Tausi Insider

Unifor National President Lana Payne addresses a crowd of Ontario Unifor members at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto on Dec. 2. She implored union locals to push harder and more creatively at the bargaining table. Galit Rodan At a gathering of thousands of Unifor members in early December in Toronto, Lana Payne, president of Canada’s largest private-sector union, was noticeably riled up. Working people, she declared, have been “thrown to the wolves” by a coterie of company executives, corporate barons and central bankers. The latter, she said, are deliberately waging a class war, wielding interest rates as a “sledgehammer” to send the country into recession, because they insist on fighting inflation with stringent monetary policy. As Ms. Payne implored union locals to push harder and more creatively at the bargaining table, her language had a whiff of militancy to it. “The Bank of Canada needs to understand that it is not acceptable to throw people out of work to meet some arbitr...