Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Alberta Worker
628 Plays6 days ago
Labour journalist Kim Siever (The Alberta Worker) joins Jim and Jeremy on the pod today to chat about the AHS procurement scandal, the province's ongoing education strike, and his experience working the labour beat here in Alberta.
Links and full show notes for this episode available at https://www.theprogressreport.ca/kim-siever-alberta-worker
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:12
Speaker
friends and enemies Welcome to the Progress Report. We are your hosts, Jim Storey and Jeremy Appel coming at you from Amiskapchi, West Gagan, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta in Treaty 6 territory.
00:00:25
Speaker
ah Today's guest is Kim Seaver with The Alberta Worker, another great publication that I hope you guys check out. We'll be encouraging you to get on his Patreon multiple times in this conversation.
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm sure we get a lot of email responses to our newsletters and so on from folks saying, oh thanks for for doing this.
Importance of Worker-Oriented Journalism
00:00:50
Speaker
Thanks for, you know, doing journalism from a worker-oriented or leftist point of view in Alberta. You guys are the only ones who are doing it, and that is not true.
00:01:02
Speaker
We are not the only ones doing it. One of the other people who is doing it and doing it very well is Kim. Kim, glad to have you on the show. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
00:01:13
Speaker
And now today we've got some a pretty big stuff in the news and we wanted to do a little bit of a roundup before we get into a discussion of Kim's work.
HS CEO Athena Mensalopoulos Scandal
00:01:25
Speaker
Have you fellas been following the big scandal that dropped last week over at HS involving HS CEO, Athena Mensalopoulos? I've just been reading the headlines.
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. How about you, Jeremy? Well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be doing my job if I wasn't following it in some capacity. um It's, ah yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, you know, see a lot of people online saying that, you know, this is the type of scandal that leads to a government falling.
00:02:03
Speaker
And with all due respect to people who are saying that, and I think that this is an example of a scandal that used to lead to a government following and now is just another day at the office.
00:02:18
Speaker
I honestly think that Daniel Smith is going to be immune to this. i mean, the very fact that the people who voted her in were the same people who got upset when she crossed the floor to the PCs tells you that – i just don't think she's going to have anything happen to her because of this, at least not among her base.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the worst case scenario from you know From the UCP's perspective, is that Adriana LaGrange ah gets thrown under the bus. But so far, Smith is saying, and other cabinet ministers, like I just saw, say Rebecca Schultz, the environment minister, saying that ah LaGrange is doing a great job. So, I mean, again, Smith has...
00:03:00
Speaker
more than 90% support from within her party. The election is not for another two years. i I thought that maybe she would pull a Doug Ford and announce an early election before um this scandal broke. So I don't think she's going to do that now. I think she will wait the full four years. Yeah.
00:03:27
Speaker
But by the time the next
Public and Political Reactions to the Scandal
00:03:30
Speaker
election, I mean, this will probably be in the rearview mirror. And, you know, someone someone will have taken the fall for it. If not the cabinet minister, then, um you know, some AHS bureaucrat.
00:03:47
Speaker
um But I think Smith has ah already insulated herself. From...
00:04:00
Speaker
the idea that she knew about this and was okay with it. Like, I mean, yeah in fact, I think already Marshall Smith now is the implicit scapegoat who's already out of government, right? Like he's the one that the former AHS CEO is saying aggressively pushed for these contracts and he's not government anymore. So I don't see ah this scandal as,
00:04:29
Speaker
concerning as is to people like us who follow these things closely and are following the broader, uh, issue of, uh, AHS being dismantled in sold for parts.
00:04:42
Speaker
I'm not sure most voters will care in two years. No. I, in fact, I think a lot of people, don't even really know much about the the details of this lawsuit or or what has been alleged, uh,
00:04:56
Speaker
We didn't have a lot to say about it last week when Carrie Tate at the Globe and Mail first started dripping out the first little bits of information about it because it it was all allegations from Mensalopolis.
00:05:11
Speaker
And a lot of these documents are not publicly available. you know, her statement of claim wasn't sent out broadly to media. It was only sent out to select outlets. So for people who are just tuning in and haven't been following this story either.
00:05:27
Speaker
maybe Maybe I ought to refresh folks on the details a little bit here. So, Theta Menzelopoulos was until just just a couple of weeks ago, the CEO of Alberta Health Services.
