Holding the Line in the Canadian Pulp and Paper Industry Priority #1: Draw a Line in the Sand to Defend Past Gains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amidst the economic crisis of 2009 and the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, one key strategic challenge for Canadian labour is how to hold the line and protect the fundamental standards and rights in collective agreements. In the weighing of risks, union leaderships are more than aware that either losing a collective bargaining struggle, or failing to rise to the challenge of a struggle, can result in more than a bad contract. Even worse, these defeats can dramatically change the rules of the whole game for the worse. In particular, industry and pattern-bargaining regimes that increase and protect standards for large groups of workers can be undermined or broken. Strategic leadership has never been more important. In my experience, the leadership we need involves several features. First, a clear basis of unity and set of principles that allows members to make choices – often difficult, painful choices. Unions must also have organization that gives a concrete form to solidarity. And leadership must ensure that resources are in place to allow unions to take on a fight to the finish, and to finish it. It is hard to imagine a group of workers more besieged by globalization and the economic crisis of 2009 than Canadian pulp and paper workers. In the past two years, about a quarter of their industry has been closed. Their goals today are certainly defensive, but, in my view, highly strategic. They are making choices, organizing, and struggling to hold the line. In October 2008 at the national convention of their union (the cep), President Dave Coles set out the choice that the union had made. “When this battered industry emerges from this dark period, our ranks will be smaller – they already are. But our pensions, our standard of living and our pattern bargaining systems will be intact.” The pulp and paper industry in Canada has highly centralized bargaining with two pattern systems, a western pattern and an eastern pattern. The two patterns follow each other on key issues like wages and term. Workers in Eastern Canada from 100 local unions and about 50 mills come together in a caucus which develops a common bargaining agenda and selects
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.058 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".