Business Unions Sell-out B.C. General Strike Summer 2004

"When the working class unites, there will be a lot of jobless labor leaders." Eugene Debs, 1905 speech

Prepare the General Strike Against Capital and its State Because the Unions Won’t

CONTENTS
Suppose they called a General Strike and we all came? What would they do?


Introduction: Grabbing Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
The Unions Betray Workers (again) by Eugene Plawiuk

B.C. returns to normalcy after hospitals workers' strike, but anger lingers Greg Joyce, Canadian Press

B.C. Workers' were not adequately represented by their union.
Arron, Indymedia

Thanks for Nothing, Jim Sinclair
Jesse Winfrey, Secretary-Treasurer,Cowichan Valley Local, HEU

Union leaders sabotage action, Socialist Alternative

Lessons from the B.C. Healthcare Workers' Strike
Barbara Biley – CPC-ML

General Strike Betrayed by Union Bosses
Le Humanitae

Union Leaders Darkest Hours Page
Members for Democracy (MFD)

Unions Narrowly Avert General Strike in B.C.
Wage Slave X, Class Struggle Bulletin

NDP Governments in British Columbia-Strikebreakers Page
Solidarity Caucus, B.C.

Fightback - Solidarity Caucus formed in B.C.
New Socialist Magazine Sept/Oct 2004

Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW

The Principles of Revolutionary Unionism
International Workers’ Association (IWA)


Also See These Online Articles:
What Happened in British Columbia? By Kimball Cariou July / August 2004 Canadian Dimension


Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.
Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, Addressed to Working Men, The First International Working Men's Association, 1865.


Grabbing Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
The Unions Betray Workers (again)

Eugene Plawiuk

As the bell tolled the eleventh hour on Sunday May 2, health care union leaders in BC trembled in fear that workers in the province would shut it down in a General Strike. The fear was palatable as they rushed to settle a deal with the Provincial government no matter the cost to their members. Indeed their fear was rational, though of course not reasonable, as they faced jail time and fines if the workers continued to strike. Yes once again like the businessmen they are, the trade union leaders looked at the bottom line and sold out their members for a bowl of pottage.

The betrayal of the health care workers tells a story that has been going on in Canada since 1995, when these same unions sold out the laundry workers in Calgary who went on a wildcat strike, which almost sparked a General Strike in Alberta. (See my article TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK ALBERTA ).

Four years later in 1999 the political party of the labour movement, the NDP in Saskatchewan betrayed its health care workers, by legislating them back to work, which is illegal under the ILO agreement Canada is a signatory to. That strike was divided as well between competing unions, which failed to unify and create a general strike. In this case it was because of the close relations between the unions and ‘their’ political party, that thwarted the possibility of a General Strike. (See my article THE HOT SPRING OF 1999 IN CANADA ).

The fact is that the “workers party” in Canada has betrayed workers in many provinces when it has gained state power. It did so in Ontario and in B.C., (which the Solidarity Caucus documents below) even before Campbell’s Liberals came to power. But workers in B.C. who have experienced this, were once again cajoled by their union bosses to give up the General Strike for yet more of the same, support for the B.C. NDP in the next election. When faced with workers power, the unions run back to the arms of the NDP and electoral politics. This is the only politics they know or are willing to embrace; parlimentarianism (the lowest form of politics).

Given any opportunity to lead, the unions mobilize their members raise their expectations and then either declare it a one day strike, or head in the opposite direction of where the enemy is . In 1974 Joe Morris and the CLC threatened the Trudeau government with a national General Strike over their wage and price control legislation. This quickly ended up being a one day National Day of Protest. In the 1990s Buzz Hargrove of CAW and Syd Ryan of CUPE were vociferous in their calls for a General Strike against the Harris government. But that only ended in a series of one day rotating strikes shutting down select cities. And as they effectively began to lead to a province wide General Strike, they where stopped. And again the labour leaders pushed for electoral politics to replace the Tories with the NDP.

And when it comes to running in the opposite direction that was the case in Quebec city at the FTAA meetings, when the federal government built a wall around the city to keep protestors out. The protest was at the wall, and on the token protest day that labour bring out its members did it go to the wall No it went in the opposite direction to hold a one day protest picnic against Globalization. The action was at the wall.

This is a special issue of Le Revue Gauche, as it contains more than my own writings on the matter of the B.C. General Strike that almost was. There are a wide variety of perspectives but all are from rank and file militants. There are Anarchist, Trotskyist (Le Humanitae and Socialist Alternative), Class Struggle Bulletin, New Socialist Group, Marxist-Leninist, the Solidarity Caucus that emerged after the sellout, and from Members For Democracy a rank and file group, and shop floor perspectives.

We end with two classic declarations of syndicalism; the Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW and the Principles of Revolutionary Unionism of the IW

I would be remiss not to mention that while workers in B.C. were being sold out, in New Foundland public sector workers staged a mass strike, and were sold out once again, by the supposedly left wing social union CUPE.

After having taken their members out for a month, and failing to defeat the government in its plans, they returned to the table with the taste of ash in their mouths. Of course this should be expected when the Head of your union plays golf with the millionaire Premier.

It would have been depressing indeed if the workers at an Alcan factory in Quebec had not seized their factory, in protest of the companies plan to close it. Despite pleas and begging from their union, the left wing CAW, to return the factory and go back to the bargaining table, these workers took direct action and occupied the factory for a month. During that time they continued producing and increased productivity and output under workers control.

CAW, that militant bad boy union of Buzz (the mouth) Hargrove, did as all unions do and condemned the workers and demanded they ‘bargain in good faith’, bargain what, the loss of their jobs.

CAW made a further mistake when bargaining for its rail unions in CN. The usual auto business bluff and bluster at the bargaining table was then to be supplemented by a one day show strike by the union. But the workers would not return to the table. CAW thought the issue was wages, and failed to listen to their members who said that like all other workers at CN the issue wasn’t wages but harassment and bullying by the employer. That was personal, and every worker had a story about the oppressive working conditions under the Privatized management of the corporation. This is why the workers refused to accept the CAW contract, which gave them a raise. It failed to protect them on the job from the shit heaped on them daily by the bosses. Instead of a one-day show strike, the rank and file forced CAW into a two month strike.

This mistake arose from the merger of a variety of craft unions and running trades into the CAW. And the CAW Inc. failed in its acquisition of new members to really listen and learn their issues. Hey Buzz knows best.

So workers can resist the leadership of their unions and take matters into their own hands. How far will they go without militant rank and file organization? The articles here all show that without militant organization of rank and file activists, then the workers will continue to be led down the road of sell out and concessions.

Even those who would normally call for ‘changing leadership’ in the unions, running leftists for executive positions, concluded

“Our position would have been to call for the creation of extended strike committees based on hospitals with representatives from local work places and community groups to spread the strike and provide democratic leadership, thereby preventing the betrayal.“ (Le Humanitae page 14.)

Exactly, the only way to spread the general strike is through autonomous worker committees, not union committees. The militant call for worker self activity leads to opportunities not only to propagandize for a General Strike, but on the eve of that strike call for the creation of workers committees. The next step; workers and community councils.

And while the Fightback Solidarity Committee and the Members for Democracy arise from these struggles, they still reflect, as do the political activists in the union, a failure to understand what is really needed in Canada for an effective mobilization of the working class; One Big Union. Not a mergers and acquisitions formula for bringing all the existing unions in Canada together, but an OBU of militants.

Rank and file militants in unions, working class radicals, and political leftists need to quit their sectarian labour caucus approach to organizing in the unions and adopt a OBU strategy. To create a militant layer of class conscious class struggle workers ready for every picket line, to create revolutionary situations out of every struggle. In other words syndicalism, creating a broad-based working class revolutionary union recognizes that every strike is a battle in the Class War.

There is a revolutionary union that is dedicated solely to this purpose that will celebrate its 100th anniversary, in 2005, as the only existing class struggle union in North America; The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

And it is the only organization that can combine organizing the unorganized along with organizing the unorganized militants. This is the dialectic needed to succeed in creating a working class opposition to the trade union and social democratic leadership in the workers movement in Canada. It is the only organization that recognizes we are all workers regardless of our place in the hierarchy of capitalism. And it is the only organization to recognize that dialectic: “The employing class and the working class have nothing in common.” Let’s hear Buzz, Georgetti, Sinclair or the rest of Landlords of the House of Labour say that. And of course it is the only union that still has as its revolutionary watchword: Abolish the Wages System.

So why aren’t all our militants joining the IWW rather than forming sectarian political caucuses of leftists in unions? This has been tried before and the result is CUPW.[1] And while the best of a bad bunch, it is still an industrial union with a syndicalist structure it is not a revolutionary union.

Before we can build an OBU of workers in Canada we need and OBU of the militants.

The history of the unsuccessful General Strikes is the history of the betrayal not only by unions but by political parties of the left as well. In Germany after WWI the SPD in Germany called a General Strike, and workers massed aimlessly due to the fact the SPD leadership had no plan of what to do after they called the strike, in fact they were surprised by its success. They could have overthrown the government of Weimar at the time, but failed to take advantage of the dual power situation the General Strike had created.

And that is the problem of the General Strikes in Latin America, and Europe they fail to take the next step. They mass people on the streets to protest, not to seize power from the State and Capital. And by seizing power it would mean creating our own power through mass democracy, mass meetings, and the creation of from below mass strike committees.