00:05:44
Speaker
as She was a long time bureaucrat who had worked in other senior government ah positions, Bureaucracy positions, not political positions, you know, deputy ministers, that that sort of thing.
00:05:59
Speaker
Although immediately before AHS, she was actually not with a government agency. She was with the AMA, which I think is a little interesting and hasn't got a lot of attention in the discourse.
00:06:13
Speaker
But the AMA were very much at odds with the provincial government over doctor compensation for quite a long time. And so I could definitely see someone from AMA coming in with a bit of precooked hostility against the government.
00:06:29
Speaker
And that's what the government alleges, that Mensalopoulos basically had a chip on her shoulder. they They're brushing away all of her allegations.
00:06:42
Speaker
The Calgary Herald did an okay roundup piece to- today summarizing Mensalopoulos' statement of claim. And so there's some some details in here that I can relate. This is not paywalled. You can just go to the Herald and read it.
00:06:58
Speaker
So definitely go check it out. There's no byline on this one, so I'm not going to say anyone in particular did great work. Before you get into that, Jim, I think maybe we should clarify that when you say AMA,
00:07:11
Speaker
a m a You're not talking about the automobile organization. The Alberta Medical Association. Physicians, not the ah not the car guys, not the car repair guys. I just thought maybe some readers might not realize the difference.
00:07:25
Speaker
So it it sounds like from Mensalopoulos' statement of claim and what she has said to The Globe so far, who are the the main media channel that her her council seems to be going to,
00:07:43
Speaker
She was quite skeptical of the government. It looks like going all the way back to the quote unquote Turkish Tylenol debacle, which if folks have short memories, early on in in the pandemic, there was a shortage in North America of cold and flu medications.
00:08:05
Speaker
And in and attempt to stop look better than the feds, basically, to to look like they could solve a problem that the feds couldn't solve. But also potentially in in ah in an attempt to give a bunch of money to a guy, starting to sound like, but ostensibly and in an attempt to show up the feds, the province ordered a bunch of from a Turkish company and HS ended up not being able to use it.
00:08:35
Speaker
The pharmacies ended up not wanting to prescribe it There were some, um, some dosage differences between the, um, the ibuprofen that you get out here that made it difficult to prescribe to people. AHS found it very difficult to use because it was, uh, it was like clogging up IVs and feeding tubes is my understanding.
00:08:56
Speaker
So, uh, we paid upfront, Alberta paid upfront, uh, millions of dollars, uh, for, for this medication. And, uh, not only did we not end up using it, using most of it, but most of it wasn't even delivered.
00:09:11
Speaker
and no sign yet on whether or not we're going to get the money back there. That seems to have been the first thing that Mensalopoulos was really critical of and started digging into.
00:09:22
Speaker
But the meat of this scandal ah turns out to have not been with this Mraish guy, the Turkish Tylenol fellow, but with chartered surgical facilities, which are private surgical facilities that can be contracted out to ostensibly make up for a lack of capacity in the public system.
00:09:50
Speaker
Mensalopolis is alleging that Marshall Smith and an agent appointed by the provincial government named Jitendra Prasad were pushing really heavily to get them to sign off on um some things. so including these ah perta Alberta Surgical Group facilities.
00:10:14
Speaker
And it sounds like the province paid a lot more than they needed to for these. So this sounds like a ah pretty straight up corruption scandal, right? Well-connected insiders getting hooked up.
00:10:27
Speaker
In the Herald coverage here, we have, for example, they note, here we go.
00:10:37
Speaker
I'm going to have to clean up this little in post.
00:10:44
Speaker
From the Calgary Herald coverage today, the lawsuit alleges an individual named Jatenda Prasad, whom Marshall Smith referred to as his guy, was installed at Alberta Health to make sure that the government could get contracting right.
00:10:59
Speaker
Mensalopolis became aware that Prasad, who had been seconded by hs to Alberta Health in December 2023, and who was involved in the negotiation and analysis of various AHS contracts, had a potentially serious conflict of interest.
00:11:15
Speaker
Prasad had an email address associated with a vendor named MH Care Medical in November
Kim Seaver's Work on Labor Issues
00:11:21
Speaker
2022, just before the then Minister of Health directed AHS to enter into a contract with MH Care for $70 million dollars in children's acetaminophen purchase order and supply agreement.
