Postal workers are delivering 2 million federal pension and social assistance cheques across Canada despite a lockout Monday as the threat of back-to-work legislation looms.
The 9,000 letter carriers are volunteering to provide this service as they have in past labour disputes.
“Going back to work to deal with the cheques may be difficult under the circumstances,” said Canadian Union of Postal Workers national president Denis Lemelin in a news release.
“But our members understand that our dispute is with Canada Post and the government, not with pensioners and people on low incomes. Postal workers will deliver.”
I'm very glad it's getting done, but how is it that they are able to get at the cheques to deliver them if they're locked out? Locked out means the employer is physically barring them from the workplace.
2.
A 15-year-old girl named Yufeng Tao works piecework in a bra hardware factory in an arid industrial-frontier town in southeastern China. She places 57 U-shaped steel bands, one by one, into a spring. The bands are heated and shaped, and then paired to be used as bra underwires. Yufeng earns a 20th of an American penny for each pair, but she’s a fast learner and is soon making 80 cents an hour, nearly double the minimum wage in the previous factory town where she’d tried to become a human economic dynamo.
Why 57? Surely 60 would be more convenient, since it divides into so many nice round numbers, but why not at least an even number since bra wires must necessarily be used in sets of two? Why not, at the very least, put one less wire in the spring than will fit so she can process them in sets of 56?
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