As Rosa Luxemburg states it is not enough for a General Strike of workers, that strike must expand to all of society to become a mass strike.

“The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become.”
(The Mass Strike 1906)

The power created by this mass strike, is the refusal to accept the conditions of society dominated by capital and its state. The proletariat creates their own organizations, organic mass democratic organizations of councils, workers councils in the work place and community councils in the neighborhood. This was the case in Argentina when its economy collapsed. But even this is not enough if their focus is merely to ameliorate the crisis rather than confronting the origins of that crisis, the domination of capitalism.

This is the real purpose of the OBU to fight now for workers rights but to always push towards the General Strike, to broaden it to the Mass Strike and ultimately the creation of a dual power situation, social revolution. Without the development of an organic militant rank and file movement in the working class, not merely a union but a class struggle organization, all our political movements will be for naught. We remain small sectarian grouplets, of little interest to anyone but aficionados. The historic lessons of class struggle will be lost. And the leadership of the workers movement will fall back to the union bosses and their political party the NDP, to be betrayed again an again.

Build the OBU of worker militants against the bosses unions.

October 2004

[1] Canadian Union of Postal Workers. In the 1970’s a wide variety of left groups in Canada sent their rank and file cadres into the factories to join the working class. The most successful intervention of the Left was in the Canadian Post Office, and resulted in two postal unions merging to form the militant CUPW, which is in effect the only mass syndicalist union in North America. Today every left wing sect has members and caucuses in CUPW. Previous executives have included members of CPC_ML, CP and Trotskyitsts.

"The workers movement has been integrated into official society; its institutions (parties, unions) have become those of official society. Moreover, labouring people have in fact abandoned all political and sometimes even trade union activity. This privatization of the working class and even all other social strata is the combined result of two factors: on the one hand the beauracratization of parties and unions distances these organizations from the mass of labouring people; on the other rising living standards and the massive proliferation of new types of consumer objects and new consumer life-styles provide them with the substitute for and the simulacrum of reasons for living. If the term 'barbarism' has any meaning today, it is neither fascism nor poverty nor a return to the Stone Age. It is precisely this "air conditioned nightmare”, consumption for the sake of consumption in private life, organization for the sake of organization in collective life, as well as their corollaries; privatization, withdrawal and apathy as regards matters shared in common, and dehumanization of social relationships." Cornelius Castoriadis (Pierre Cardin) from Recommencing Revolution, Socialism or Barbarism, France/Solidarity UK 1964.


B.C. returns to normalcy after hospitals workers' strike, but anger lingers

Mon May 3, 7:11 PM ET

GREG JOYCE

VANCOUVER (CP) - The chaos of a strike involving thousands of public sector workers was averted, but health centres were faced Monday with catching up on missed surgeries and some union leaders faced an angry membership.

The labour dispute, which would have amounted to a near general strike in B.C., was averted late Sunday night in an agreement involving the Hospital Employees Union and the government. Despite the settlement, there was sporadic job action as some pickets lingered in front of some hospitals in Kelowna, Nanaimo and Victoria.

Some union leaders bore the brunt of their members' anger in the wake of the settlement.

The government defended its imposition last week of Bill 37 - the back-to-work legislation - and in reaching the agreement Sunday night.

Premier Gordon Campbell said the HEU "wasn't interested in negotiating so we brought in Bill 37 to protect patients and create a flexible framework to allow us to reach a resolution with an arbitrator."

Finance Minister Gary Collins said health support workers still have a sweet deal under the new contract which reduces their wages and benefits by 14 per cent over two years.

"If you look at the collective agreement that's there, the package that they have with up to nine weeks vacation, 18 sick days, previously a 36-hour work week, the agreement is way more generous that you'll find pretty much in the public sector let alone the private sector."

The union represents a broad range of skilled and unskilled workers, from cafeteria and cleaning staff to licensed practical nurses and technicians.

The dispute renewed debate in some circles about whether to ban strikes in the health sector.

Labour Minister Graham Bruce said outlawing strikes in the health sector is not the answer, but he's considering making changes to public sector bargaining in British Columbia.

"I believe there is a better way to resolve public sector disputes," he said. "The industrial labour relations model around public sector negotiations doesn't work. We've seen that it hasn't worked and maybe it needs some adjusting."

In a related development, arguments opened Monday in B.C. Appeal Court over government legislation two years ago that broke union contracts.

Four B.C. unions covering health workers, nurses and government employees are asking the province's highest court to declare Bill 29 unconstitutional.

The union's lawyer, Joe Arvay, wants the court to recognize that there are constitutionally protected aspects of the collective bargaining process.

Although the lingering pickets Monday at some locations sputtered, union anger in some areas didn't.

HEU spokesman Darryl Pinkney in Nanaimo, where pickets were up at a transit yard, expressed anger at the settlement.

"Most of our members feel that it's not over. Most of our members feel that it's unfair and there's nothing that changed."

Susan Barron, a lab technician at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, said she and her co-workers had been sold out by their own union.

"All I can say is we have the ability to bring in new leadership this fall and that's what we will be doing. We've been sold out."

Sandra Giesbrecht, a member of the union's local executive in Victoria, also directed her invective at the union's executive.

"You know what, they didn't consult us. They were incommunicado. I understand they were sequestered but we're tired of them making decisions without feeling the pulse of the membership."

At a small rally outside Vancouver Hospital, another HEU member who didn't want to be named said the dispute was about "saving public health care, not about rollbacks."

She refused to believe that HEU members were paid more than their counterparts elsewhere.

"I don't believe those statistics," she said. "The cost of living is higher in B.C."

The HEU's secretary-business manager, Chris Allnutt, tried to assuage some of his members' anger.

"All of our members shouldn't be happy with what has happened in Victoria," said Allnutt. "The imposition of the legislation is absolutely abhorrent and our union said No when we were in free collective bargaining.

"There's no question that workers have been done in by this government."

Allnutt said he didn't support pickets remaining up in the face of an agreement.

"In terms of members still being on the picket line, we directed our members to go back to work and most members are accepting the union direction."

Other sporadic picketing went up at public transit yards in Victoria and at two ferry terminals - Swartz Bay and Departure Bay - but both terminals were soon cleared of pickets and ferry loadings resumed. Sailings were delayed, however.

The deal also averted a widespread shutdown of B.C. schools by unions supporting the health-care workers.

Since the dispute began last Sunday, about 6,000 surgeries have been cancelled as well as tens of thousands of diagnostic tests such as X-rays, CT scans and MRIs.

Louise Simard, president and CEO of the Health Employers Association of B.C., said the surgeries were primarily non-urgent surgeries.

"But the impact is enormous because it makes the waiting list longer and takes us months to get back to where we were."

It could easily take up to a year and perhaps longer to catch up, she said.

Viviana Zanocco, a spokeswoman for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, said that people who were bumped by the job action won't necessarily be first in line when surgeries resume Tuesday.

It depends on the doctor and his operating time schedule, and the seriousness of the medical problem compared to others.

"Doctors can bump down the line or reassess now, or wait," she said.

The number of surgeries missed in the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, the largest, numbered almost 1,300, including almost 3,800 diagnostic procedures.

The deal caps the number of full-time union jobs local health authorities could contract out to 300 in each of the next two years.

The premier said the cap was offered last week, but the union membership refused to discuss it.

The deal provides for a $25-million severance package for workers laid off between 2002 and 2006.
The union will also exercise its right to ask an arbitrator to sit down with both sides to negotiate exactly how a 10 per cent rollback in members' wages and benefits would be worked out.

Another four per cent in savings will be realized in extending the work week from 36 to 37.5 hours.

B.C. Workers' were not adequately represented by their union.

http://victoria.indymedia.org/features/labour_poverty/
by Aaron Wednesday May 05, 2004 at 06:37 AM
lakeheadmill@yahoo.ca

I wanted to publish this article that I found on Yahoo! as it includes many lessons that are not brought to the surface. The day following May Day, the real labour day, an international celebration of labour, the 'union representatives' of the B.C. health workers' silently ended the strike. It should be noted that the strike was just gaining momentum as many other unions, and other folk, pledged to endorse the strike. On monday, a general strike was slated to take place. This strike had the makings of a firm stance against the bosses of British Columbia, and the potential to act as a catalyst for a widespread stance. Unfortunately, the non-revolutionary business union, that are often kept in the pocket of the bosses, dictated the people back to work, against many of the strikers' desires. Many of the B.C. workers' are dissatisfied with the outcome. The important lesson here is that unions often do not represent the workers they purport to help. Until we begin to organize for ourselves, in a democratic, non-hierarchical fashion, the potential of the struggles of working people against their bosses will continually be flanked by the business unions. I hope you read the following article to get an idea of how upset many of these workers really are, and the crummy deal that was shoved down their throats by their 'representatives', just as momentum was beginning to build.
Aaron

Thanks for Nothing, Jim Sinclair
by Jesse Winfrey [Repost by Grey Tigers] • Monday May 03, 2004 at 09:15 AM

Thank you for selling me and my 43,000 sisters and brothers out tonight. You couldn't get off the band wagon fast enough either. I want you to tell me and the rest of your sacrificial lambs exactly what you personally gained by agreeing to this complete and utter betrayal.