00:11:32
Speaker
This is the Turkish Tylenol thing. Was I calling that ibuprofen? Acetaminophen. i think ah if anyone gets thrown under the breast, it's likely to be this fellow, actually, Jitendra Prasad.
00:11:43
Speaker
I've never heard of this guy before. ah just love the description of him as one of Marshall Smith's guys. Yeah. Like Marshall Smith going on, ah you know, Mark Maron's podcast. And he's like, who are your guys?
00:11:59
Speaker
And he's like, well, um... This Jitendra Prasad, he's he's my guy. This is Marshall Smith's Mr. Big Balls.
00:12:13
Speaker
It's easy to picture um one of two things happening here. One being either that there are well-connected insiders who are just going to Lagrange or Smith or other people in the government getting hooked up with juicy contracts.
00:12:32
Speaker
But it's also easy to imagine them just kind of bumbling around and being like, oh, we need more we need more surgeons. I know a guy.
00:12:46
Speaker
yeah also like Kramer from Seinfeld, like he's always got a guy who can,
00:12:52
Speaker
you know, help with his get rich quick schemes. This is probably not how you want to do contract procurement. at a gigantic health bureaucracy is to just have a guy.
00:13:04
Speaker
That's probably not a great idea.
00:13:10
Speaker
Well, Mensalopoulos is suing the the Alberta government now for a lot of money. And her statement of claim makes some pretty serious allegations about Marshall Smith, Adriana Lagrange, Marshall Smith's guy, and other people in the provincial government.
00:13:28
Speaker
I guess it remains to be seen how long any of this stink sticks on them and whether or not it really does any long-term damage to the brand. Yeah. As I said, I i don't think it will um because the election's not for two years. I mean, then she doesn't even have a seat in the legislature yet, um which I do think limits, um,
00:13:58
Speaker
His ah you know efficacy as the leader. And yeah, I mean, mind you, we'll see how how how deep it goes. Of course, the Turkish Tylenol fellow um was also the guy who bought the Oilers tickets for the Premier, who sat in his box.
00:14:23
Speaker
O' Not alleging i have no evidence of a direct quid pro quo, but it is context that is worth considering. David O' And some folks have alleged the quid pro quo famously are. David Well, I don't know if I would call him a fellow traveler exactly but another another person who. David Does political commentary.
00:14:51
Speaker
in Alberta, Nate from the breakdown, getting sued by that fellow for a lot of money. Yeah, and I'm impressed that Nate hasn't backed down at all from it. So, you know, obviously I don't agree with him on it on everything, but kudos to him for standing tall in the face of what appears to be a bully.
00:15:15
Speaker
Well, it's ah it seems like a pretty straight-up... SLAP suit, a lawsuit against public participation, right? But um Nate has a a very large audience online and it seems like his crowdfunding to pay his legal bills has worked out.
00:15:31
Speaker
While this AHS scandal stuff is not the only thing stressing the Alberta government this week, they are still dealing with a very serious education worker strike.
00:15:44
Speaker
I'm going around Fort Mac, I'm going around Edmonton,
00:15:50
Speaker
CUPE reported ah last week that five more locals have voted to join the strike in Calgary, Foothills, the Parkland School Division, Black Gold School Division.
00:16:05
Speaker
Doesn't seem like this is going to wrap up anytime soon. Shortly after the AHS stuff, the the scandal stuff dropped in the Globe The provincial government released a very belligerent statement about the strikes.
00:16:24
Speaker
Did you guys see this one on the 11th, the statement from Nate Horner and and Demetrius Nikleds? About the QP national attacks? o Oh, yeah. Very spicy language in this one.
00:16:37
Speaker
i had forgotten about it briefly, um but yeah, I did see him... allege that this is all conspiracy from uh qp national to um you know weaken conservative governments across the country or something along those lines yeah i got the statement in front of me here ah here's here are a few choice quotes from it qp national union with ontario-based leadership is interfering in what should be local negotiations between school boards and qp locals
00:17:09
Speaker
And in other areas, using tactics of fear and intimidation to prevent deals from being signed.
00:17:16
Speaker
I mean, they really have the gall to say something like that when they're forcing school divisions on what they're allowed to negotiate at the bargaining table. So like there's these workers, over 6,000 workers haven't been able to negotiate
Kim Seaver's Journey in Journalism
00:17:30
Speaker
with their employer.
