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!

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  • FunkyStuff [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Anyone else feel like they're the only ones who know how to clear notifications? Every time I see someone open their discord they have 99+ unread messages. Email inbox, 99+ unread emails. 500+ messages. Like, dude, just set it to ignore and mark all as read.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, idk. I'm probably getting way less messages/notifications than everyone else

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The thing is, I doubt I am because I'm way more online than my friends. I just know how to right click -> mark all as read when I don't have time to catch up. Don't the notifications stress other people out?

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Set up a spam filter then! TBH I don't know exactly how to do that in all cases but I know I set up a system in my inbox to send some of the most egregious spam mail to spam. I can't imagine it would be too much work to set up.