Dear BCFED,

Thank you for selling me and my 43,000 sisters and brothers out tonight. You couldn't get off the band wagon fast enough either. I want you to tell me and the rest of your sacrificial lambs exactly what you personally gained by agreeing to this complete and utter betrayal. We have seen big labour in the form of Dave Haggard taking deep draughts from the trough of late, but I had no idea the rest of BC's labour movement was as greedy and spineless. Obviously, all the press about pocket lining by the big boys is true, why else would you cave in to this outrageous agreement after so much rhetoric by Alnutt, O'Neill and Sinclair. You had no intention of carrying out any form of General Strike, ever, you simply got all of your memberships revved up on the false pretense of global job action that was never intended to occur. I am sickened by your complete lack of any kind of testicular material.

We have suspected for some time, especially since catching our own health authority in a lie about signing dates, that all the multi-national deals were signed some time ago. You have simply been going through the motions, as they did, of stringing the workforce along to continue providing the best level of health care on the planet while you secretly set yourselves up for career change, retirement or pay-off until all the preordained start dates for contracting out could be reached. I'll bet the threat of law suits by Compass, Sodexho, Aramark et al was the true incentive for the government to ram legislation through that you simply rubber stamped on my behalf after leading us down the garden path of defiant political protest.

The extra turn of the screw will come when the "I told you so" from the media darlings start and I have to walk the halls of my workplace looking into the eyes of the public and management. Thank you so much for adding to the humiliation and degradation your self serving act has wrought on us. You have fulfilled Campbell's mandate to crush a full percent of the provincial population in spirit and dignity. Thank you also for handing us further into the arms of fascism by allowing Bill 37 to remove any last remaining vestige of impartiality in the mediation process. I need now only look to the Labour minister appointed arbitrator for streamlined decisions that will solidify the end of collective bargaining forever.



On a personal note, I have beat my head senseless for two and a half years educating and mobilizing members for this day of retribution for working people, only to have the day that Mr. Sinclair would never even name evaporate in a puff of smoke. You have brought the end of solidarity to the very people you expected it from, and I don't doubt that the subsequent self destruction of the HEU from within as demoralized local executives crumble will surely satisfy Mr. Campbell's sociopathic blood lust to crush me simply because I am represented by a now very apparently toothless union. He is laughing his ass off right now and all his sycophant minions are joining in for a good round, again at my expense. You may have bolstered support for his political demise, but by next May, most of us with any fight will be contracted out and will never benefit by any turnaround in law.

I hope you are truly proud of your gutless achievement today, and please don't hesitate to expound at length at meetings and conventions about how labour in BC will rise to fight again, just as you nearly rose and fought for me for the better part of an afternoon today. I am nauseous with rage and anger for you and will not be placated with a pat on the shoulder in your forthcoming tearless apologies. You are puppets of the regime and I expose you to the light.

In complete and total solidarity with the people you just screwed to the wall,

Jesse Winfrey
Chief Shop Steward, Secretary-Treasurer
Cowichan Valley Local, HEU
Duncan BC





Escalating industrial action threatened general strike in British Columbia

Union leaders sabotage action

Socialist Alternative, Toronto
http://www.socialistworld.net/

In a period of seven days, a strike involving 43,000 health support workers
- cleaners, orderlies, cooks, licensed practical nurses, accountants and
others - escalated to what was to be a general strike in the Canadian
province of British Columbia. But the magnificent action was sabotaged last
Sunday night by leaders of the Health Employees Union (HEU) and the British
Columbia Federation of Labour.

The strike began Monday April 26 over government demands that the workers
accept the government's plan to reopen the existing collective agreement in
order to impose layoffs and wage and benefit concessions, amounting to over
C$900 million worth, including a wage cut of up to 17%. Over 85% of the
union is female and many of them are immigrants or women of colour making
them some of the most vulnerable workers in the public sector. The strike
escalated as the BC nurses' union vowed not to cross picket lines

The neo-liberal government of Gordon Campbell has become increasingly
unpopular among workers due to privatisation, cutbacks, and attacks on
workers rights over its three years in office. Anger at the government, and
outrage at its treatment of workers, led to universal sympathy with HEU
strikers, and a growing solidarity, first by other public sector workers,
and then by workers in the private sector.

Incredible sign of working class unity

Workers in the province were outraged when, last Thursday, the government
passed 'back to work' legislation which implemented a 15% pay cut,
retroactive to 1 April. Not only did the strike remain solid as workers
defied the law to continue what was now an illegal strike, but many other
public workers across the province walked off the job in solidarity,
including ferry workers and many teachers. Private sector workers shut down
a pulp and paper mill in Prince George and the Teamsters' union announced
they would not cross picket lines. Many individual Teamsters left work and
joined the HEU pickets. Building trade workers and other members of
supposedly "conservative" craft unions were also preparing to walk off the
job in an incredible sign of working class unity.

Over the weekend, the movement escalated into what became a wider action
with 100,000 workers, including transit workers and teachers prepared to
walk off the job on Monday. It was anticipated that by mid-week the action
would escalate to a full scale general strike, of not only public but
private sector workers that would force the government to back down or even
push them out of power.

On Sunday, the courts ruled the continued walkout illegal and threatened to
impose heavy fines against the unions and jail union leaders. As workers
prepared to shut down the province their leaders met with the government to
sell them out. The HEU union tops, in consultation with the head of the
province's Federation of Labour, agreed to a "settlement", in which the
workers would accept a 10% wage cut and work 2.5 more hours a week, in
exchange for the number of positions contracted out being limited to 300.

Picketers, and indeed workers as a whole, were outraged when they woke up
Monday morning to the deal and to demands by their leaders that they go back
to work. A number refused. Picket lines remained in places and workplace
closures occurred sporadically around the province. But, without a fighting
organisation of socialists in the union, there was no structural backbone in
place for an organised defiance of this betrayal.

The past week's events have reminded the working class of two important
lessons. First, that workers consciousness and solidarity can crystallise
very rapidly into a militant movement that few would have thought possible.
The supposed divisions within the working class that separate private sector
and public sector, white collar and blue collar, can quickly evaporate, as
workers instinctively recognise that they have more in common with each
other than with their bosses.

Second, that the union bureaucracy cannot be trusted and workers must build
grassroots socialist movements in their unions. These movements can fight
for militant action and also provide leadership during struggles when union
bureaucrats try to sell out workers.


Lessons from the B.C. Healthcare Workers' Strike
A New Beginning: Tackling the Issue of Who Decides

- Barbara Biley* -
The Marxist-Leninist Daily Website: http://www.cpcml.ca/
Email: editor@cpcml.ca

The anger felt by healthcare workers when they were ordered back to work at midnight on Sunday May 2 by their union was equal to or greater than the anger that they felt when they were declared criminals by the Campbell government before dawn on April 29. This anger was shared by thousands of school board workers, ferry workers, teachers, mill workers and others who had supported the healthcare workers all week and had made all the necessary preparations to begin walking off their jobs just hours later. Already workers in several cities had walked out: city workers in Kelowna, Hydro workers in Prince George, Vancouver, Comox and other cities, along with registered nurses at St. Joseph's Hospital in Comox and several other facilities and millworkers in several cities. These actions were taken in solidarity with healthcare workers and for the purpose of forcing the government to back down on its anti-labour Bill 37, the bill that imposed a contract including a 15 per cent wage rollback and other indignities on healthcare workers while flaunting the Campbell Liberals' determination to continue privatizing healthcare and laying off and blacklisting Hospital Employees' Union (HEU) workers.

In the week following the end of the strike and political protest by healthcare workers, workers demanded to know what took place, why their leaders took the actions that they did, and why the workers themselves were not the ones to decide. The leaders described the irascibility of the employers, who demanded massive concessions in "bargaining" and refused to accede to the union's demand to put a freeze on contracting out during negotiations and to come to an agreement providing job security. They described the heavy-handed, anti-democratic, arbitrary and anti-worker actions of the government which rammed Bill 37 through the legislature overnight, the Labour Board ruling that ordered the union to direct the workers to comply with the legislation, the Sunday morning session of the B.C. Supreme Court which found the union in contempt for refusing to order the members back to work. They explained that their assessment was that the battle could not be won by the healthcare workers alone so they called in the officers of the B.C. Federation of Labour, who participated with them in discussions with the government which resulted in a softening of the blow -- a cap on layoffs for the next two years of 600 full-time equivalents or approximately 900 workers, and an agreement that the workers would not have to pay back the "extra" 15 per cent that they earned from April 1 to May 1. They said that had they not agreed to this "deal" they would have lost the support of the leaders of the other unions. They said that the "offer" was on the table for only an hour. They said it was the hardest decision they had ever made. They said that they assessed the situation and determined that although there were workers taking their own decisions all over the province to walk out in opposition to the government's attacks on healthcare workers, there would not be a general strike to bring down the government. They said that the issue of submitting their decision to the members does not arise because this was not bargaining and the union constitution only requires that the members vote on (a) a negotiated settlement or (b) a decision to take a bargaining dispute to arbitration.

Workers feel greatly dissatisfied with these answers since they beg the question of the need to oppose the bid by governments to act with impunity and call it the rule of law. It is clear that the unions had set up no apparatus to back up the workers across the province who were ready to back up their demands with job action. It is not merely a question of whether or not union leaders were ready to face fines and prison but of the infrastructure required to defend locally fired workers both in terms of putting legal collectives in place and independent news media which would smash the silence on local activities.