00:17:33
Speaker
And then and then the government comes in and says that, The National Union is interfering in bargaining. I mean, I've been in correspondence with the CUPE people quite a bit over the past couple of weeks keeping track of this stuff.
00:17:49
Speaker
And it doesn't seem like CUPE National is really all that involved here. I mean, obviously, they would be contributing a a little bit, but this does seem very much like a provincially driven effort.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, is it surprising that a right-wing politician doesn't understand ah how the labor movement works rather is pretending to so not understand how the labor movement works for political expediency?
00:18:18
Speaker
No, I don't think it's ah it's surprising at all. When they talk about tactics of and fear of fear and intimidation, ah what they are talking about has been...
00:18:29
Speaker
pressuring scabs to stop showing up. they ah They mentioned it a little more specifically here in in the UCP release too, with one example quoting from them.
00:18:44
Speaker
In Edmonton, after nurses were contracted to administer insulin and other medications to medically fragile children, CUPE pressured the nursing agency to withdraw service, forcing those students to stay home.
00:18:55
Speaker
And that wasn't CUPE doing that. That was a grassroots movement. It's like CUPE posted about it. And then a bunch of people contacted the, the third party private company that provides nursing, um contacted them through phone, email, Facebook page, all that sort of stuff. So that's where they got the pressure from.
00:19:16
Speaker
It wasn't the union doing that. Certainly not the national office. No, no. I, I mean that, I don't know if you can call saying, um, uh, Hey everybody look at this. They're calling in scabs.
00:19:30
Speaker
Just making that statement. I don't, I don't think you could call that a tactic of fear or intimidation. And on their Facebook page, the company said that they had no idea that they were being used as scab labor.
00:19:41
Speaker
they They didn't realize that they were crossing the picket line. So they said, had they known they wouldn't have done it. I mean, i'm I'm going to take them at their word, but that's what they said. Oh, good on them. You know, even if they're saying it after the fact, um,
00:19:54
Speaker
They're not the only company that got mixed up in this too. I received, and I think we have shared on on our social, some reports by CUPE and by the locals of other companies being brought into SCAB, ah janitorial companies.
00:20:10
Speaker
there There were some allegations from Fort Mac, for example, that they were bringing janitor contractors in at night ah sneaking them in at night and then doing a pretty shoddy job of the cleaning and and escaping in the morning before the picket would come up.
00:20:27
Speaker
And some schools are also trying to get teachers to do some of the work that EAs used to do as well. Yeah, trying to get subs sub substitute teachers to come in and do it. If you are a substitute teacher listening to this, I hope hope you treat those those work offers with the disrespect they deserve.
00:20:46
Speaker
Nobody wants to be a scab. Well, I wouldn't say nobody, but That's true. We did just do a big, a big, long research series on, on private nurses replacing public workers, didn't we?
00:21:01
Speaker
yeah i mean that they those you know technically wouldn't be scabs because they're not being brought in during a labor dispute um and obviously uh health care workers right to strike is constrained um you know given that uh they're health care workers um but um Yeah, I mean, they they they still i mean serve the function undermining collective bargaining, while at the same time costing the government even more money than they would by just bargaining in good faith and paying their nurses well and treating them with respect.
00:21:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, CUPE did not respond very delicately to that government press or press release. they They put out one of their own ah the same day. So this was a this was on the 11th, on the Tuesday. We're recording on Thursday the 13th here.
00:22:06
Speaker
So in CUPE's response, they say, the outrageous statement posted by the Alberta government today is full of falsehoods and baseless attacks. The UCB government that repeatedly claims it is not involved in bargaining with education support workers is very quick to comment on the matter and involving itself to an unprecedented level.
00:22:24
Speaker
Once again, rather than step up to the plate and negotiate a solution to the classroom problems they've caused, the government chooses a smear campaign. Local 829 in Medicine Hat was put under administration for reasons unrelated to bargaining.
00:22:37
Speaker
The former executive chose to meet with the school district after being informed that they were put into administration. Therefore, the deal they signed has no force or effect. However, the administrator will pursue bargaining with that school district until further notice.
00:22:50
Speaker
The timing of the UCP attack is to draw attention away from five strike votes happening right now. Those are the five locals we just mentioned a few minutes ago. And the release of polling data showing that UCP supporters don't even side with the government when it comes to the strike and education issues.
