Dorothy Westerman
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 24/04) - Aboriginal people remain targets for discrimination or harassment on the job, says the president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).

Nycole Turmel says challenges in employment equity such as racism or an employer not recognizing one's rights on the job prevail in some workplaces across Canada.

"The other challenge we have is for the union to reach out to these members. They don't feel they are part of a union structure.

"They want to be unionized, but they have problems with the way we deal with them and we accept that," Turmel says.

Turmel, who travelled from Ottawa, was in Yellowknife, Saturday, to attend a national meeting of aboriginal trade workers from across Canada along with other PSAC members.

The purpose of the meeting was to establish a national network of aboriginal workers to address these and other concerns among aboriginal workers.

"We want them to tell us how we can improve on this issue, especially when you look at the North, where there is a large community of aboriginals," says Turmel.

"Yet they are not at top-level jobs and sometimes they are the first to go in lay-offs."

Ideally, a collective agreement identifying these issues and reflecting the reality of the situation aboriginals encounter would be a solution, she says.

In the Yukon, for example, Turmel says an article within the collective agreement specifically for the aboriginal community has been negotiated. PSAC represents more than 160,000 workers across Canada, 12,000 of them north of the 60th parallel.

Lack of education

Darlene Powder, a PSAC member from Fort Smith, says one problem in the North is that many aboriginals hold lower-level positions.

"So as a group of concerned aboriginal members, we want to bring us all forward and not leave people behind so that we are together as a unified front," she says.

Another Northern worker attending the meeting, Donald Robert of Fort McPherson, says his concern is the lack of education regarding the rights of workers.

"A lot of people in smaller communities have no idea that a situation they may be going through at work is abusive or harassment and think it's a day-to-day process," Robert says.

"I think we need to get that information out there to help our people to realize that is not acceptable in the workplace.

"They have a right to feel safe, secure and feel like they mean something to the organization they work for."

Turmel says she sees a brighter future for aboriginal workers across Canada.

"The direction we got from our convention will allow aboriginals to finally get together and share information and be involved in the union on their grounds -- what they want to achieve," Turmel says.