and, as a result, the number of occupational disease claims successfully filed for Firefighters has substantially increased.  The same thing must happen for all Ontario workers.

      That is why ODRA has four demands:

1.     Award compensation for workplace diseases that far exceed the disease rate occurring in the general community population.

2.     Award compensation for cancers associated with working with cancer causing chemicals and other agents rated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 and or Group 2 carcinogens.  This means making a presumption that they are occupational in nature.

3.     Award compensation for diseases where workers were exposed to several carcinogens and other chemicals that may promote cancer development or enhance the toxic effects.

4.     The WSIB abandon its impossible search for absolute certainty and consider multiple sources of scientific evidence available including medical and community and worker-based research.

If these demands are met the situation will change and it will change for the better delivering a lot more justice for workers with occupational disease.

One last thing must be said.  Over a year ago the ONDP tabled Private Members Bill 125 in the Ontario legislature which, if passed, would make the changes we advocate the law.  We call on the ONDP to re-introduce Bill 125 in the legislature and we demand that the Ford government fully support it.  If it does. we will finally see more justice for workers with occupational diseases because the WSIB will be legally compelled to change its Operational Policies to incorporate our demands.

      Our fight on these issues has been a long, hard one. But we are determined to continue it until we win.  We will not fight to compromise with those who won’t hold corporations that murder workers to account.  We will only fight to win. Fight to win!

 Letter to the St. Catharines Standard

     The resumption of truck assembly at GM Oshawa (GM back to making trucks in Oshawa) is a good news story, up to a point. What was not been reported anywhere is the fact that the cessation of assembly operations in Oshawa in 2019 facilitated GM’s exiting almost an entire workforce which enjoyed relatively high wages, good employee benefits and pensions. This enabled GM to replace a relatively higher cost workforce with one with much lower wages, fewer benefits and inferior pensions costing GM only about half of what the pre-2019 workforce cost. The closure and reopening of assembly operations in Oshawa enabled GM to cut its labour costs by about in half all with the enthusiastic support of Unifor.

     This provides reason for skepticism. But there is even more reason to be skeptical about these events. Namely, this is not the first time GM has shut down operations at one of its plants only to start them up again with a drastically lower cost labour force. GM has done this before at a UAW organized plant in Michigan. In view of this, one cannot help but suspect that GM very strategically took a page out of its existing playbook and successfully executed the same tactic in Oshawa to slash its labour costs. By doing so GM showed what it can and will do to impose its will.

Bruce R. Allen   

 

Foundry Workers and Cancer

        For a long time, asbestos stood out as being the focal point, as a carcinogen (cancer causing agent), that Foundry workers were routinely exposed to. Quite a few WSIB claims for mesothelioma, lung cancer or asbestosis were allowed due to exposure to it. A week ago the WSIB allowed a lung cancer claim for a recently deceased worker who was employed at the Affinia/ITT Aimco Foundry that was located on Berryman Ave. in St. Catharines. However, it was not allowed on the basis of the worker's limited exposure to asbestos. It was allowed due to his decades of exposure to silica dust even though the worker had smoked for about half of his life. Silica crystals are a carcinogen. They not only can cause lung cancer. They elevate the risk of gastro-intestinal cancer as well.

 

       Thousands of workers were employed at the GM Foundry on Glendale Ave. which closed in 1995 after approximately 40 years of operation. To my knowledge not one worker in that Foundry who died of lung or gastro-intestinal cancer ever had a claim filed, let alone allowed, due to exposure to anything other than asbestos. Many of these ex-Foundry workers are still alive. Some are still working at GM. If you know any of them who have or have had lung or gastro-intestinal cancer I want to talk to them because the GM Foundry was filled with silica, including airborne silica, as well as a lesser amount of asbestos. GM must be made accountable to its Foundry workers who died or will die due to lung or gastro-intestinal cancer as a result of exposure to silica dust.

Commentary on Paul Demers’ Report on Occupational Cancer in Ontario

        Early this year Paul Demers issued his anticipated report Using Scientific Evidence and Principles to Help determine the Work-Relatedness of Cancer.   Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development commissioned the report.  It provides critically important insights into what Paul Demers says is “the extremely large gap between the estimated burden of occupational cancer and submitted claims” to Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).  These insights are damnable.  They highlight the fact that the seriousness of the problem of occupational cancer in Ontario is greatly underappreciated.

        A large portion of the blame for this extremely large gap cited by Demers lies with the Ontario’s servile medical profession.  Specifically, his report stresses that medical students in this country receive little training in occupational health.  The result is a serious lack of detection and reporting by medical professionals of patients having occupational or work-related diseases. 