00:23:05
Speaker
There is no injunction from the ALRB preventing picketing. Rather, CUPE and the school district entered into an agreement that picketing would not delay school buses. And they also mentioned what you were just talking about, Kim.
00:23:17
Speaker
Nurse Next Door in Edmonton withdrew from
Political Leadership and Labor Unrest
00:23:20
Speaker
offering services to Edmonton public schools after claiming that they didn't realize that they would be replacing striking workers. This was not due to pressure from CUPE.
00:23:29
Speaker
Alberta has the lowest per capita education funding in albert in Canada. Instead of engaging in smear campaigns, the government should come back to the table and address the issues that their lack of funding has provided. So,
00:23:42
Speaker
I mean, these guys are just throwing punches at each other at this point.
00:23:47
Speaker
i I really don't see there being an amicable solution to this anytime soon, which is tough because there are a lot of kids out of school right now. I mean, i are there any kids in school right now in for in Fort Mac unless they're in the private system?
00:24:06
Speaker
No, but I think that you know we've seen over the past six years that the UCP has been in power, that they thrive off of chaos and uncertainty and conflict. and Especially conflict, yeah.
00:24:22
Speaker
discord um and so you know just add uh you know eas to the list of uh ucp scapegoats along with environmentalists and justin trudeau or soon mark carney uh um the alberta ndp and jagmeet singh right i mean know pretty long enemies list and uh uh you know the labor movement has always not been treated respectfully by conservative governments or progressive governments for that matter.
00:25:00
Speaker
So, but the, the, the way that they're used as, as this scapegoat and weaved into this conspiracy narrative is, I think very typical of the type of politics um that Danielle Smith and Jason Kane before her represent.
00:25:21
Speaker
It's pretty easy to, i think for them to get away with putting forward a very misleading narrative about any sort of labor issues, because there are not really all that many people in the province on the labor beat.
00:25:37
Speaker
I think this would be a great time for us to segue over to talking about your work, Kim, because you are one of the people who is like laser focused on the labor beat and on journalism,
00:25:50
Speaker
oriented towards the working class in Alberta. ah Why don't you tell us a bit about your project down in Lethbridge and some of your some of the stories you've been working on recently? Sure. So actually, April will mark five years since I first wrote a new story that prompted me to switch my career to journalism full time.
00:26:14
Speaker
And so the Alberta Worker is an independent startup media outlet um focused on stories about the working class. I originally started talking about just politics in general, Alberta politics mostly.
00:26:30
Speaker
ah But after a couple of years, I started to focus a little bit more on labor issues, especially as I started to do the monthly um labor report that Statistics Canada comes out.
00:26:45
Speaker
I started providing the most comprehensive coverage of the Alberta job market every month. And then it just started um transitioning from there as I started covering collective bargaining agreements, striking, I provided the most comprehensive coverage of Starbucks organizing in Lothbridge, you know, things like that. And I just noticed that I was doing primarily worker related articles not so much political articles that i get used to and so i rebranded in the spring of 2020 to become the alberta worker prior to that it was just kim siever news and part of the rebrand as well was trying to get people to take me a little bit more seriously i often would see people commenting on what's kim siever news and this is just some guy's blog you know those sorts of things
00:27:34
Speaker
not really taking me seriously, seeing me as a legitimate news source and rebranding helps me to do that. I've seen a lot more people on the right sharing my articles since the rebrand than I did prior to that.
00:27:47
Speaker
So that's been kind of nice. um Yeah, so i lately some of the work I've been doing is a lot of collective bargaining. So every month the mediation services of the provincial government publishes what they call the bargaining update.
00:28:06
Speaker
And in it, they released the most recent collective bargaining agreements that they've received. So they published one earlier this month for all the ones they received in January, for example.
00:28:20
Speaker
And so i most of my work is done going through those bargaining agreements and checking to see what's changed from the previous bargaining agreements. A big central focus is wage increases, but then I also talk about other changes as well. Changes to benefits, changes to work hours, new holidays, vacation time, all that kind of stuff.
