This quarterly CUPE bargaining report is a must-read if you're interested in the state of the Canadian economy and a little bit of crystal ball-gazing. Put together by the folks at the Progressive Economics Forum - all of whom are the kind of economists who keep getting proved right again and again, even though nobody listens. They were even plagiarized by TD Bank. But people keep saying 'yeah, but they have an obvious political bias...' and I quote Colbert: yes, indeed, the truth does have a well-known liberal bias.

There's a unionzation drive on at Queen's right now, to unionize the support staff. To this I say: right-o! I'm already a member of CUPE in my capacity as a technologist, and I have had nothing but good experiences from being a member of a union, except that the pay kind of sucks. (But that's not the union's fault - management continually tries to downgrade employees, so that unionized workers make less than similarly-paid support positions at Queen's. This is changing, our last contract was actually really good, with a few exceptions.)

What gets me is people saying that they don't have the freedom to make more money in a union, that unions are the reasons why pay sucks. They don't seem to understand that the union bargains upwards, and management bargains downwards. Why do they blame the union? If management wanted the salary grades to go higher, the union sure as hell won't stop them! Oh, no, please, don't pay our staff more money! Unions, contrarywise, ensure that you get cost-of-living increases and yearly raises.

So in a staff meeting the other day, one of the support staff asked whether or not they would lose their "flexibility" if a union went through. I stepped up and answered her: only if there is an adversarial relationship between the union and management does the union "stiffen up," to protect the workers. If everybody wants to bargain in good faith, the union has no problems with people doing what they do and stretching their wings and being creative. The union is there as a safety net, not a straight-jacket.

And hey: management already bargains collectively. You already can't go to your boss and demand such-and-such a raise; it has to go through HR and they approve it and they set the salary grades and... well, a single worker already works by the rules set forth by the management collective. A union simply raises the single workers to that same level, of bargaining as a unit with the management, on equal footing.

This morning I attended a breakfast hosted by OPSEU to kick off International Women's Week. There was croissants and fruit and ... most importantly ... COFFEE.

I'm not a morning person. Really, not. And this morning was especially exciting, because it was icy! With the freezing rains! And I forgot my wallet! But it wasn't just me. The bus driver was blinking sleep out of his eyes, and I got the impression that, as long as I didn't have three heads and thus require him to wake up enough to be concerned, that I was welcome to hop on and ride for free. Just don't make any loud noises, OK?

When I got there, late, because I can't catch a bus on time to save my life, I spent an hour with several wonderful women and men who all shared the common cause of believing in women's rights in Canada. We heard a lovely speech from Sister Pauline Lally of the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul about the state of inequality that women in much of the world today face. Then I gave a nice little speech pointing out that, despite what Stephen Harper's Conservatives said when they cut funding for women's rights advocacy, we had not achieved equality for women here in Canada either.

Then there was more coffee.

So, happy International Women's Week, folks. I'll end off with an excerpt from my speech:

Equality is fundamental to our future as a nation. We’ve come a long way, but not all the way. We’ve made a lot of progress, but we haven’t crossed the finish line.

So let us use International Women’s Week to remind us about women’s issues, and carry those thoughts into action in our daily lives, in our homes and at our workplaces. Women’s equality is part of a fair and just Canada ... and, with hard work and constant vigilance, we will achieve equality for women in Canada and around the world.

Cheers.