Calling on the Canadian Parliament and Senate.

Former Union researcher speaks out.

April 11, 2008
Injured and Abused Workers Association
Attention : President Wayne Coady

Dear Sir:

The New Democratic Party is not the working man or woman’s party, the NDP segregate and discriminate when it come to representation in either the Provincial Legislature or in the House of Commons . The New Democratic Party mislead voters when it comes to calling themselves the peoples party, when in fact they are the party of the unions. Much like the Liberal and Conservatives are the party of business. I have learned that there is no such thing as a people party , but instead , we have parties party.

I was employed with one of the labour organization as a statistical researcher, there were several similar researchers with other labour federations , all of us were collecting information for the New Democratic Party, provincially and nationally.

We ran surveys to find out if the membership were happy with the New Democratic Party, we also ran a survey to check out how the Workers Compensation System across Canada was treating injured workers, mainly former unionized member. I say former members simply because 99% of all unionized members are dropped because they cannot afford to pay dues if they cannot return to work, taking into consideration they were either denied or terminated from these Workers Compensation Boards, even though they were medically credited with being disabled.

The bottom line is unions truly careless about their former injured members, except for the occasional few who were good at showing up to a protest or to support the New Democratic Party candidate. In other words your first loyalty had to be to the union and if the union liked you, well they could usually pull a few strings with one of the W.C.B’ s unionized staff or caseworkers. It has little to do with being disabled when it comes to making it onto the benefit roster of the Workers Compensation system without a fight, it is usually done under the table with union connection. And since every unionized WCB has a union representative sitting on the Board of Directors, need I say more?

Now there is little I can do to help, but I can assure you, that unions and the New Democratic Party play a role in messing with the lives of injured workers , neither practice what they preach. Unions sit on every single W.C.B board as you have mentioned Wayne, so if they wanted to clean up the abuse and the bad faith these boards are noted for , the unions and their political partner the New Democratic Party could, so why haven’t they?

I must say Mr. Coady you are doing a good job informing the injured workers about union involvement in these Worker Compensation Boards. Keep up the fight. Hopefully Ottawa will strike a Senate Committee to look into the entire Workers Compensation System. There is no question that abuse and bad faith exists, within all of these boards, so what is both levels of government afraid of?

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” - Martin Luther King Jr.


Sincerely

Robert XXXXXS former union policy researcher .