There is one further twist to the story. Bill 37 gives the workers two options on the reduction in compensation. Besides a legislated 4 per cent decrease in wages resulting from the increase in the work week from 36 hours to 37.5 hours, there is a choice regarding the remaining cut. There is to be either an 11 per cent decrease in the hourly rate or the union can agree to apply for binding arbitration in which case an arbitrator who will be appointed by the government will cut the compensation package by 10 per cent. This 10 per cent cut can come from health and welfare benefits, leave of absence provisions, vacations, statutory holidays, on-call, shift and trades premiums, overtime and wages. The leaders of the union will leave this decision, whether to take the 11 per cent cut or go to arbitration, to the members, and have said that they will make no recommendation one way or the other.

This struggle of healthcare workers, like the strike of the ferry workers in December, has once again brought to the fore the issue of who sets the agenda in Canada and, ultimately, who decides. Who decides social and economic policy at the federal and provincial level? Who decides what wages and working conditions are acceptable to workers and how the workers will fight to defend them? The events in B.C. show how governments are putting everything at the disposal of the rich. It must not pass.

The Campbell government, like the federal Liberals and provincial governments across the country, are stepping up the anti-social offensive by restructuring the state to make it all "lawful." On the one hand they are handing over everything that belongs to the people, including the healthcare system, to the monopolies, and privatizing everything from the ground up in healthcare. The smashing of the defence organizations of the workers is an integral part of the anti-social offensive. Since their election in May 2000, the Campbell government has interfered directly in contract negotiations at least seven times, imposing contracts on registered nurses, medical technicians and teachers and forcing ferry workers and woodworkers into compulsory arbitration.

As a result of the wages and working conditions that they had negotiated over many years, healthcare workers, mainly women, have remained at their jobs for years. The healthcare system has benefited from a stable, well-trained workforce which is critical to the work that they do. In the past two years, since the passage of Bill 29 by the Campbell government in January 2002, which stripped collective agreements of language that prohibited contracting out, housekeeping, laundry, food services and patient care have been contracted out. Thousands of healthcare workers have lost their jobs. All but a handful have been blacklisted. They have been replaced by modern-day slaves supplied by the modern-day slave-traders, Sodexho, Compass and Aramark. These modern slaves are fewer in number than the workers they are replacing. They receive the bare minimum training, little more than minimum wage and work under constant threat of dismissal. Their health and safety and the health and safety of the patients and residents in the facilities in which they work are endangered. They leave as soon as they are able to find better jobs.

The workers of B.C. are stepping up their resistance to the Campbell government's attacks. The strike struggle of the ferry workers in December 2003 aroused widespread support. The strike struggle of healthcare workers brought out thousands of organized workers and massive public support. Registered nurses are negotiating now and the teachers' contract and that of CUPE school board workers will be negotiated soon.

In just under one year there will be a provincial election. Should the workers bide their time, knuckle under to what the government is imposing and hope that the Liberals will be defeated and replaced by the NDP? This option is more and more being rejected as a false solution. Discussion is increasing on how to renew the democracy so that it is the workers and people who make the decisions that affect their lives and put in place the kind of infrastructure they require so that they can put the full weight of their numbers and organization behind their decisions. The issue they face is that the right to fight for their rights is criminalized. This is what they have to challenge. Only by defending their own interests and involving the entire polity in setting the agenda for society and renewing their organizations so that they can adequately address these concerns can the workers defeat the anti-social offensive. Far from looking for saviours in this or that union or political party, the workers will see that new leadership emerges from those who come forward to effectively wage the struggle for democratic renewal of the society and their own defence organizations. The recent experience of the healthcare workers' struggle has brought this issue to the fore.

* Barbara Biley is a healthcare worker in Comox, British Columbia and the Marxist-Leninist Party candidate in the B.C. riding of Nanaimo-Alberni.


CANADA: General Strike Betrayed By Union Bosses
Workers vow to continue illegal strike
L’Humanité Editorial Board

43,000 hospital workers in British Columbia have been sold-out by their union leaders. Despite the workers defying the government in an illegal strike, mass wildcat strikes by other unions, and significant support from the public, the labour bureaucracy has signed a deal containing a 15% wage cut. This was done behind the backs of the workers and currently reports are coming in of strikers vowing to stay on the lines in defiance of the government and their "leaders".

Hospital ancillary workers, mainly women and members of immigrant communities, represented by the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) have faced the brunt of the attacks by the BC Liberal government. Their demands were no contracting out and no wage cuts. However, under modern capitalism even asking for the status-quo is a revolutionary act.

Upon coming into power the BC Liberals, led by Gordon Campbell, instituted a $2 billion tax cut with the majority going to the rich and corporations. To finance this tax cut the workers were asked to sacrifice, and if asking did not do the job then conditions would be imposed. The Liberals passed legislation that ripped up the HEU’s collective agreement by removing any protection from contracting out ancillary hospital work to non-union firms. This was despite the fact that Gordon Campbell had promised not to do this in the HEU’s own newsletter prior to the election. This act prompted mass demonstrations, chants of "Liar, Liar!" and the call for illegal job action.

The leaders however vacillated and did nothing despite the fact that the very existence of the union was in jeopardy if all its work was contracted out. One year ago the HEU leadership attempted to broker a deal outside the normal contract cycle in order to lessen the effect of contracting out. They recommended to the membership a contract with a 15% wage cut and a cap of "only" 5000 jobs contracted out. The workers correctly rejected this deal by 57% due to opposition to the wage cut and the belief that it was impossible to believe anything this government said. Having been defeated in their attempt at moderation the HEU leadership was forced to take the road of militancy. The HEU’s contract expired April 1, 2004, setting the stage for a confrontation with the government.

Canadian capitalism is at a crossroads. Federal, Provincial, and Municipal governments are all following the dictates of their corporate masters and are attempting to cut back on public expenditure (read: jobs and services). In Canada 17.5% of the population are public employees, compared with 14.6% in the USA and 12.6% in Britain (down 7% in a decade). Assuming relatively constant wages, this puts the Canadian capitalists at a disadvantage when it comes to keeping their profits. They are faced with the choice of attacking public sector workers or seeing their international market share shrink. It is the capitalist system that forces the government to act this way – if they try to keep people happy the economy suffers; if they attempt to improve competitiveness they incite revolt. The BC Liberals have chosen class war and the health workers have answered their challenge.

The strike begins

On April 24, the HEU pulled its workers and set up pickets at all of the hospitals in British Columbia. Essential service workers were allowed to cross, however elective surgeries and diagnostic tests were cancelled as nurses respected the picket lines. The employer was insisting on a contract with 100 pages of roll-backs including a 15% wage cut and no barriers to contracting out. At this point 6000 jobs had been lost to multinational firms such as Sodexo and Aramark which pay their workers $10/hr compared with the union wage of $18. They justified this by saying, "Why should a hospital cleaner get any more than other cleaners on minimum wage?", the union members asked back, "Have you ever tried to clean a SARS ward?"

Everybody was expecting the workers to be legislated back to work. Despite its "progressive" reputation and labour laws, Canadian governments have been resorting to a nasty little tactic. When the workers are on strike in a key industry, and the resolve of the workers is such that it is only a matter of time until they win, governments have passed emergency legislation to remove the right to strike and enforce a contract or arbitration on the workers. Unions that defy the legislation face fines and imprisonment.

The Campbell Liberal government has used back-to-work legislation more often than any government in history and has even earned a rebuke from the ILO for its undemocratic behaviour. This tactic is especially useful when a government wants to impose cutbacks. We recently saw 20,000 Newfoundland public employees legislated back after over 3 weeks on strike in the largest strike in the history of the province. Even though this act prompted the largest demonstration ever in Newfoundland, the leaders hung their heads and said "we must respect the law". We wonder where we would be today if the pioneers of the labour movement had held the same position when even forming a union was illegal. This time the movement had learnt that legislation can be defied. The first to defy legislation were workers at the University of British Columbia who went on 2 days of illegal strike in March 2003 and gained concessions. Next the ferry workers illegally shut down the system and forced the government to compromise. Both sides knew that the HEU strike would be make or break for both sides.


Workers defy legislation

As expected the BC Liberals legislated the workers on April 28. After an all-night sitting Bill 37 was passed at 5am the following morning. The bill passed was pure spite aimed at teaching the workers a lesson for rejecting the previous deal. It removed the right to strike and imposed a contract on the workers. The contract contained a 15% wage rollback, no limits on contracting out. The wage cut was retroactive to April 1, so the workers would also have to pay back the money they were "overpaid"! In response Chris Allnutt for the HEU declared the workers would stay out until they had a fair settlement. Finally a lead had been given and the workers answered the call enthusiastically. Spontaneously, 800 hydroelectric dam workers walked off the job in sympathy. Workers across the province had been waiting for the opportunity to oppose the Liberals and this was it. Barry O’Neill of CUPE BC declared that CUPE’s planned one-day walkout (see previous article: Canada: CUPE BC One-Day Walkout - Full marks for effort - method has problems. ) would be called for Monday, May 3. Many CUPE locals could not wait for Monday and 20,000 workers struck Friday, April 30 closing down some schools and municipal services. Other wildcats were reported in CEP and IWA pulp, paper, and saw mills – for the first time spreading the strike to the private sector. Even the flow of beer was endangered as Molson and Labatt distribution centres were picketed! "GENERAL STRIKE! GENERAL STRIKE!" was the popular chant on the pickets. The stage was set for a massive May Day demonstration.