       Demers correctly asserts that improvements in this training would increase the number of workers being compensated for occupational diseases.  Improvements in training would specifically end the current situation where the onus of recognition of when a patient’s disease is occupational in nature effectively falls on the patient meaning the afflicted worker.  In view of this, it is little wonder that on average in Ontario there are only about 170 allowed WSIB claims for cancer annually and a large majority are asbestos related, according to Demers.

       The WSIB shares a lot of the blame for this large gap between the estimated burden of occupational cancer and the number of claims filed at the WSIB for it.  The WSIB facilitated this gap over time by reducing its internal scientific capacity to address occupational disease issues.  Paul Demers points out that the WSIB has no research capacity in this regard making the WSIB incapable of investigating the problem of cancer in high risk industries.  The WSIB is likewise incapable of investigating occupational disease clusters like those exposed at a General Electric plant in Peterborough and in the rubber industry in Kitchener-Waterloo.   It also turned a blind eye to a cancer cluster in a closed GM plant in St. Catharines.

       The WSIB similarly deserves a failing grade because it almost always focuses on establishing whether a single carcinogen is the cause of a worker’s cancer disregarding the possible impact of exposures to multiple carcinogens.  Demers highlights this by correctly emphasizing that exposure to multiple carcinogens can have a synergistic effect.  This results in a greater effect on a worker than the sum of the solitary effects of the exposure to each carcinogen.  This is so important because, as he notes, workers are rarely exposed to just one workplace carcinogen.  The cluster at the General Electric plant in Peterborough made this very clear.

        The cumulative outcome of these failures by the medical profession and the WSIB is a self-induced blindness to reality about occupational cancer in Ontario.  Cancers that are occupational in nature are not being recognized as occupational in nature on a vast scale as a result.  Untold numbers of Ontario workers have died and continue to die from cancer that is occupational in nature without knowing it and being compensated for it.

       Yet, despite this, the Occupational Cancer Research Centre, which Paul Demers is associated with, estimates that approximately 3000 cancers are diagnosed per year in Ontario due to exposure to sixteen of the most well known carcinogens.  The number of claims for occupational cancer have dramatically increased since 2005.  The statistics now show that over twice as many Ontario workers die from occupational cancers as from traumatic injuries.

        These statistics might lead to a conclusion that the situation is in fact improving with respect to workers being compensated for occupational cancer.  But, to the contrary, this report’s revelations constitute abundant reason to believe the problem of workers dying due to occupational cancer is getting worse.  The likelihood of this alone indicates that the WSIB has abysmally failed workers in Ontario who have had and continue to have occupational cancer.  There should be outrage across Ontario in response.

       There is yet another big reason why there should be outrage.  This reason is not addressed in Demers’ report.  Namely, the huge failure to compensate the victims of occupational cancer in Ontario through the WSIB means that the enormous costs associated with their illnesses is wrongly being born by Ontario’s healthcare system.  In other words, Ontario’s taxpayers are bearing these costs not the corporations responsible for workers developing occupational cancer due to their exposure to workplace carcinogens.  These corporations have effectively been getting away with murder for decades with the taxpaying public picking up the tab.

        Paul Demers’ report on occupational cancer in Ontario should make it clear that this must be stopped and stopped in no uncertain terms.  The corporations who bear responsibility for the illnesses and deaths of countless workers due to occupational cancer in Ontario must be made to pay the costs for it.  The WSIB’s negligence must end by forcing it to do whatever is required to make this happen.

Bruce R. Allen is a paralegal based in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Epitaph on the Oshawa Fightback

        The harsh reality of the Unifor – GM agreement to “save” the jobs of Oshawa GM workers is undeniable.  Together GM workers and about 2,500 low paid workers employed by the supplier companies located in and around GM Oshawa will see a workforce of over 5,000 shrink to about 300.  What’s more, the long term employment of the 300 GM workers who will survive the assembly plant’s closure is uncertain.  No one is guaranteeing these remaining jobs to be located in a small stamping operation will survive past the 2020 Unifor – GM contract negotiations.  GM’s promises that there could eventually be up to 500 jobs are as worthless as its unkept job security promises to Oshawa workers in the past.

        The overlooked, poorly paid workers in the supplier operations are the most victimized by this agreement.  They get nothing.  By contrast, senior Oshawa GM workers eligible to retire or nearly eligible to retire can either get lucrative retirement incentives with pensions or the opportunity to fill a small number of job openings the agreement will create in what’s left of the St. Catharines GM plant. 

        Oshawa will be devastated.  To grasp this one only needs to recall how union leaders always said that every auto industry job generates six or more jobs in surrounding communities.  Do the math in order to grasp the magnitude of the economic hit Oshawa faces.  Oshawa only needs to recall what happened to Flint, Michigan after GM gutted its operations there slashing the workforce to a fraction of what it once was leaving behind a desperate population now living with a water supply poisoned by lead.

