Some 60 press, pre-press and inserting workers at weekly newspapers in Hamilton, just down the road from Toronto, have been on strike since Dec 6. At issue are wages (these are the lowest paid workers in the industry), benefits, and most crucially, the rights of women to equal pay. All of the inserters are women, and the employer refuses to acknowledge their pay equity complaint, has told them they are overpaid, (at barely above legal minimum wage) and has offered them less than male-dominated jobs.

The once left-leaning Toronto Star has become a business bully in the past few years, finally culminating in this bitter strike. The strike has raised the awareness of the degree to which media monopolies can control the news, and can control media workers. There have been NO reports on the strike in the papers on strike, and only two very small pieces in the local daily, which has the same owner. We have twice leafleted the entire city of 490,000 to alert the public to our struggle.

Our Union has now taken the unprecedented step of asking the Canadian Labour Congress to institute a formal consumer boycott of TORSTAR products in Hamilton, including the weeklies (Brabant newspapers) the daily (the Hamilton Spectator), the Toronto Star, and Harlequin Books. TORSTAR, the parent corporation of the Toronto Star, owns and controls virtually all the newspaper media to the west of Toronto, including Hamilton, which is a proud steel town on the shores of lake Ontario. These TORSTAR products are mostly unionized, with our union representing the bulk of those workers. A boycott will surely hurt the bottom line of the publishers, but we fear they will retaliate against our members.

TORSTAR has hired teams of scab labour, who are put up in local hotels, and arrive in blacked-out vans, and who get paid more than twice what the strikers made. TORSTAR had been ordering a female manager to cook the scabs' meals, but has since hired a chef for them.

The CEO in Hamilton is a woman named Jagoda Pike. Her previous claim to fame was contracting out all of the newspaper carriers of the Toronto Star, after our union organized them. Since taking over the Brabant Chain in 2003, she has fired the 600 children who used to deliver the papers, replaced them with the down and out of Hamilton who will work for less than minimum wage, laid off whole departments of the Brabant papers, and now decided that women inserters are not to be treated equitably.

The head of TORSTAR is Robert Prichard. He recently gave himself a 13% raise, a raise which was 3 times what the 60 workers are seeking in total per year!

Your readers can help, by e-mailing or writing to TORSTAR, and telling Mr. Prichard that they will support the boycott of Torstar products, and demanding that he ensure that a fair agreement is negotiated for these workers.

The addresses are
Robert Prichard
Torstar
Corporate Office
One Yonge Street,
Toronto, Canada
M5E 1P9
Telephone: (416) 869-4010
Fax: (416) 869-4183
Email: [email protected]

Jagoda Pike
City Media
44 Frid Street
Hamilton, ON
L8N 3G3
905-526-3431
[email protected]

Thanks

Where's the conflict between union-busting and supporting a multimillionaire who flys flags of convenience on his shipping line to avoid Canadian labour law and taxation?

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when it comes to management practices it is strictly 19th century?

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What's worst is that these print shops were widely known for being "union-friendly". For this reason, several Left and progressive papers based in Toronto were using them, and as a result, were essentially crossing the picket line and using scab labour. This included the Sparts and the Socialist Worker. The irony may be great, but that's about all that is.

To add insult to injury, my own union newspaper prints with these people, and they never even notified us of the strike. They even went so far as to put the union bug on the paper, saying 'made by union labour, CEP xxx' despite the strike.

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Originally posted by mushroom:
I wouldn't expect the Toronto Star to report on this strike as they are directly involved, but are other papers and news media reporting on it? If not, are there any political parties advocating on behalf of the union?

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The dead hand of Robert Prichard -- again.

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Originally posted by CBCMike:
We meet again tomorrow, and are cautiously less pessimistic than before.

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