Vancouver has no real tradition of May Day which is normally put on by immigrant groups and the left. Last weekend 6000 marched in a very militant parade. While this may sound small by European standards, one must take into consideration the fact that most of the workers were still on picket lines. Jim Sinclair of the BC Federation of Labour (BC Fed) attempted to walk a fine line between denouncing the Liberals and not getting people too riled up. He spoke of the need for discipline, workers must follow the leaders. While most workers were enthused by the spontaneous walkouts the labour bureaucracy was clearly afraid of losing control. Every time a chant of "General Strike" was begun the speakers attempted to drown it out and discourage it. An acceptable chant initiated from the stage was "We wont back down!".

In the event of no deal a mass walkout was being planned for Monday, May 3 with escalating action throughout the week. In addition to 43,000 HEU strikers, 70,000 CUPE municipal, schools and university workers were to go out, plus 40,000 teachers, Stelco Steelworkers, and the recently privatized BC Rail amongst others. In total this would represent over 30% of unionized workers in the province – the revolution would start Monday morning, 6 o’clock. All the right wing pundits (both outside and within the labour movement) continuously warned, "Don’t go too far or you’ll scare away public support" and they said this before the strike, before the illegal strike, before the solidarity strikes, and before the general strike. But the best the corporate press could do was print the complaints of a right wing couple living across the street from the hospital who said they were sick of hearing car horns honking in support of the workers at all times of the day. The workers were solid.


The anatomy of a sell-out

With the chants of "We wont back down" ringing in their ears the labour bureaucracy started working on a compromise that would avoid the confrontation that they feared so much. The first evidence of the betrayal came from the Provincial New Democratic Party’s new leader Carole James (see article for background: British Columbia NDP: Bureaucracy maintains stranglehold - Left builds support for future battles ). She said that while she wanted Bill 37 to be repealed the government should "at least address the issues of retroactivity and a cap on contracting out". The right wing of the movement feared that a general strike would hurt them electorally so they wanted it nipped in the bud with a face saving formula. Secret talks began between the government and the union bosses with there being 2 main barriers – the right wing of the BC Liberals who want to teach the workers a lesson, and secondly the workers themselves not keen on being sacrificed at the altar of electoral expediency and reverence for the bourgeois state. One can be sure that the threat of $470,000 per day fines for illegal strikes weighed heavily on the minds of the labour leaders when they eyed their $100,000+ paycheques, expense accounts, and courtesy cars.

The hotheads in cabinet were won over to the reality of what could be a historic working class movement and eventually the deal was presented by a dishevelled looking Jim Sinclair at 11pm Sunday, May 2. All he could say was that it was a good deal for patients! The strike was called off by the leaders of the BC Fed, HEU and CUPE without a vote or any form of consultation with the workers. The new deal removes the retroactivity component and caps contracting out to an additional 600 workers over 2 years (in addition to the 6000 already fired). The imposed contract saves $200,000 for the government off 43,000 workers – the same amount as the tax cut given to the 8000 richest British Columbians.The 15% wage cut remains so this deal is in fact worse than the one the workers rejected by 57% which would have had a cap of 5000 fired. The response from the workers was swift; the following scene played out on TV:

Sandra Giesbrecht, picket captain Royal Jubilee Hospital, speaking to picketers,

"So I have to know what my members want to do,"

(Response from crowd, "STAY-OUT! STAY-OUT! GENERAL-STRIKE! GENERAL-STRIKE!")

"I don’t think we want to be sold down the river by anybody like Jim Sinclair who sat on a fence for 2 years and did nothing for us. And I say this to the BC Fed, the HEU, and any other union leaders who are listening – we have the fortitude to stay out as long as it takes"

(Cheers!)



We are hearing reports of similar statements from hospitals across the province and strikers are fanning out to contact each other to bolster the lines. When HEU president Fred Muzin told Surrey hospital workers to remove the pickets he was apparently told to "f--- off".

Crisis of leadership

Leon Trotsky explained that the crisis of modern society has been reduced to the crisis of working class leadership. Carole James, Jim Sinclair, and the other parliamentary cretinists in the leadership of the NDP and the Unions fear the workers far more than they fear the capitalists. In fact, even on a narrow electoral scheme a movement like the health workers can galvanize the working class and give the NDP a massive election victory. This is only on the condition that the NDP backs the workers 110% and adopts a socialist program that can solve the crisis in healthcare.

Over the course of one week we saw a revolution in the class-consciousness of workers in British Columbia. Imagine the impact of 40,000 health workers campaigning to defeat the Liberal government they hate. The logic of this movement was a general strike that would bring down the government. Pundits were already talking of a snap election to decide the issue; this happened after the British miners strike in 1974 and Labour kicked out the Tories.

It is not clear that the bureaucrats have the intelligence to think this far, but the last thing they would want is to be brought to power under conditions of working class mobilization. As soon as you accept capitalism you accept defeat. Under conditions of capitalist crisis all governments are forced to attack the workers, be they social-democratic or neo-liberal. A mobilized labour movement would not let their leaders betray them so easily and would prepare the way for new convulsions. A "leader" like Carole James would not last long under such conditions. Our position would have been to call for the creation of extended strike committees based on hospitals with representatives from local work places and community groups to spread the strike and provide democratic leadership, thereby preventing the betrayal.

Capitalism is demonstrably incapable of guaranteeing the status quo for workers, even in an apparently rich country like Canada. If workers want to improve their standing they must break with capitalism and join the fight for socialism. The last few days have shown how important leadership is to success or failure, so we cannot leave the movement at the mercy of class betrayers. Over the last week the workers put in enough sacrifice and courage to overthrow this rotten government and make the first steps on the road to overthrow capitalism. The battle is set back but not yet over and the workers may even turn this around despite the betrayal. The small forces of Marxism in Canada, around the paper L’Humanité, are working to ensure the movement has the leadership it needs to achieve victory. We call on all those who burn at the betrayal and want justice for working people to join us.
May 2, 2004

Union Leaders Darkest Hours
- Are the dawn of a new age for people who work for a living

Members For Democracy --- http://www.ufcw.net/
By MfD contributors
remote_viewer & weiser. May 22, 2004

Those of you trying to figure out what the hell got into BC Federation of Labour President Jim Sinclair during the recent HEU strike crisis, might want to dig through your recycling bin and dig out Michael McCullough's September 2, 2003 article in the Vancouver Sun in which Mr. Sinclair talked about the labour movement's greatest challenges.

What Jim Sinclair said on Labour Day, 2003 was classic union leader fare dished up like an over-boiled hot dog at the Labour Day picnic.

"There are difficult challenges we're facing this year, probably the biggest challenges we've faced," Sinclair said in a special Labour Day interview with The Vancouver Sun.
Chief among them are the erosion of collective bargaining, privatization, poverty and stalled economic growth, Sinclair said. Virtually all these perils he blames on the provincial government of Gordon Campbell.

Sinclair said the Campbell Liberals have undermined free collective bargaining by "tearing up" public-sector contracts and taking away workers' right to strike. Private-sector workers also face a more employer-friendly Labour Code.

Sinclair called privatization and contracting out "the cancer eating away at living standards in this province."

Sinclair lamented that "unions were living in their darkest hours". He would have been more accurate had he said, "Unions are living in the dark."

Flash forward to May 2004: 43,000 members of BC's Hospital Employees Union walk out on strike against "the privatization cancer". Within days they are legislated back to work by the much-reviled Campbell administration with a 15% retroactive reduction in wages top add insult to injury. The government's hamfistedness prompted widespread outrage in communities across the province. A province-wide general strike was only hours away.
What did Sinclair's BC Fed do? The "Fed" helped broker a deal that got the workers back to work...with a 15% wage rollback and an agreement that allows for the loss of up to 600 jobs!

In the days and weeks that followed this bold capitulation, the Fed and its various affiliates have been busily spinning the deal as a good thing - something that limits privatization and protects jobs.

"The Fed" and the Fed Up
Judging from the comments posted by HEU and CUPE members on the official CUPE web site, the spin isn't doing much except making the members nauseous. It's this kind of intelligence-insulting bluster that continues to turn a lot of working people off of unions. Working people just aren't that stupid. It's not globalization that's turning them away from unions. It's union leaders' chronic bullshitting about what they're doing about it.

Jim Sinclair blames mainstream unions' low lumens on the evil neo-liberals and the shadows cast by capitalism's global agenda. For sure, globalization and its neoliberal enablers have working people by the throat but that's not the reason for workers' lack of enthusiasm for what passes for unions these days. Simply stating and restating the obvious isn't going to impress the millions who are being throttled by the capitalists. It doesn't take a social scientist to understand that poverty is bad for humanity.
What the lords of labour are doing - or not doing - about the corporate fat cats who are behind the globalization project, is what has brought the labour movement to its darkest hours. Workers are realizing that while the capitalists have them by throat with one hand, with the other hand they're patting their union leaders on their empty heads and throwing them a bone.

Yes Jim, aren't those corporate fat cats a blight on society?! Amid all his rhetoric Sinclair - like all the other lords of labour - keeps chasing the capitalists' bones and does a marvelous job of straddling the ideological picket fence without singing a high note.
With one foot planted firmly in the socialists' yard, he calls for massive government intervention in the economy. Meanwhile, his other foot sinks deep in the neoliberals' flower patch as he calls for more economic growth which will, according to a theory that almost nobody believes anymore, create more jobs, which will create more union members which will create...a better world...or something.