        This sorry outcome is all there is to show for an ineffective Unifor fightback to save GM Oshawa.  Hampered by a glaring lack of support from the rest of a labour movement (Unifor withdrew from the CLC in 2018), little support from Unifor  leadership where GM has other operations and an impotent boycott that pandered to xenophobia by targeting GM vehicles made by Mexican autoworkers this fightback was little more than a minor nuisance to GM.  Indeed, GM relished the lack of support for the fightback outside of Oshawa.  GM had to be especially pleased by the UAW’s lack of interest in supporting a Unifor fightback.

        Things did not have to turn out so badly.  GM retirees in Oshawa and St. Catharines, who are the backbone of what activism there still is in the auto sector, showed this.  They showed more willingness to fight back than the active members with the notable exception of the Oshawa GM workers who staged brief sit-in strikes immediately after the closure announcement.  The retirees also showed a degree of radicalism absent from auto since the Oshawa Fabrication Plant was occupied during the successful twenty day strike against GM in 1996. 

         Oshawa retirees did this by calling for the nationalization of GM Oshawa and retooling it to produce future-oriented, green vehicle technology.  Likewise, St. Catharines retirees wrote to Unifor President Jerry Dias calling for the plant to be handed over to the workforce and the community to continue operations much like idled factories in Argentina have been successfully occupied and run by the workers who worked in them.

        Unifor’s national leadership disregarded these ideas.  The agreement to ostensibly save 300 jobs is all they came up with instead.

        In effect, the Oshawa and St. Catharines retirees saw the closure announcement as an opportunity to save far more jobs, protect the community of Oshawa and produce non carbon emitting vehicles suited to addressing the accelerating climate change crisis.  Top Unifor leadership and leading federal and provincial politicians inexcusably failed to do likewise.  They weren’t interested.  Just as they aren’t interested in doing what’s necessary to tackle the accelerating climate change crisis.

        Consequently, most of the affected workers face a fate of trying to make it in an increasingly low wage economy involving more and more precarious work.  Meanwhile time is running out to seriously address an accelerating climate change crisis. 

         Every challenge presents an opportunity.  GM’s Oshawa closure announcement presented an opportunity to address the crisis facing these workers and the ecological crisis threatening the planet.  That opportunity was squandered.  It was squandered by leaders lacking vision who demonstrated their subservience to Capital by bending to the will of GM. 

Speech on Mumia Abu-Jamal – January 26, 2019                  

        I would like to focus my remarks entirely on our comrade Mumia Abu-Jamal who has suffered for so very long.   This is entirely appropriate because we could now be at a critical turning point in Mumia’s 37 year-long battle for justice and against his wrongful conviction for the murder of Daniel Faulkner.  Consequently, the possibility of freedom for Mumia remains remote but clearly less so than it did just a year ago.

       Two developments clearly attest to this and show why this could be a turning point.  One is the December 27, 2018 decision by Judge Leon Tucker before the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.  Tucker’s decision allows Mumia and his legal representatives to reargue his appeal before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.  This happened because the U.S. Supreme Court in a prior precedent setting case admonished the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania judiciary stating a fair trial requires that Judges not hear their own cases and decisions.  Therefore, they cannot sit in judgement on appeals of their own making.

      Judge Tucker correctly saw a conflict of interest having recognized that Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille should have recused himself from a hearing on Mumia’s appeal rights given that Castille was the Philadelphia District Attorney when Mumia was earlier appealing his wrongful conviction.  By not recusing himself Castille was effectively denying Mumia an impartial hearing consistent with Mumia’s constitutional rights and the judicial principle of procedural fairness. 

       Earlier Castille had also effectively denied Mumia his right to have a judicial hearing before an impartial person in 1995 by bringing the original trial court judge Albert F. Sabo out of retirement to hear Mumia’s only evidentiary hearing in 1995.  This sordid judicial history makes Tucker’s decision to order a fair hearing a real departure from what Mumia has experienced up till now. 

       Judge Tucker’s decision is actually the first favourable ruling in the 37 year long legal battle and persecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Mumia himself recognizes this.  In a message recorded from prison Mumia commented on the decision by remarking that the proceeding which resulted in Judge Tucker’s ruling marked the first time he has ever been in front of a Pennsylvania judge who was not paid for by the other side meaning by Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police.