00:28:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's some fun stuff in there too, if I could jump in. It's ah it's not all nuts and bolts, by the way. If you're hearing and you're getting the impression that the content over there is a little dry,
00:28:56
Speaker
Uh, there's some really fun stories that pop up about grievances too. That's some of my, find my favorite stuff to read on your Patreon. What I've always appreciated about your work, like besides the fact that it's so prolific, like you're you're constantly um coming out with stories um and you know shining light on things that you would have to go through some like dry ah reports or you know stats can
00:29:29
Speaker
data to get to um but i find that you do a really good job demystifying uh numbers right because we know that governments not just conservative governments but especially conservative governments like to play with numbers and there was a story from i want to say a couple years ago maybe a few years ago about um the the the job numbers in alberta and how the ucp was claiming oh look we added all these jobs in you know
Economic Factors and Political Spending
00:30:00
Speaker
the two or three years since we came to power um and you broke it down and it's like well first of all poppy like like it the amount of jobs haven't kept up with population growth
00:30:14
Speaker
which means that there are fewer jobs per capita, uh, also, um, and growing share of those jobs are part-time jobs, right? They're increasingly precarious.
00:30:26
Speaker
And, um, I, I thought that was a really good piece. Um, and yeah, actually I, I, I had that information in every one of my monthly, uh, coverages of the labor market survey.
00:30:40
Speaker
um to sort of keep track of the percentage of full-time jobs as a as representative of total jobs. and And I always go back to June 2019, because that was the last month before they implemented the so-called job creation tax cut.
00:30:59
Speaker
And there's only been, I believe, five times where it's been over that percent or at that percentage, ah four times in 2023 and only once last year.
00:31:11
Speaker
And all the other times it's been low that percentage. And so the vast majority of the time since June 2019, the percentage of total jobs that were actually full-time jobs has always been lower.
00:31:23
Speaker
So while we have been creating more jobs in absolute numbers, they're a higher percentage of them have been part-time jobs. And that's not even counting the changes in net wages. That's another story i did a couple of years ago.
00:31:40
Speaker
in that Alberta has the the worst and change in real wages. In other words, wages adjusted for inflation. We're one of, I think, either two or three provinces that had a negative real wage growth. In other words, it declined.
00:31:57
Speaker
um And of those three, it was the worst. So we've had the worst change in net in income.
00:32:06
Speaker
That sort of analysis is lacking in a lot of the Go ahead, Jeremy. Well, when we're talking about jobs and we're talking about what are increasingly part-time jobs, that's also not people with jobs, right? Like one person could be working three part-time jobs or two part-time jobs because they can't find full-time work. So that is also another way that, you know, the government plays with numbers to make it seem like everything is great when actually everything is always getting worse.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, and that that sort of analysis is something that you don't really see a lot of in the mainstream coverage of these issues. the you know They don't really have people dedicated to these beats.
00:32:49
Speaker
it's It's more like a press release comes out and they quickly fire it off. and You get kind of a stenography rather than an analysis piece. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the benefits of me doing one article a day is that I can just focus on it and spend the time I need to to get it done.
00:33:06
Speaker
I mean, I don't really blame the reporters themselves because it's... the The blame has to lie at the feet of the news agencies because they're the ones who are um cutting cutting budgets. They're the ones who are cutting positions. They're the ones who are stagnating wages.
00:33:23
Speaker
It's not really the fault of the the reporters who are just trying to do the best they can with the overload, the work the higher workloads that they've been given. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if they get told, you know, here's the here's the presser from StatsCan, write this up, I need this in 45 minutes.
00:33:40
Speaker
that's ah That's a little different from having someone be able to sit down and not just to spend a day researching the piece, but also to consider it in the context of all the research that they had done previously, you know, because you've you've been on this beat now for five years.
00:33:54
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Or the six press releases they're given to write articles on. Yes. The one from StatsCan, four from lobbyist organizations, and then the one from the local government.
00:34:06
Speaker
Or the local cops. Yeah. Or the local cops. Speaking of local matters, how are things going down in Lethbridge? We don't have a dedicated reporter down there. Is there anything our listeners should be aware of that's ah that's in the air down in Lethbridge these days? I'm not sure. I did work on an article recently um that hasn't gone public yet, but I did notice it was for an electrical contracting company that had...
00:34:38
Speaker
workers in Calgary, Red Deer and Lethbridge. And I noticed that they didn't have Lethbridge workers listed in their new contract, which I found was interesting. And they no longer have a Lethbridge office listed on their website. So, so it looks like there are may have been a few Lethbridge electrical kind construction workers who lost their jobs recently.
