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Montreal is the site for CUPE’s National Bargaining Women’s Equality Conference – Setting the Table - February 10 to 13.
 
Tuesday night at the conference opening Gloria Mills from UNISON, the largest union in the United Kingdom, will give the keynote address.
 
Mills is the Director and National Organiser on Equality Issues for UNISON and has been a trade union activist for more than 20 years.  She was the first black woman to be elected President of the UK’s Trade Union Congress in September 2005.

Strategies to get women’s issues to the table

Thursday morning’s panel discussion will feature special guests Judy Darcy, Darline Raymond and Armine Yalnizyan.  They will lead a panel presentation on Strategies to make women’s issues bargaining priorities.
 
Darcy is the secretary-business manager of B.C.’s Hospital Employees’ Union as well as a past national president and national secretary-treasurer of CUPE.  Raymond is the coordinator of Action travail des femmes, which recently won a victory against Gaz Métropolitain over its discriminatory hiring practices.  Yalnizyan, an economist and graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations has authored ground-breaking publications dealing with income inequality in Canada.

Cultural program reflects Québec’s best talent

Spoken word artists Queen Ka and Kyra Shaughnessy will be artists-in-residence throughout the conference, gathering information for their performance Friday morning.
 
Thursday evening’s cabaret night features an appealing mix of performers.  From the whirl, beat and mix sounds of Women with Kitchen Appliances to Sofia Baig’s insightful critique of our world from her perspective as a young Muslim woman.  Singer/songwriter Lynda Thalie will perform a fusion of North African and Middle Eastern beats with Occidental sounds.

First conference on bargaining women’s equality

The conference will be CUPE’s first to focus solely on bargaining women’s equality.  It stems from the ground-breaking work of CUPE’s National Women’s Task Force, which presented its finding to the biennial conference in Toronto in 2007.