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Fed intervention in labour disputes could set dangerous precedent: labour experts

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In an era of increased strike activity and union power, labour experts say it’s not surprising to see more calls for government intervention in certain sectors like transportation.

What’s new, experts say, is the fact that the government isn’t jumping to enact back-to-work legislation.

Instead, the federal labour minister has recently directed the Canada Industrial Labour Board to intervene in major disputes — though the government was spared the choice of stepping in over a potential strike at Air Canada after a tentative deal was reached on Sunday.

Brock University labour professor Larry Savage says that for decades, companies in federally regulated sectors such as airlines, railways and ports essentially relied on government intervention through back-to-work legislation to end or avoid work stoppages.

“While this helped to avert protracted strikes, it also undermined free and fair collective bargaining. It eroded trust between management and the union over the long term, and it created deep-seated resentment in the workplace,” he argued.

Barry Eidlin calls such intervention a “Canadian tradition.”

“Canadian governments, both federal and provincial, have been amongst the most trigger-happy governments … when it comes to back-to-work legislation,” said Eidlin, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University.

Savage said the use of back-to-work legislation peaked in the 1980s, but its decline since then had less to do with government policy than the fact strikes became less common as unions’ bargaining power softened.

But since the Supreme Court upheld the right to strike in 2015, Savage says the government appears more reluctant to use back-to-work legislation.

Eidlin agrees.

“The bar for infringing on the right to strike by adopting back-to-work legislation got a lot higher,” he said.

However, the experts say the federal government appears to have found a workaround.

In August, Canadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. locked out more than 9,000 workers — but federal labour minister Steve MacKinnon soon stepped in, asking the Canada Industrial Relations Board to order them to return and order binding arbitration, which it did.

The move by the government — using Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code — is “highly controversial,” said Savage.

Section 107 of the code says the minister “may do such things as to the minister seem likely to maintain or secure industrial peace and to promote conditions favourable to the settlement of industrial disputes or differences and to those ends the minister may refer any question to the board or direct the board to do such things as the minister deems necessary.”

“The reason why it’s a concerning workaround is because there’s no Parliamentary debate. There’s no vote in the House of Commons,” Savage said.

Not long after the rail work stoppage, the government was called upon to intervene in the looming strike by Air Canada pilots. The airline said that a government directive for binding arbitration would be needed if it couldn’t reach a deal ahead of the strike.

However, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government would only intervene if it became clear a negotiated agreement wasn’t possible.

“I know every time there’s a strike, people say, ‘Oh, you’ll get the government to come in and fix it.’ We’re not going to do that,” said Trudeau on Friday.

The airline and the union representing its pilots reached a tentative deal on Sunday.

Though Air Canada was asking for the same treatment as the rail companies, Eidlin said the Liberals appeared to recognize that would have been an unpopular move politically.

Since the rail dispute, the NDP ripped up its agreement to support the minority Liberals, and Eidlin thinks the government’s intervention was one of the reasons for the decision.

“That really left them with this minority government that’s much more fragile. And so I think they have a much more delicate balancing act politically,” he said.

Section 107 was never intended as a way for governments to bypass Parliament and end strikes “simply by sending an email” to the labour board, said David J. Doorey, an associate professor of labour and employment law at York University, in an email.

For the Liberals today, Doorey said using Section 107 to end the rail work stoppage was much simpler than back-to-work legislation — in part because Parliament was not in session, but also because the Liberals hold a minority government and support for back-to-work legislation from the Conservatives and the NDP would be far from guaranteed.

Eidlin is concerned that the government’s use of binding arbitration to end the rail work stoppage could set a precedent similar to what decades of back-to-work legislation did: removing the employer’s incentive to reach a deal in bargaining.

“This has a corrosive effect on collective bargaining,” he said.

The Teamsters union representing railworkers is challenging the government’s move.

The breadth of the government’s power under Section 107 is “something that the courts are going to have to decide,” Eidlin said.

If the courts rule in the government’s favour, the status quo could essentially return to the way it was before 2015, he said.

But Doorey believes the labour minister’s directive to the board to end the rail stoppage will be found to have violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The rail stoppage wasn’t the first time the federal government used these powers during a recent labour dispute.

When workers at B.C. ports went on strike last summer, then-federal labour minister Seamus O’Regan used the section to direct the board to determine whether a negotiated resolution was possible, and if not, to either impose a new agreement or impose final binding arbitration.

The last few years have really been a litmus test for that 2015 change, Eidlin said, as workers are increasingly unwilling to settle for sub-par collective agreements and employers “still have that back-to-work reflex.”

With an uptick in strike activity, “of course, there will be more interest in government intervention in labour disputes as a result,” said Savage.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.

Companies in this story: (TSX:AC, TSX:CNR, TSX:CP)

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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