00:35:00
Speaker
kim could you tell us a bit about sort of how um you're able to find, ah you know, fresh stories that aren't being covered elsewhere in like different angles to things that might be getting um a lot of ah mainstream media coverage.
00:35:20
Speaker
um Like sort of how how do you go about like your research? So, cause your, your, your work is very heavy on like,
00:35:34
Speaker
Numbers and, and and you know. Primary sources. Lots of primary source to add Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like, you're not necessarily going out and interviewing people um about certain things. It's just like, okay, here's here are the facts, you know? And I think that is very valuable in itself.
00:35:55
Speaker
But how what's what's your process like? Yeah, so I, um because it's just me, I don't have the capacity to do a lot of interviews, um to go up to arrange the interviews, do the interviews, record them, transcribe them, and then edit them.
00:36:13
Speaker
It's just a lot of work and I just don't have the capacity to do that. And so I do rely heavily on ah published um sources, whether that's databases or reports, that sort of thing. So all of my articles, or at least the vast majority of them, are ah centered around information that's being published somewhere else.
00:36:36
Speaker
Sometimes it's on the government of Alberta's website, sometimes it's on a union's website, um but therere the vast majority of them center around ah published sources.
00:36:47
Speaker
And because I've been working on labor news primarily or exclusively, well almost exclusively for the last three years, but even before that as well, so more or less for the last three or four years,
00:37:04
Speaker
I've been able to find a lot of the um best sources. So like this is the Bargain Update, StaxCan with their labor market report.
00:37:16
Speaker
A lot of the articles that are written on the labor market report just use the the press release that StatsCan publishes, but StatsCan also attaches to each one of those media releases dozens of data tables. And so that's where I go ah to get some of that information. a lot of the information I publish in my article regarding the labor market report isn't available in that press release. You have to go into the data tables and analyze that data.
00:37:46
Speaker
And so that's where I get that information from as well. um I also go to, there's The provincial government also publishes all the collective bargaining agreements going back over two decades.
00:37:59
Speaker
And so I can go back there and check out um things about publishing, check news releases on different union websites.
00:38:10
Speaker
A lot of them don't publish. and news are news updates, but UFCW Local 401 does a pretty good job of it. AUPE does a pretty good job of it. United Nurses does a pretty good job of it.
00:38:23
Speaker
And then faculty associations are pretty good too. and So those are pretty good sources. And also the provincial government publishes wage tables every month.
00:38:36
Speaker
And what those are is a collection of mostly public sector wages, but some others as well.
00:38:45
Speaker
Just updating what the percentage of rate wage increases were for people. So you can actually go back to, i think, 2015 or 2016 to see what wage increases were like for public sector workers in various sectors, which when I presented presentation,
00:39:04
Speaker
um my talk at parkland institute conference in november a lot of that information i used for some of the data that i shared so there are lots of different sources that i can go to to get that information it's just a matter of being familiar with them so it doesn't take me as long to search although i know exactly where to go where to get the information i'm looking for
00:39:29
Speaker
Well, saving time, not just for yourself, but for for everyone else. Yeah, sure. everyone else Everyone else can know now go straight to you for the information. Hopefully. ah There's just one thing I actually have wanted to ask him because it's something I've always wondered.
00:39:44
Speaker
um that Well, not always, but um since Danielle Smith came to power, we haven't really seen the major like cuts to public services and ah labor disruptions that we really saw under Kenny's tenure, right? With the major cuts to, you know, cross the board right?
00:40:15
Speaker
to uh government and then of course with the pandemic had the the the wildcat strike and the the you know the the sort of growing crisis in public health care not just in alberta but across the country um i'm wondering why you think we haven't seen as much of that uh under uh uh at this point I think it's because on the surface, it looks like she's increasing spending where Jason Kenney deliberately cuts spending. And we're certainly public sector workers are still not making
00:40:56
Speaker
the real wages that they should be based on what inflation has increased at and what increases that they've been getting. And like, for example, educational assistance,
00:41:09
Speaker
have had several years of wage freezes. Some educational assistants have had 10 years of wage freezes. And so while it does seem like while they are increasing spending, um they're still increasing spending at a lower rate than they should be given population growth and inflation. So on the surface, they can make it seem like we're spending more money.
00:41:31
Speaker
So we're trying to make sure that the public sector is growing. when in reality we still haven't caught up from all the cuts that Kenny brought in. And so I think just the optics of it looks different than what, than it did under Kenny.
