Howard Hampton calls for longer layoff notices and job adjustment committees
Kitchener (2 Oct. 2007) - The Ontario New Democratic Party wants the province to crack down on international companies that kill good jobs to move to cheap wage jurisdictions outside Canada.
"We shouldn't be known as one of the jurisdictions where it's quickest, easiest and cheapest to lay off workers," Hampton said in his campaign for the Oct. 10 Ontario election. "In Dalton McGuinty's Ontario, it is just too easy to close a plant or a mill," the NDP leader said of Ontario's Liberal premier.
Hampton is calling for longer layoff notice periods and mandatory adjustment committees in all cases of layoffs of 50 or more jobs. Companies should also be required to give a one-year notice to allow for the province to intervene and help negotiate a closure agreement, he says.
"In almost every case, companies know well in advance when they might be making decisions like that," he says. "The one-year notice allows workers, communities and governments to come together to look at alternatives."
Hampton is also pledging to double severance packages to two weeks pay for every year worked and to remove the province's 26-week severance cap.
"These provisions exist in many other jurisdictions," Hampton says. "When you see the premier of Newfoundland going to global corporations and saying to them, `I'm here to fight for workers and working families in Newfoundland,' I say where's Dalton McGuinty been (in Ontario)?"
The Kitchener area has lost 6,900 manufacturing jobs in recent years, most of them since 2003.
NUPGE
The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada's largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring that our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE
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