Your Labour Day message...

...from Sid Ryan:

Labour alone didn’t create Medicare, Canada Pension, Employment Insurance, the 40-hour workweek, child labour laws and minimum wages, pay equity and so many other cherished threads of our social fabric. A broad coalition of progressives from all walks of life -- including labour unions -- made a case to the public and our politicians that everyone deserved these reforms.

The issues, the means of communication and the tactics change and evolve with the times, but this model endures in small and big ways, across Ontario and beyond...

Looking forward, we must commit ourselves to joining with others who share that dream, so together we can lobby, cajole and push businesses and governments to act in the public’s interest, rather than their own. Together, we make the dream of secure, stable public pensions for all a reality. We can move forward on Kennedy’s dream of the world encapsulated by an earlier line in that famous speech. Humanity, he said, held in its mortal hands, “the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.”

Together with our friends -- civil society groups like the Council of Canadians, our fellow private and public-sector unions, progressively-minded politicians, political parties and ordinary women and men who aspire to a fairer, better world for everyone -- we have made and will continue to take action towards making that world a reality.

Individually, none of us has all the answers. Collectively, we possess many.