How do the lords of labour do this ideological high jump and avoid grievous injury? The theory-that-almost-nobody-believes-anymore is what's driving their love-hate relationship with the capitalists and it's driving their own demise as well. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in a North American workplace today who believes that corporations want to create more than the bare minimum number of jobs that are absolutely essential under any circumstances or that there is some kind of causal connection between increased profitability and job creation. Three decades of corporate behavior tell us that it just isn't so. But as long as the lords of labour are busy chasing the capitalists' bone, they are able to conform their being to get the privilege of conformity. Unpleasant realities are not nearly as visible from the corner office or the luxury hotel suite anyway.

Breathtaking Feats of Fence-Jumping

As the winds of globalization help the capitalists chart a constantly changing course to bigger piles of profit, union leaders like Sinclair bluster about the poop deck yelling confused and conflicting orders. Out of one corner of their mouths they deplore the capitalists and their global conquest. Out of the other corner they laud them as job creationists who need labour's cooperation.

Witness these feats of fence-jumping by Sinclair and another Canadian labour luminary, Canadian Labour Congress President Ken Georgetti:

Jim Sinclair, head of the BC Fed on Labour Day 2003:
"There is a tendency [in today's economy] to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The question is whether the government is going to act to try to stem that or encourage it. We have a government that encourages that gap's getting bigger through tax cuts, through wage loss, through tearing up collective agreements, through cutting welfare benefits. Our government is leading the charge to make it bigger, not fighting to make it better."

Jim Sinclair in a letter to the editor of the Vancouver Sun earlier this year:
"It's refreshing to see Sun editorial writers validate a point that the labour movement has been making for a long time: Building a truly modern economy only really happens when governments regard labour as a partner rather than an obstacle to be overcome."
"A truly modern economy" is, of course, the one we have. The "government" that Sinclair is referring to is the one headed by BC Premier Gordon Campbell.

Here's Ken Georgetti in a letter to the Editor published earlier this week in the Globe and Mail: "Late last month, the B.C. Liberals legislatively forced the province's 43,000 health workers to take a 15-per-cent wage cut, longer work weeks and continued layoffs. Across Canada, from British Columbia to Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, working people -- in particular, those who work in the public sector -- are being asked to carry the can for other peoples' poor decision-making. Those at the top make the decisions, but those at the bottom bear the burden."

Here's Ken Georgetti on "those at the top" back in 1988:
"It's just the old tired attitude that if you believe in labour or social democracy, you have to be against capital and profits. We can use pension income to create jobs, union jobs that pay a fair rate and get a fair return. We can make a profit...but...without exploiting people." Canadian Labour Congress President (and Concert Properties Director) Ken Georgetti, quoted in "The Hard-Hat Capitalists", Vancouver Sun, Valerie Casselton, May 14, 1988

That was a long time ago, you may be thinking. Surely Georgetti's wisened up since then. Not a chance. Here's Ken Georgetti in a January 26, 2004 letter to the Editor of the Financial Post, wherein the one we call "Bro_Ken" takes issue with a columnist who was critical of labour-management collaboration in a recent commentary.

"According to [the columnist], it's wrong if unions work with employers to save jobs in adverse market conditions. Wow! Would he feel better if those unions refused to dialogue with management? If they refused to help Canadian companies remain competitive in an increasingly unregulated and unprotected market he and his ideological ilk have long championed?"

Bro Ken seems blissfully ignorant of the fact that this awkward statement puts him right in the ideological ilk that he accuses his critic (incorrectly) of championing:
Unions must do their part to help corporations rake it in.

Whose ideological ilk is that?

Leader-hosin'

Of course, Bro Ken's fondness for job creationism and dialoguing with management and helping companies remain competitive can be understood when we consider that, as head of the Canadian labour movement, he's been thrown an awful lot of bones by the capitalists over the years. And he's been kept quite busy chasing them all. Brother Ken has been connected to the capitalists by an umbilical chord made of money for a long time. Thanks to his tireless efforts to fund free enterprise with workers' money, numerous labour leaders now sit beside greedy corporate bastards on corporate boards and hang out at conferences with them preaching the gospel of collaboration.
People who work for a living are becoming more and more disenchanted with labour's ship of fools.

Here's what a HEU Shop Steward had to say about Jim Sinclair's recent achievement:
I hope you are truly proud of your gutless achievement today, and please don't hesitate to expound at length at meetings and conventions about how labour in BC will rise to fight again, just as you nearly rose and fought for me for the better part of an afternoon today. I am nauseous with rage and anger for you and will not be placated with a pat on the shoulder in your forthcoming tearless apologies. You are puppets of the regime and I expose you to the light.

Read the rest of this straight up letter which was posted on Indymedia Victoria under the heading "Thanks for Nothing, Jim Sinclair."

Jim Sinclair wants us to believe that privatization and contracting out are "the cancer eating away at living standards in this province." If that's the case, then Sinclair is acknowledging that mainstream unions have become powerless and are of little use to people who work for a living. Unions are supposed to protect jobs and get working people more (rather than less) economic security. If privatization and contracting out have reached a cancerous stage, then mainstream unions are flat-lining - effective only in squeezing dollars from their members and political favors from their government handlers.

There's more truth to this than your average union honcho wants to believe: If it weren't for the unionization of the Canadian public sector our mainstream unions would be history already. It's our big heavily unionized public sector institutions that account for over 70% of Canada's 32.5% rate of unionization. In the private sector, decades of labour-management partnering have left unions floundering around barely able to hold on to existing bargaining units and unable to organize a piss up at a brewery.
If Mr. Sinclair and his pals would step out into the light (before they are dragged out into it by their angry members), they would see the puzzling paradox that confronts people who work for a living across North America: Living standards have indeed increased for some workers without the help of any six-figure union bosses. But for those who are represented by the six-figure lords of labour, things haven't been so good.
Globalization has made it easier for traditional union work to run away to Mexico and China and mainstream unions have proven impotent in stopping it. The concessions they bargained to make thousands of their employer partners more competitive have been used to finance off-shore operations or to line the pockets of multi-millionaire executives or to invest in non-union operations or for just about anything except job creation. Round after round of wage and benefit concessions that were supposed to protect jobs have done just the opposite. The members - whose working lives keep getting bleaker - are fed a steady diet of absurd bullshit about "bitter pills" and bad deals that are "good deals in the circumstances". Some of North America's largest unions behave more like corporate human resources departments - keeping workers' quiet and them selling concessionary deals to maximize profit.

It's not all that surprising then, that survey after survey shows that unions are shunned by the vast majority of people who work for a living - especially in the private sector. That's because many workers perceive unions and their fat-salaried leaders to be more concerned with their own well-being than with the betterment of life for people who work for a living. They view unions as being focused on broad social issues - that their porky leaders don't really understand and have no particular vision about - than shop-floor or office-cubical issues. The porky leaders seem unaware that the shop-floor/office cubical issues in which they have no interest are connected to the broad social issues that they don't understand. But people who work for a living understand this connection on an intuitive level and they're not going to follow anyone who doesn't get it.
But Mr. Sinclair and the other denizens of labour's darkness blindly bump about knocking into any worker or employer who steps into their paths. These union leaders are living in the darkness of their own making. Fifty years ago they agreed to become partners in a labour relations system designed to crush any move that would seriously disrupt government or commerce. In doing so, they set the clock ticking toward the time of their demise. That time is now.

We Know What We Want - Let's Go Out and Get It

Workplace activism and fair treatment for all employees are vital components of a healthy and vibrant society. If we want a healthy and vibrant society - and a hell of a lot of us do - we might as well treat that as a priority above the interests of corporations and their appendages. Therefore, people who work for a living must be allowed to meaningfully participate in the labour-relations system. Their voices - our voices - must be heard - not just filtered - through self-interested union fat cats who spend their days living the six-figure, all-expenses-paid lifestyle.

Allowing workers' voices to be heard is not in the best interests of the union, corporate or government porkers who put their heads together at their favorite scratching posts in ongoing efforts to protect the existing order - the advisory committees, task forces, industry councils and, of course, the Labour Boards. There, the injustices of the 21st century workplace can be washed away with buckets full of 19th century values. The world is a much less confusing place if you divide up the humans into masters and servants - especially if you're the master. We must stop thinking like servants.
Isn't it really odd that our workplace technology leaps forward at a staggering pace but the values that underpin workplace relations are now three hundred years old? The powerful guys who bring us the labour relations system want things to stay that way and, for a long time, have been prepared to stroke their union appendages in their ongoing efforts to keep millions of working people silent and sidelined. As for the union appendages, from their perspective it feels nicer to be stroked by the master than out in the streets going to bat for people and risking arrest like some kind of latter day Eugene Debs and those crazies from the early days of unionism. We are entitled to our own values.

The sad reality is that guys like Sinclair are drawn into the backrooms where the interests of thousands of working people are dealt away because they are a part of the machinery of domination. They're part of the machine and so they do their part for the machine. They publicly criticize the capitalists because that's part of their schtick. But deep down inside, they like the capitalists and they're like the capitalists. They can't imagine a world without 'em - if they could, they'd be talking about it. But they don't. Instead they talk about the need for workers to kiss the capitalists' asses so that they can be more competitive and to accept all the unpleasantness that goes along with this as their lot in life. Hey, there will always be have's and have not's, right? How many times have we heard this lame logic from mainstream union leaders? Too many. We don't have to believe that we are inferior...

So, it's not all that hard to understand how Jim Sinclair, head of the Fed, can diss the capitalists on Labour Day and kiss them in the backroom a few months later when the serfs are getting agitated and can't seem to see the silver lining behind as 15% wage cut.

