Imagine you are a union member who pays dues off every paycheque to have the union protect your job, then one day you find out your dues are being used to make your job obsolete.
That’s what’s happening to plenty of members of Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union.
Unifor announced this month it is joining a lawsuit to try to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline. What is shocking, is Unifor says it represents “35,000 members who are employed in oil and gas extraction, transportation, refining, and conversion in the petrochemical and plastics sectors.”
More than 10% of Unifor’s members work in an oil- and gas-related sector and yet the union is fighting to shut many of those jobs down.
“Unifor stands united with the groups demanding that the federal government stop reckless pipeline projects and invest in greener jobs that can support families,” union president Jerry Dias said in a released statement.
According to Kai Nagata, the energy and democracy director of the Dogwood Initiative, Unifor has also joined his environmental group seeking to have the British Columbia government block the Northern Gateway and even Kinder Morgan pipelines.
So now we have Unifor funding or supporting the opposition to two different pipelines and they are also on the record opposing the Keystone XL pipeline.
Unifor is fighting against its own members, its own interests.
Why?
Maybe because they have a deeper commitment to the far-left groups they fund than they do to the hard-working Canadians who fund Unifor with their dues money.
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