Memo to Bell employees

Start fighting back now.

In a sane country run by a government that cared even remotely in the idea of the public good, the CRTC would quickly put the kibosh on an idea as obscene as the proposed Telus/Bell merger. This is Canada however, and Federal Industry Minister and market ideologue Maxime Bernier never met a huge conglomerate he didn't love. This has all the uncertainty and suspense as the preordained conclusion of the Alberta Oil Revenues review.

Seriously, I feel like I'm the guy who already survived a night in the house of horrors, running from an axe murderer who escapes and then sees a whole other group of co-eds deciding to party there despite what happened to all those other kids.

No! Don't go in there! The soulless telecom executive will eat your soul and turn your skin into a power tie!

Really folks, CEP members, telecom workers - trust me on this. Start fighting back now.

AGT and BCTel were publicly owned utilities with huge publicly financed and built telecom infrastructures. They were sold for pennies to private interests and ultimately merged into Telus.

Telus, a nonsense syllable word created by marketing staff was first seen on the side of a phone company van in an X-Files episode shot in Canada. A phone company employee gets horribly killed by a swarm of killer bees while climbing a telephone pole.

When AGT and BCtel merged into Telus, management made it clear that they wanted a new contract substantially weaker than what the more militant labor environment in BC had secured for BCtel employees and closer to what employees in Alberta had been able to eke out. Ultimately after years of refusing to bargain in good faith - as ruled by the CIRB the federal labour board - Telus locked out their employees and ground them down till they were forced to take a contract worse than either of the originals had been.

They frequently told their employees how much better the offer was than what employees at Bell got. Expect to be told the exact opposite if the Bell/Telus merger goes through.

And to be clear, this will be a merger the way the Alliance/Progressive Conservatives was a merger. With one side getting swallowed by the other.

My good friend Matthew, who stood on the line with me, has been tearing his hair out over this stuff.

And check out Telus' attempt to wipe out history by claiming ownership of video shot by picketers and news stories about the 2005 labour dispute.