Excerpts from a Labour Day (September 6, 2021) interview with Kim Novak, president of UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) Local 1518 in BC conducted by David Beer, founding editor of The Tyee.

THERE’S NO GUARANTEE THEY’LL WIN. But that doesn’t matter: not to the 97 hotel workers locked out at the Hilton Metrotown hotel in Burnaby, BC; and not to  all the other unions standing in solidarity with UNITE HERE Local 40.

CALL IT A HOMER SIMPSON MOMENT: the light bulb insight that paying more is a great way to get people to work for you. Henry Ford had that moment on January 5, 1914 when he stunned the world with his decision to double the wages he paid to all his workers. How else to “stimulate the economy”?

The reigning neoclassical model of economics is autistic. It’s so rational it’s irrational.

THE PROTESTORS KEEP COMING BACK. Day after day. For six days in a row on August 4. At the legislature in Edmonton, in Calgary and Lethbridge and many other places all across Alberta. Hundreds of them. Every day. They want the government to drop its decision to make Alberta the first province to throw caution to the winds and simply learn to live with the virus.

CALL IT A SOLIDARITY GAP. It’s the distance between what unions are doing to support the homeless in Toronto park encampments and what they could and should be doing. Many union activists in Toronto are organizing to close that gap.

“I’M LIVING WITH WAR EVERY DAY” is not just a line from the 2006 Neil Young song. It was a reality for all of us then. It is a reality for all of us today. A July 14 open letter asks Prime Minster Trudeau to recognize that reality and reject it.

A TAXI RIDE TO A STRANGE MAN’S BED is not where she wanted to go, but that’s where a 19-year-old Indigenous woman wound up in Winnipeg in 2016. The risk of sexual assault at the hands of a taxi driver was real and ever-present for all Winnipeg women back then. Not now. Not since Indigenous women in the city took collective direct action to protect themselves.

SOLIDARITY MEANS DOING MORE than just enough. Unions prove it every day. None more so than the over 3000 academic workers in CUPE Local 3906 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

THE WESTJET WORKERS SAID “YES” JUST ONCE and they got their union. It doesn’t happen everywhere.