Breaking up the exploitative triad of government/business/labour-leaders may be difficult but it's not impossible. That it must be done is not really an issue anymore - it must be done. What people who work for a living need to think about is how they would like to do it. Do we want to get invited to the private club? Once there, what to do? Disrupt? Redecorate? Demolish and rebuild? Or do we want to build something new, ourselves, on an entirely different foundation? The choice is up to us collective and individually and bearing in mind that many different actions can further the same cause.

Change is accomplished by thousands of seemingly inconsequential actions" - the forum signature of MfD contributor verity tango.

We don't all have to agree on some grand plan or pick our own potentates to make it happen. That's their model. They use it because it suits their needs and meets their objectives. Other models are possible - maybe even better for us.

Those who would rather get into the private club should go there. Keep in mind though, that to get invited into a private club, you may have to make lots of noise on the outside. When you start to disturb the neighbors, the gates might just open and you will be invited in. Once you're in, what you do is up to you. You can join the party or trash the party or decide that the celebration will be about something else now that you've arrived. Whatever you do, keep your objective in front of you. Those who want to start something new should start something new. Create your own scene away from the private club. If you think that the existing order is toxic, why build something on its foundation? Whichever you favour, the first step to getting there is to start thinking about it and talking about it.

The fat cats might want to open the gates sooner than later because if people who work for a living find that they like life on the outside, they may refuse to come in. Then the fat cats will have to come out into the light where the real action is. They won't want to do that because no one will be looking up to them or deferring to their better judgment anymore. Most likely they will run away and be history while the rest of us make history. Their darkest hours are still ahead. Ours can be behind us.

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Taking back our unions and engaging the future...
We are people-who-work helping other people-who-work take back their unions. We started out as a reform movement within the Canadian UFCW but have expanded our focus to the broader community of workers. We believe that fully democratic unions are essential to improving the lives of working people today and in the future.

The world is changing. The knowledge age is here. The places where we work are changing. Workers can influence the course of change and build a better, more humane world and better more humane workplaces. To this end we need to know - to understand - what's going on. When we understand our environment, we can change it. We can analyze it, assess it, and decide what we want and how to achieve it. To facilitate change that is good for workers, we need unions that are good for workers. Unions that are good for workers will be able to engage the future.

Many of today's mainstream unions are not equipped to engage the future. Many are trying hard to hang on to the past. Some have long since ceased being union's altogether. This has to change or workers will be left as high and dry in the knowledge age as they were in the industrial age. Workers know this. Many are working hard to take back their unions.

Knowledge is power. Through this interactive web site we seek to empower workers involved in union reform by providing information, advice and support so that you can think for yourselves. We seek to break the silence about mainstream union practices that disempower workers so that you will know what really goes on and see with your own eyes. We provide a place where you can meet, talk, share information on a wide range of subjects related to unions, the workplace and the labour movement so you can decide for yourselves. Understanding what's really going on and linking up with like-minded others can help build an empowered worker community.

We are virtual. We have no structure, no officers or directors, no bureaucracy - that's old, from the other age. We are ideas, thoughts, information, and communication. We are this web site and all who come here. It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, what kind of work you do, or what kind of formal role you have been assigned in your workplace, if you care about the future of workers you are welcome here. Share your views, tell us what's happening where you work and at your union. Engage others and engage the future.

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Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King

UNIONS NARROWLY AVERT GENERAL STRIKE
IN B.C., CANADA
http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/unags.htm



In the week from April 25 to May 2, 2004, what began as a legal strike by 43,000 hospital workers in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada nearly developed into an illegal 'general strike' by upwards of 200,000 workers against the provincial government (which funds the hospitals and the health-care system generally), and potentially involving perhaps another 100,000 to 150,000 unionized workers. This in a province of approximately 4 million people: B.C., Canada’s western-most province. In the Canadian ‘federal’ state system, the ten provinces have various powers and responsibilities that would be held by the central national government in a non-federal state system. Responsibility for the provision of health-care is one of the most important of these functions.



Since the right-wing Liberal Party government’s accession to power three years previously, one of its apparent goals has been to wreak havoc on an already crisis-ridden, publicly funded, universally accessible health-care system. Another, more widely known goal of this government has been to brutally attack the share of social wealth in the province held by the working class and the marginalized, and at the same time to attack the power of the trade unions (which had been supported by the previous New Democratic Party government). One of the first things the new government did was to tear up previously negotiated, binding contracts between both nurses (actually, the B.C. Nurses Union) and hospital and other health-care workers (actually, the Hospital Employees Union (HEU)) and their government-funded employers. These were replaced by new, government-dictated contracts, which contained significant concessions for those employees concerned, concessions especially in the area of job security. This proved telling of the government’s plans: to permanently eliminate thousands of health-care workers’ jobs in B.C. In fact, the real plan was to radically lower the labour costs of the health-care system generally and to bring in private delivery of various ‘peripheral’ services in the health-care system, such as ‘housekeeping’ or cleaning, landscaping, and food services in order to facilitate this reduction.



In the process, in the guise of “fighting rising health-care costs” so as to prevent taxes from rising further, the health-care system is being gutted, so much so that in a few years it will be in such bad shape that there will undoubtedly be widespread public demand for the option of private (i.e. corporate) provision of health-care, right up to the establishment of fully private hospitals. The result would be a two-tier system, the degraded public one for the unprivileged masses, and a much superior one for the wealthy minority.



The privatization of delivery of the above-mentioned ‘peripheral’ services to the health-care system has involved the mass firing of thousands of workers, and their replacement (in fewer numbers) by new workers earning between 55 and 60% of those they are replacing, along with significantly reduced benefits. In fact, the contract stipulating these severely reduced levels of remuneration was agreed to by both the new employers and a different union from the one which has until now represented the workers holding those jobs. (This ‘sweetheart’ deal between a well known, large union (IWA -- previously the International Woodworkers of America, now the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers) has, needless to say, thrown the ‘labour movement’ in B.C into turmoil.) The result of this is thousands of workers working for new private employers and represented by a new union earning $9+ an hour doing work that previously paid $17+ an hour, and with significantly reduced benefits.



All of this has been part of the Liberal government’s agenda since coming to power in 2001. While the hospital workers’ employers are officially known as the Health Employers Association (HEA) of B.C., in reality, this organization is a puppet of the provincial government, as the latter appoints all of the officials that comprise it, and dictates to them their general strategy for “fighting escalating expenses” as well as what the financial ‘bottom line’ is as far as collective agreements with their employees is concerned. In the negotiations between the HEA and the HEU preceding the strike, the HEA refused to retreat from its demand for a general 15% wage reduction for all HEU members and for no limit on the number of jobs to be privatized. Naturally, the HEU membership let the union’s leadership know in no uncertain terms that they would have nothing to do with any such contract. So, when the legally acceptable time for strike action arose, there was no agreement in the offing, making strike action inevitable. The union leadership knew that the membership were ready for an all-out fight against the government, so the call was for a full-scale strike, with only “essential” staffing levels (as agreed upon by the HEU and HEA) maintained.



The strike began on Sunday, April 25, and ran for four days legally, before the provincial government passed legislation making it illegal. The legislation also unilaterally imposed a contract on the hospital workers which was even more draconian than the HEA’s ‘final offer’ to the HEU, as it not only forced on them the same 15% across the board wage cut and no limits on outsourcing jobs to private employers. This legislation – not the criminalizing of the strike, but the terms of the contract – was widely condemned by the mass media in B.C. as either a “serious miscalculation” or “sheer political stupidity”; the reason being that it sent a bolt of anger through much of the working class and certainly the whole of the ‘labour movement’ in the province. In effect, the legislation galvanized large numbers of workers into a mood of not only mass anger, but also into a mood to fight back, to engage in solidarity action with the embattled health care workers. Suddenly ‘public opinion’ swung sharply in favour of the workers, and against the government.



In response to the government’s “back-to-work” legislation and concomitant imposition of an intolerable contract, the HEU leadership chose to defy the legislation, risking both criminal charges for contempt of court and potential fines (as have occurred in previous strikes legislated to an end). It can certainly be argued, however, that the HEU leadership chose this ‘radical’ option only in order to maintain its control over the strike, by maintaining its credibility with the general membership of the union, who were obviously in no mood to end the strike. The HEU chose to rename the strike a “protest” and the picket lines became “protest lines”. HEU spokesman Chris Allnut, addressing a strikers’ rally at Vancouver General Hospital was quoted as saying “You are to respect the protest lines until we decide that you should go back to work” (Vancouver Sun, April 30, 2004, p. A1); needless to say, the “we” here referred to the HEU leadership.



It was in this context that the B.C. Federation of Labour (the umbrella group comprising most of the major trade unions in the province) came up with a plan to escalate the hospital workers’ strike to a mass strike involving workers in a myriad of different sectors of the economy. The day after the legislation, as many as 20,000 public sector workers belonging to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) walked off the job and picketed their workplaces, affecting a range of public services, including municipal halls, libraries, schools, recreation facilities, garbage services, airports, water treatment plants, public works yards, and, in one city, bus service. As well, at least 800 B.C. Hydro (electricity) workers across the province staged a wildcat strike in solidarity with the hospital workers; in fact, the wildcat began on Thursday when a number of Hydro workers at dams in northern B.C. got the ball rolling.



