Remember those Porter Airlines workers who have been on strike since 10 January? How the employer was offering tiny or no wage increases and no improvements to the workers’ (and by extension all our) safety?
To that anti-union behaviour you can add the fact that Porter is listed as a user of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (see HERE). As is now well-known, thanks to a few brave RBC employees, this program allows employers to import workers rather than recruit Canadian residents. More importantly, those workers arrive and stay at the whim of their employer, making the abuse of their rights, including their right to organize, inevitable.
Any way you cut it, Porter is a bad employer. But it gets even worse. Adding insult to injury, a major investor in Porter is OMERS, the pension plan for municipal and school board workers in Ontario. Workers in the plan and their unions don’t control OMERS, so OMERS is happy to take union members’ money and invest in anti-union companies like Porter.
In just a few seconds you can send a protest message to OMERS telling them what you think of their investment in this company and asking that OMERS put pressure on Porter to behave reasonably and return to the table with the intent of reaching a reasonable settlement.
SEND AN EMAIL. And please: tell you friends and encourage them to sign-on to this campaign. It is about the Porter strike, but it’s also about how union member’s pension money is invested and why we need to control our own pensions.
