Walmart
Excerpt from hansard
Official Record of the Ontario Legislature
Andrea Horwath, MPP for Hamilton Centre, made the following Statement in the Ontario Legislature on October 20, 2008 regarding the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and its valiant effort to help Wal-Mart Canada workers:
Labour unions
Ms. Andrea Horwath: Last week, all members in this House would have received this booklet entitled “We will make a difference: the Wal-Mart Canada Corporate Social Responsibility Report.” Dead centre in this expensive booklet is a page where Wal-Mart claims to support and respect workers’ rights to join a union. That’s a very contradictory statement considering Wal-Mart’s recent actions to close down stores rather than deal with its newly unionized workers. It’s impossible to believe when Wal-Mart has no organized workplaces in Ontario and was engaged in nasty union busting activities in Windsor in the late 1990s. The United Food and Commercial Worker’s Union, under the leadership of Wayne Hanley, has been waging a valiant and concerted fight across Canada to bring Wal-Mart workers under the union umbrella of fair wages, good benefits, and improved working conditions. Without a union, workers must settle for low wages and no security. The UFCW is taking Wal-Mart to the Supreme Court over the company’s shutdown, last week, of its oil and lube centre in Gatineau, Quebec. This follows Wal-Mart’s closure of a store in Jonquière two years ago, after workers there unionized. Wal-Mart doesn’t care about bettering the lot of its workers; Wal-Mart shareholders make a fortune on low-waged workers. I hope that retail shoppers will shop at places that really respect—truly respect—and support their workers. Wal-Mart isn’t one of them, despite its claims of “making a difference.” It’s the wrong kind of difference.
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As New Democrats, we support UFCW and all our labour organizations that fight to improve wages and working conditions for our workers here in Ontario. We stand up for workers and their right to good jobs, good union representation, good pensions and good benefits.