justrollinon asked: Here's a question.. when strikes and unions come up there seems to be a significant amount of people who like to trash unions and I can't quite figure out why, if they are representing workers well.
Probably because the mainstream media in both Canada and the USA leans to the right and does not communicate what Unions do.
I bet most Canadians have no idea what collective bargaining is or know the exact reasons why the postal workers were on strike.
it benefits companies if people have, and spread, a poor perception of unions because in turn they will then be less likely to form, or support, unions in general. No unions, and companies get away with a lot more towards their employees.
To that effect, there’s a lot of purposeful misinfo spread about unions, and a lot of people are comfortable to just go with what they hear, rather than fact checking it, which is how you end up with a big chunk of the anti-union sentiment.
And because there’s been so much anti-union and pro-corporation propaganda (which includes corporations are people, are benevolent job providers, profits benefit everyone, minimum wage increases hurts their profits too much, etc), unions are treated as a monolith. If one union or a member of a union is bad, all unions are deemed bad.
But corporations? Corporations are individuals so one does not reflect any others. Even within a corporation, blame will be shifted up or down the power structure of workers as needed to absolve the corporation of any wrongdoing.
People are trained to sympathize and protect corporations even if it comes at the expense of themselves. Throw in rampant corporate greed that forces people to live paycheck-to-paycheck and corporations clearly hinting that any thought of unionizing would cause a loss of hours/shut down work entirely with the rest of anti-union propaganda and people get scared at the prospect of any change in the status quo.
“In today’s unanimous decision, the Tennessee Supreme Court explained that, under state law, a life sentence is a determinate sentence of 60 years,” the court wrote. “However, the sixty-year sentence can be reduced by up to 15 percent, or 9 years, by earning various sentence credits (good behavior. & getting involved in prison based education programs while incarcerated) Therefore, the Supreme Court concluded that a defendant serving a life sentence for a first-degree murder committed on or after July 1, 1995, may be eligible for release after serving at least 51 years of the sentence.“
For those of you who haven’t yet caught up to this story:
Cyntoia Brown was a 16 yr old girl, who at the time of the incident was living in a room at a Nashville InTown Suites with Allen (the man who propositioned her for sex) because her pimp and boyfriend Garion McGlothen, nick-named “Kut Throat,” insisted that she needed to earn money.
After Allen took her to his house, he showed Cyntoia multiple guns, including shotguns and rifles. Later in bed, as she described in court, he grabbed her violently by the genitals, his demeanor became threatening and, fearing for her life, she took a gun out of her purse and shot him.
Call Governor Bill Haslam (615)-741-2001. she has a Clemency hearing May 23rd. DEMAND JUSTICE!!
#StayWoke
The parole board split on whether Cyntoia should be granted clemency. /BillHaslam can still grant her clemency before he leaves in January. You can reach him at: phone #: (615) 741-2001; e-mail: bill.haslam@tn.gov
Some Canadians are discovering smoking cannabis legally comes wrapped in a whole lot of plastic.
Nova Scotians who have purchased legal cannabis through the province’s stores have been taking to social media, surprised their paper bags of pot are filled with so much packaging.
Greg MacLean says he was in disbelief when he bought a small portion of marijuana on the first day of legalization at a Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation store in Antigonish, N.S.
“I took it home, and opened it all out and laid out all the packaging,” he said. “That’s when I realized how excessive it really was for just four grams of weed. It’s too much.”
Each different product came wrapped in several layers of packaging, he said.
“I mean, a baggie has been doing the trick for years and year and years now,” he said.
The NSLC, which is the only body in Nova Scotia licensed to sell cannabis, says retailers aren’t in charge of packaging.
Instead, Health Canada has set rules around how marijuana must be packed for sale.
Health Canada says packaging must be tamper-resistant and child-resistant. It must prevent contamination and keep cannabis dry.
But it’s up to the provinces and licensed producers to decide how they’ll specifically adhere to those regulations.
“I’m laying there, scared enough, not wanting this done, telling her I didn’t want it done. All of a sudden I smell something burning. If I could’ve moved my legs I probably would’ve kicked her.”- Brenda Pelletier on being sterilized against her will
Brenda Pelletier checked in to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon five years ago to give birth to her baby girl. She left, with her tubes tied. The tubal ligation procedure happened, she says, after she was pressured into it by hospital staff, while she was in a vulnerable state.
And as a Métis woman, Brenda Pelletier’s experience appears not to be an isolated case.
At least three other aboriginal women have come forward to say that they too were pressured to be sterilized at the Saskatoon hospital in recent years.
