Faculty at Manitoba’s largest university are on the verge of a strike after their union says it has reached an “impasse” in its contract negotiations, one day before a strike deadline.
Mediation had “failed to produce an agreement that prioritized faculty recruitment and retention,” the University of Manitoba Faculty Association said in a news release on Monday.
Last month, union members voted to authorize strike action, with a deadline set for Nov. 2.
“The University of Manitoba administration has chosen not to invest in the future of our faculty and our university, leaving us no choice except to strike,” Orvie Dingwall, UMFA President, wrote in the release.
The union represents 1,200 professors, instructors, archivists and librarians at the university.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible
for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
This
is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them
on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
This rule
was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that
higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
Thanks
to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating
more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
Normally
one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we
won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply
shortages.
Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
The
companies ran out of room to store the containers, because they could
only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move
the containers off-site.
Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
This
was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it the
economy, at least of the Western United States and potentially of the
whole world via cascading problems. And similar problems are likely
happening elsewhere.
Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.
None
of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word
out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was
calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and
mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go
away
until this guy comes along and tweets about it and action gets taken within 8 hours!
Noises linked to mysterious injuries among US diplomats in Cuba were most likely caused by crickets — not microwave weapons — according to a declassified scientific review commissioned by the US State Department and obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The
report, obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act
request, was originally classified as “secret.” It concluded that the
sounds accompanying at least eight of the original 21 Havana syndrome
incidents were “most likely” caused by insects. That same scientific
review also judged it “highly unlikely” that microwaves or ultrasound
beams — now widely proposed by US government officials to explain the
injuries — were involved in the incidents. And though the report didn’t
definitively conclude what caused the injuries themselves, it found that
“psychogenic” mass psychology effects may have played a role.
