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Mélanie Laroche, a professor at the Université de Montréal who specializes in the relationships between employers and unions, said Amazon’s decision [to close all of its operations in Quebec, very likely because of imminent unionization,] was not a surprise. 

She said Quebec’s labour laws are more restrictive on businesses than elsewhere. 

Amazon currently recognizes one other union, in Staten Island, N.Y. But it has not yet reached a collective agreement with them.

In Quebec, by contrast, labour law would have obliged the two parties to negotiate a collective agreement and could have imposed arbitration on them. 

“Amazon was probably confronted with that imminent arbitration demand for a first collective agreement and wouldn’t have had a choice but to conclude a collective agreement,” she said.

“They’re deciding to close facilities in a province where perhaps the labour laws are much more restrictive for management.”

As for Quebec’s premier, he says this was a private decision by a private company. Like increasing numbers of politicians around the globe, he’s no Union Maid; and indeed the unionizing forces who generated this unfortunate outcome might have considered not only the growing conservatism in many countries – including their own – but also the quite healthy hourly wage Amazon Quebec employees enjoyed until they all lost their jobs.

… Andrew Humiston era.

***************************

From the obituary of Andrew’s father:

Mark is survived by his son Andrew.

Who shot Mark four times at point blank range.

… friends.

Example One: She was chatting with her buddy Peter about Tom Lehrer, and it quickly turned into a competition as to who knew more lyrics and could sing them more convincingly. UD of course won; her parents played and sang Lehrer all through UD’s childhood, and UD has a better voice/vocal memory than Peter.

While UD basked in her victory, Peter said in a musing nostalgic sort of way I remember Tom’s many visits to my parents’ Cambridge house when I was growing up… He was a good friend and very entertaining…

UD bowed to his one-upmanship…

Example Two: Through Peter’s daughter, UD has come to be friends with Alice Hayes, a direct descendent of Rutherford B., and a clerk on the January 6 Committee. Barely out of her twenties, and guilty of nothing, she has just been issued a presidential preemptive pardon!

Preliminary reports suggest a failure of the hotel’s fire alarm system, and a slow response from emergency vehicles.

Whatever happens on Monday, Jan. 20, is not akin to the redemption offered by Jesus Christ. 

When they also run programs, and when it’s a conspiracy, it can be close to impossible.

UCLA – a pretty respectable school – handed the running of its orthodontics school over to a set of buddies who made a point of admitting students from way-rich middle east kingdoms. Once in residence, these students were ordered to come up with, er, supplemental fees in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if they didn’t they’d be out on their oil-rich asses.

Not sure how the school figured out what was going on, but for reasons of its own the school – after throwing the members of the conspiracy out – did nothing by way of prosecution of anyone, and worked hard to keep a report about their malfeasance secret.

As one of the last acts of his presidency, Biden has issued preemptive pardons for Fauci and several other national heroes and heroines who pissed off whatzisname by pursuing truth, justice, and the American way.

SOS says: It’s not a mixed metaphor, but it’s certainly a muddle… To express her anger over the Bidens’ failure to visit her mother while she was in the hospital, Alexandra Pelosi packed every insult she could think of into a mess of a thing in which Lady Macbeth is enjoined to put on her big boy pants and take up football. If you want to complete an effective hit, you need aim and accuracy.

Few people incorporate idiocy and degeneracy as intensely as Unity Mitford did. Reading her newly released diaries from 1935 is a mildly interesting way to spend a snowy afternoon.

A New York high school does absolutely nothing about a violent student brandishing guns.

In an email to Principal Paul Wilbur, Forest Hills teacher Adam Bergstein described [Moshe] Khaimov as “a clear and present danger” who has struck and threatened students and staff, and brought other weapons to school.

Bergstein faulted the city Department of Education for a system of lax discipline.

“Schools are in a constant state of danger because the DOE refuses to hold students accountable for their behavior until it’s sometimes too late,” Bergstein told The Post.

“They rely on restorative justice circles instead of punishing a child when they are dangerous and clearly pose a risk to everyone in a school.”

Only when students made a fuss did administrators rouse themselves a little from their stupor.

The city council. They’ll approve effing anything, especially lounges (bloodbath background here) full of killers.

The mayor has begged them not to, but they all just laugh, y’know? UD doesn’t know whether lounge owners are bribing council members, or whether members just like it in principle when new abattoirs open up, but, you know, welcome to Bama.

Amy Wax loudly espouses views that most reasonable people find repellent. This does not justify punishing her for expressing them. Her suspension, with the other penalties, is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity. 

John McWhorter was right back in October, when he defended the free speech rights of U Penn’s benighted law professor; and now that she has, with great fanfare, sued the university for having imposed sanctions on her, this long sad story will continue for some time to play out.

FWIW, ol’ UD figures she’ll win her case and get herself some money and an apology. Her lawyers can easily point to really disgusting speech from U Penn professors that has occasioned not a peep.

That’d be Jews standing around drinking the blood of Gazans, vs Wax showing her racism. Lots of ick to go around at Penn apparently.

Wax is old and has cancer – maybe Penn thinks it can wait this out.

How tonally appropriate that the composer whose works were wiped out in the Pacific Palisades fire was Arnold Schoenberg. His famous atonality swept us away, said Leonard Bernstein, from Keats’s “poetry of the earth,” from our innate, universal, position in a world which sings harmonically to us, to a weird mystical alien otherwordly place. A place whose utterances we do not understand, but which can generate in us an undifferentiated anxiety.

This is in fact the anxiety of homelessness. Just as the homes of Schoenberg’s son and his neighbors have been swept away, making world and psyche rootless and afraid, so most of the composer’s work literally abandons the home note, the first note of the scale, which we leave and return to in harmonic, non-dissonant, tonal, music — which is to say, in virtually all of the music, classical or popular, we all know. The server who approached UD in a Matera restaurant and asked her to join in with him in singing Volare (he had overheard me singing something else at our table) assumed rightly that UD knows the song because of its simple, strongly rhythmic, redundant lines, inanely reassuring lyrics, and sweet, strong, resolution. On vastly more complex levels than this, our innate tonal drive seems to demand that we be housed in a structurally sound musical universe, that the architecture of music be grounded and sheltering.

We can manage the radical ambiguities of Mahler, but the unambiguously ungrounded atonalities of Schoenberg are a musical bridge too far for most people. He seems to have burned down the musical house.