      Nonetheless, two days ago the State appealed Tucker’s decision in what is an obvious attempt to block an appeal by Mumia from going forward.  At a minimum this will drag things out and prolong Mumia’s ordeal.  But if the State does not manage to block an appeal from going forward the way is open for a possible new trial in which the suppressed, manufactured and bought evidence that was used to wrongly convict Mumia could be exposed.  In other words, Mumia’s legal team could get the opportunity to reargue their case for Mumia in court armed with uncovered evidence of how he was railroaded in the original trial that resulted in his wrongful conviction and death sentence that was later reduced to life in prison.

      It is also very significant that this important legal development was followed just two weeks later by another development which one of Mumia’s past legal advocates, Rachel Wolkenstein, believes could shed new light on the police-inspired frame-up of Mumia.  Namely, on January 10, 2019 six boxes of legal files relating to Mumia’s case were discovered in an obscure Philadelphia storage room.  This means that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s prior representations to the courts that it had produced the complete files for the courts to review in Mumia’s case has been proven wrong.  Indeed, nothing in the Commonwealth’s database on Mumia’s case showed the existence of these six boxes of files of evidence.

       Rachel Wolkenstein believes this revelation could expose the actions of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office and the Fraternal Order of Police in the handling of Mumia’s case.  This remains to be seen. 

       But there certainly is reason to believe the discovery of these files could unearth buried evidence helpful to Mumia’s case.  Logic and the history of this case would have it that this evidence would never have vanished as it did and remained unexposed in Discovery if it had served the purposes of the prosecution who remain hell bent on seeing Mumia die in prison.  In other words, this new evidence could expose prosecutorial misconduct of the type that has been so often exposed in the hundreds of cases in the U.S. in which the Innocence Project has succeeded in overturning wrongful convictions and having innocent and mostly persons of colour released from prison usually after many years of wrongful incarceration.

     So, given these two, related and potentially crucially significant developments in Mumia’s case there is now a compelling and obvious need for an immediate escalation of the international struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Renewed mobilizations in support of Mumia are arguably as, if not more, imperative than they have ever been precisely because if they are strong enough then they can lead to his exoneration especially subsequent to these developments.  This would spare Mumia from continuing to be subject to what amounts to a slow execution by having him remain incarcerated in a maximum security prison and persistently denied the level of medical treatment he so badly needs and deserves given his age and declining health.  We must act now to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

A Reflection on Unifor Leaving the CLC      Several months ago the National Executive Board (NEB) of Unifor violated Unifor’s constitution by holding a conference call to debate and vote on a motion to withdraw from the Canadian Labour Congress. (CLC)  This action violated the union’s constitution which it makes it clear that such a decision can only be made by the union’s Canadian Council.

     Significant opposition erupted in response to the NEB’s action.   Opposition was particularly evident in Unifor locals based in southern Ontario comprised mostly of autoworkers and auto parts workers.  Out of this opposition came a challenge to the NEB action by way of the filing charges with Unifor’s Public Review Board.To the surprise of many the Public Review Board ruled that the NEB’s action in withdrawing the union from the CLC was in fact done in violation of the union’s constitution.  The NEB’s action stood exposed as illegitimate and illegal.  This was unprecedented.

     Unprecedented and illegitimate though the decision was the NEB did not respond by doing the right thing and reversing the decision.  The immediate response was deafening silence and not the slightest acknowledgement of any wrongdoing.  The national leadership's formal response was to have the issue of the withdrawal from the CLC dealt with at the Unifor Canadian Council meeting in Halifax in mid-August.  It was ratified there with relatively little opposition.

      The ratification of this arbitrary decision was entirely predictable.  It was entirely predictable because no recommendation from a National President has been voted down at a Unifor or CAW national council meeting since 1992.  This is because these councils are effectively rubber stamps designed to give whatever decision or course of action the national leadership wants an appearance of having the support of the entire union.  It shows that Unifor like the CAW before it effectively functions like an anti-democratic, one party state.

      The consequences of this withdrawal from the CLC are evident in labour councils and provincial federations of labour across Canada.  Unifor has been frozen out of these bodies and vilified.  This has been particularly evident at the Niagara Regional Labour Council.  Its absence has had a crippling effect on these organizations and has left Unifor marginalized except when the Liberal Party finds it expedient to grant it status as a “stakeholder” when it serves their purposes.

       In this context Unifor dubiously proclaims ad nauseum that the CLC needs to be fixed.  But its leadership is unwilling to try to fix it from the inside and will not acknowledge that it can never be “fixed” from the outside.  Furthermore, the actions which brought us to where we are now illustrate that there is lots to be fixed in Unifor.  Sadly, the prospects for fixing Unifor are bleak at best and arguably non-existent given that it is an intrinsically undemocratic organization ruled by an entrenched, privileged and self-perpetuating bureaucracy.  Contemplation of the need to build new labour organizations from the base up has consequently become a practical necessity.