Ok but this is true!!! I was 19 years old when i went into the hospital to give birth to my first child and while i was laying in bed reading and signing consent forms i came across one that woukd give them.permission to tie my tubes. The nurse kept telling me i didnt have to read them all that they were all about my stay in the hospital and intake forms and when i began to read that particular form the nurse came to me laughed nervously and said well we put that in there just in case you wanted to get your rubes tied. I then asked if they always gave them to woman giving birth she said no, the doctor had asked for thematic be put in there “just in case” I didnt want any future children. The nurse then went on to ask me about my future and if i was really sure i wanted to have more children or not. Until my mom came intimate room to check up on me and the nurse then took all the papers from me and left. For the rest of my delivery the nurses refused to give me medication for the pain or an epidural saying it was too early for that and it might stop my labour. I honestly think they withheld pain medication and the epidural to show me how hard child birth can be. Afterwards when they were releasing me the nurse asked me again if i was sure i didnt want to get ny tubes tied. Which i said no to. She then went on and explained thaf if i did i woukd just have to make an appointment with my doctor and i would be in and out in no time at all. That is my experience with the Canadian healthcare system and being a native woman. It is wrong that anyone would try and force something like that on a 19 year old. Please share. Let it be known what is happening to native woman. We have rights just like any other woman and shouldn’t be pushed into suxh decision at such a young age.
Hey white folks with uteruses who do not want or should not have kids,
you know how you’re outraged about how hard it is to get a Doctor to agree to sterilize you even to save your life?
Guess what else they do? Double your outrage.
And those two issues are not unrelated. White supremacy pushes an idea of who should be having kids and who shouldnt. White, abled women are prioritized especially ones who arent poor, they should have many kids, to further white supremacy, while those deemed “undesireable” (people who arent white, people who are disabled, people who are poor and uneducated and especially people who are more than one of those things) should be kept from having children for the good of society.
So when doctors refuse to sterilize white, educated women who want it, they are functioning within the same thought process as when doctors sterilize non-white women against their will.
Since this article came out in 2016, a class action lawsuit has been filed by two of the victims.
The history of birth control in Canada is riddled with this racism and white supremacy. Some of the first women to get birth control? People of colour and poor white people, because non-white babies were a threat and if you were poor and white you were considered bad stock.
If you were reasonably well off and white, you couldn’t get birth control because it was considered your duty to pump out white babies of good stock.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise it’s going on to this day. Canada and women’s rights in Canada are founded on racism and genocide.
I don’t know if this debate will kill any remaining chances of Doug Ford becoming Premier.
But it should.
Doug Ford put on one of the worst debate performances I’ve seen, ever, by any leader, in any country. He was lying at a rate worse than Donald Trump.
If Ontarians watched that debate and elect Doug anyways, I’m not going to have much sympathy. Not after there is a credible alternative to both Wynne and Ford, who handily won the debate tonight; Andrea Horwath.
An experimental conservation project that was abandoned and almost forgotten about, has ended up producing an amazing ecological win nearly two decades after it was dreamt up.
The plan, which saw a juice company dump 1,000 truckloads of waste orange peel in a barren pasture in Costa Rica back in the mid 1990s, has eventually revitalised the desolate site into a thriving, lush forest.
This is the greatest thing I’ve read in a long time and I want this experiment replicated everywhere as soon as possible.
My town would be a good start.
the funniest part is that everyone is so surprised.
“composting kitchen waste makes plants grow. who knew???”
well… everyone?
It’s not so much that they’re SURPRISED about it. That was actually the original plan.
This juice company agreed to donate a few acres of its own land to a bordering national park, and compost orange peels there to help restore the land. They were subsequently sued by a rival juice company for having “defiled a national park.” The law sided with the rival company, and the project was discontinued early.
This isn’t so much a “Wow SO SURPRISE!” as a “FUCKIN’ TOLD YOU SO!”
Plus also, sixteen years ago, we might’ve known the answer to the question “What happens when you compost kitchen waste?” but we DIDN’T know the answer to “What happens when you dump 12,000 tons of orange peel on 7 acres of ecologically depleted wasteland?”
And for the first six months, the answer was, “7 acres of nasty-smelling, fly breeding ex-fruit sludge, and a lawsuit from a rival juice company,” but 16 years LATER we can say, “A 176 percent increase in above-ground biomass, and a study site so transformed we couldn’t tell we had the right place until we dug the sign out of undergrowth consisting mainly of native shrubs and grasses, SUCK IT, TICO FRUIT!!!!”