00:41:44
Speaker
And we shouldn't, um, we shouldn't ignore the fact that, um, they currently do have four locals on strike right now and that have been on strike for several months and potentially five more locals coming up.
00:42:02
Speaker
Um, Plus, they potentially could have another 35,000 people joining them. The United Nurses rejected their latest tentative agreement. And there i did an article on that recently.
00:42:15
Speaker
And there were several nurses who are wanting to have a strike vote right now. and they're wanting to give a strike mandate. So there is the potential. I'm not sure how likely, but there is a potential that we could see nurses also joining them a strike on the strike line.
00:42:30
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that um while they may be ah little more generous on the money side in a total sense, the the labor piece is not better than it was under Kenny.
00:42:43
Speaker
and the
00:42:45
Speaker
Just look at the dispute inquiry board. Jason Kenny never put a 30-day pause on striking like Daniel Smith has. That's very true.
00:42:56
Speaker
And when it comes to money going out the door, even if the spending is going up, I don't think that the type of spending that's getting done is is really impressing a lot of people sending money for medication that we don't even receive.
00:43:12
Speaker
Now you've got the example of these inflated contracts, these allegedly inflated contracts with the Alberta Surgical Group. you know, as you say, the the people on the public side of things are not seeing more money, even if more money is going out the door.
00:43:25
Speaker
The money that is going out the door seems to be going out the door for phantom medication. for overpriced privatized services and for hockey tickets. Yeah, so they can give 2.75% increase over four years for workers in the last contracts. h like it's It's one thing to say, um well, okay, total total spending is not going down or total spending is even going up.
00:43:52
Speaker
But that includes just like massive handouts to the private sector. That's not money that's all going to salaries and wages of public sector workers. Right. Right. Whether it's nursing agencies or right private surgical ah companies, um there's yeah there's there's a lot.
00:44:16
Speaker
If you look at that spending, ah that fits within the sort of framework of neoliberalism, which is always, of course, evolving. Yeah.
00:44:28
Speaker
I think another factor too, i mean, the reason, um another reason i think, uh, is important, uh, to understand why, um,
00:44:40
Speaker
government spending is, is increasing um regardless of how that increases configured is the fact that oil prices have been high for the past few years yeah since Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:44:53
Speaker
So there hasn't really been a need to do the type of austerity that Kenny implemented in his earliest years.
00:45:04
Speaker
And also that he got a lot of that out of the way. So the government can, now increase funding to certain things, but it's still less per capita than it was before 2019. Yeah, well that's very true.
00:45:23
Speaker
Well, I think if you want to keep up on both the the latest when it comes to labor peace and labor conflicts here in the province, but also the hard numbers when it comes to how much workers are actually getting paid out here,
00:45:38
Speaker
You couldn't look for a better source than Kim's work over at the Alberta worker. So whether you're a progress report listener with just a general interest in Alberta politics, or whether you're more involved in the labor movement and and really need the latest and the hard facts, I, I, uh, I can't recommend Kim's work more big, big fans of it here. Um, we even, and we refer to it ourselves in our own work quite a lot. So, uh, I would heartily encourage everyone to head over to TheAlbertaWorker.ca. Is it AlbertaWorker.ca? Not the, right?
00:46:11
Speaker
AlbertaWorker.ca. Yeah, it's TheAlbertaWorker, but the website is AlbertaWorker.ca. AlbertaWorker.ca. And there's ah there's a link there, too, where you can support Kim's work through Patreon.
00:46:24
Speaker
And I heartily encourage you to do that, too. Appreciate that. Thanks, Jim. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Kim and Jeremy. Thanks for joining us once again for a little chat about the news of the day.
00:46:38
Speaker
Before we wrap up, is there anything that you fellas would like to plug? If you want to but not just support the Alberta worker, but if you want to get updates for all the stories, I publish six news stories each week.
00:46:54
Speaker
So Monday day through Saturday, I publish a story each day and you can sign up for a email newsletter also at my website. you Just click on the newsletter link once you get there. And you can also follow the Alberta worker on most of the major social media platforms, and you can follow me on my personal accounts as well, also on most of the major social media platforms.
00:47:15
Speaker
All right, folks, you have your marching orders. Do all of those things and join us soon for the next episode of the Progress Report. Bye-bye.