On this day in 1978, United Steelworkers union workers in Sudbury, Ontario voted to go on strike to fight proposed layoffs and pay cuts. The strike was the longest in Canadian history until the record was broken by Sudbury workers in 2009.
The layoffs and cuts to pay and benefits were at the multi-national company Inco, which cited low nickel prices as a justification.
According to filmmaker Martin Duckworth, workers voted to strike against the advice of the United Steelworkers hierarchy, and the strike enjoyed national support because Inco was a known polluter and one of the biggest multi-nationals in Canada.
Around 11,600 workers were involved in the strike, which affected the wages sustaining 43,000 people, or about 26% of the population of metropolitan Sudbury. By the end of the strike, nine months later, the company had been deprived of over twenty-two million hours of labor.
The workers won small wage increase and a pension package, however thousands of workers lost their homes and cars because of the length of the strike. According to journalist Amy Miller, since 1979, INCO has fired 20,000 employees from their staff and now have more people receiving payments from the pension roll than pay roll.
The role of women in the community during the strike was profiled in the 1980 documentary film A Wives’ Tale (Une histoire de femmes).
All Out to Support Striking Vale Inco Workers!
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- ⭐️ September Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
now all fediverse discussion will be considered a current struggle session discussion and all comment about it are subject to be removed and even banning from the comm.
have all of you a good day/night 
Playing Cyberpunk (now that I finally have a PC that can run it)
a) The vending machine in V’s apartment is probably the thing that stood out the most to me in terms of hypercapitalist dystopia
b) At least this dystopia seems to have 3rd spaces and a sense of community, I think modern suburbia is way more alienated from one another because of single-family zoning etc, you can’t just leave your house and hang out with people. A part of me genuinely looks at these cyberpunk slums and thinks “man, must be nice to live so close to everyone” even though I know that their life sucks in pretty much every way
You have no idea how much I miss being able to go outside and walking 5 minutes to a street market or community park. How am I supposed to lounge around eating candied haw while the neighbourhood grannies dance to europop remixes of maoist songs when everything is 30 minutes drive away?
That sounds an awful lot like LOITERING to me. Leisure time without paying landowners? Sounds like authoritarianism to me
For real though, as a European, loitering laws are one of the most dystopian things about the US to me
Exist? Better pay or get roughed up and thrown in jail.
its made by Polish devs so its got a bit of European vibes
I think it’s more so that it needs to have this so the city feels alive.
It’s a dystopia, but it can’t be too awful because the player still needs to kinda want to be there and want to roleplay an inhabitant. If it was just stroads and cars everywhere, nobody would want to play this game.
Yea that too. But some of the roads in the game are soooo thin it doesnt at all fit in American cities.