The B.C. F.L.’s ‘action plan’, which was conveniently leaked to the media, described how the escalation of job action would develop to most all public sector workers, as well as significant numbers of workers in the wood and paper products industries, and tourism (hotels and cruise ship facilities). The leaked document outlining this plan of escalating strike action was published in the Vancouver Sun newspaper on Saturday, May 1 – May Day. Obviously the plan was to scare the government into backing off and killing the legislation passed on Thursday. But the plan was a miscalculation, as the government was hell bent on seeing its agenda through to its conclusion come hell or high water. Instead, news of this plan of action for the ‘labour movement’ emboldened thousands of rank and file workers, who genuinely believed that their union leaders were going to lead a mass, ‘general’ strike in a no-holds barred showdown with the provincial government, something many of them had been looking forward to for a long time. Here was the perfect opportunity for it, as ‘public opinion’ was solidly on ‘our’ side.


Saturday’s May Day parade and rally in Vancouver was the largest in decades, as upwards of 10,000 people joined in, even though the BCFL steered the events clear of focusing on the hospital workers strike or their own ‘action plan’ for mass strike for the coming week. Rumours circulated at the rally amongst certain militant union members that the BCFL leadership was looking to quash the strike by setting up secret ‘closed door’ meetings with the government. The rumours proved fatefully true, as late Sunday news began to appear that the HEU, with the help of the BCFL leadership, had reached a deal with the government to end the strike. And when workers woke up Monday morning looking forward to a week (or more) of militant industrial action and political protest against the government, there was shock and disgust felt just as widely and just as deeply as their had been anger on Thursday and Friday. Only this time the object of that disgust was not the government, but the union leadership, which had signed a deal giving the government everything it had passed in its “back-to-work” legislation, except for one small concession: the 15% wage cut would not be retroactive to April 1, but would rather take effect May 1, the day before what came quickly to be known as “Black Sunday”.



This ‘betrayal’ by the union bosses was so blatant that it probably did more to disillusion workers about unions than anything else that has happened in B.C. for a long, long time. (I use the word “betrayal” in “scare quotes” because only someone who was once your ally in a fight can betray you, whereas the historical evidence clearly establishes that, when the stakes are sufficiently high, the unions and their functionaries – the ones who manage the unions – are not allies of the rank and file membership.) Not only were hospital workers given a deal by their union leaders virtually identical with the one the government forced on them by way of legislation, but the union membership affected by the deal were not even offered the opportunity to vote on this ‘agreement’. While there apparently was sporadic unwillingness to return to work on Monday by some HEU and CUPE members, this writer is unaware of any self-organized wildcat actions. Apparently the shock workers felt was stronger than the anger, as there was a surprising lack of resistance to the union-government screwing over they had endured. However, a group of a few dozen HEU members did stage an ongoing protest outside HEU headquarters for the following week. Further, a grassroots-organized protest against the union’s ‘betrayal’ was held on the following Saturday, where several hundred angry hospital workers and their supporters marched and spoke out against their ‘leaders’ in the HEU and BCFL. This writer attended that rally and distributed the following leaflet (slightly modified).


LESSONS OF THE BLACK SUNDAY SELLOUT
Wage Slave X


Over the May Day weekend, many thousands of working class people around B.C. were confident that something truly wonderful, yet something also deadly serious, was going to flower in the coming week, beginning Monday, the 3rd. Behind it all, what it was all about was what has been sometimes called the ‘social question’. But what was at the forefront of this burgeoning movement was the question of the provincial government’s treatment of hospital workers particularly and of the public health care system in B.C. more generally. Yet these two issues, which combine the government’s ‘labour relations policy’ with its public health care policy, just so happen to be the two most important for the majority of working class people in B.C. today. So when the Campbell government made a huge miscalculation in both legislating the striking HEU workers back to work AND at the same time directly imposing a contract on those workers involving more concessions and reductions than the Health Employers Association had been demanding during previous negotiations with the HEU, there was a tremendous surge of both anger at the government and solidarity with the viciously attacked workers in the HEU across the province, a surge which I dare say surprised everyone in B.C. The anger was truly palpable from Thursday (April 29) on, but so was the sense of solidarity, especially from Friday on. The difference was that while the anger remained more or less constant, the sense of solidarity was growing rapidly throughout Friday, Saturday (May Day) and Sunday, until … that fateful moment when most involved learned that the planned escalating general strike was called off as the HEU with the help of the B.C. Federation of Labour had agreed to a deal with the government.



But that moment on what some are now calling Black Sunday was only fateful in that it spelled the death of the particular general strike planned to unfold this past week. The determination to fight the Campbell government must still be there in hundreds of thousands of working people and their families, and we now know that there exists within this sector of the population a sense of solidarity far stronger than anything the B.C. Fed. or any union leader in the province has led us to believe. It is true that an extremely favourable opportunity for launching an all-out class war against a viciously anti-working class government has been lost. And it is true that if only two or three days of the planned escalating mass strike had been allowed to develop, that a massive surge forward in class consciousness and in the political maturation of the entire working class in B.C. would have undoubtedly occurred. Fundamental social-political truths about this society and the forces that, confronting one another, comprise it, truths which have been well hidden for most working class people for 20 years now, would have been clearly exposed not only for the 200,000 to 300,000 workers who would have been directly involved in the strike, but also for the rest of the roughly 2 million working class people in B.C. Most important of these would have been the enormous power that the working class is capable of wielding when it is united in active, defiant class solidarity against the treachery of the ruling class. The new generation of workers which has arisen within the past 20 years has not had direct experience of that power, and thus, for the most part, is not convinced that it really exists. They would have been irreversibly convinced of the reality of that power had even just a couple of days of the expected general strike taken place. They would have learned quite well where the class lines are that separate the working class, the middle class, and the ruling capitalist class, and that the basic interests of the working class are not compatible with those of either the ruling class or the middle class. All of this was so close to being achieved, and it was lost, and that is truly unfortunate. But I for one don’t feel like mourning, and I think there many others who feel the same way.



I think there are many others who feel confident that just a few days of the general strike that had been planned to develop would have won the HEU workers far, far more than what the union leadership and the ‘help’ of B.C. Fed. got for them (really, forced on them, since they have no say in it). I think there are many who feel very emboldened as working class militants as a result of the experience of the surge of solidarity around the province. And the beyond palpable sense of disgust and rage at the betrayal of the struggle by the leadership of the HEU and the B.C. Fed., while negative in itself, can only confirm and strengthen that conviction that we really are all together in this, that the ongoing HEU workers’ struggle is OUR struggle, and that we need to now look forward to, to plan and organize for the general strike we were all hoping to bring about this past week.



There is one crucial lesson that we all need to draw from this latest defeat, and the way the events unfolded, it shouldn’t be too difficult to do so. What happened this time that we want to make sure we avoid next time? Clearly, it is the sell-out by the HEU and B.C. Fed. leaders. How can we make sure that doesn’t happen again? Why do we allow these leaderships to do this to us, to even be in a position to do this to us? Why don’t we, the rank and file, have any control over them at the most crucial of moments? It is the power structure and the mode of functioning of the trade unions as they are today that allows these betrayals by the leaderships to occur. So if we want to make sure that such betrayals can’t possibly occur again, we need to either change the power structure and mode of functioning of the trade unions we are in OR we need to simply bypass those structures, their rules and laws, to organize ourselves in our own general assemblies and committees, with directly elected, mandated, and revocable delegates, in other words, to take the struggle directly into our own (collective) hands. Dedicated union activists have tried for decades to reform the power structures and mode of functioning of their unions, all to little if any effect. The second alternative, which unfortunately didn’t take shape amongst the bulk of the HEU and CUPE membership on Monday (and when it has happened in other places at other times it has appeared spontaneously), is in reality the only way for rank and file unionized workers to take control of their workplace struggles away from the union bosses and bureaucrats. Class struggles around the world for decades have clearly shown this to be so. The unions everywhere stand in the way of workers’ self-determination. But this strategy requires a far greater level of involvement and commitment on the part of the membership, of those involved in the struggle, than working through the existing channels of reforming the unions. In any case, what occurred on Black Sunday should have put to rest all strategies for bringing about a general strike (or strikes) and beyond it a renewed militant working class movement based on pressuring the union leaderships from below. We all should be able to see now that that road is a dead end.



Wage Slave X



May 7, 2004



Contact me at: wageslavex@yahoo.ca


"Every single New Democratic Party (NDP) government in the history of British Columbia has brought in strikebreaking legislation during its term of office."

(From the Solidarity Caucus, a rank and file group of trade union militants)

Every single New Democratic Party (NDP) government in the history of British Columbia has brought in strikebreaking legislation during its term of office.

On August 9, 1974, Dave Barrett's NDP government passed the Essential Services Continuation Act, which prevented firefighters from striking.

On November 26, 1974, Barrett brought in the Elevator Construction Industry Labour Disputes Act, described by Labour Minister Bill King as "a rather innocuous little bill" which ordered elevator construction workers to end their strike.

On October 7, 1975, Barrett's labour minister Bill King, introduced Bill 146, the Collective Bargaining Continuation Act, a sweeping back-to-work law that outlawed strikes then going on involving the IWA's forest workers, the pulp and paper workers, propane and butane truckers and workers in B.C.'s largest grocery chains, as well as nipping in the bud a pending strike involving BC Rail employees. Speaking for the NDP government during the debate, King stated that "the rights of private citizens in this province are being harmed" by the strikes in question, and "we are not prepared to stand idly by and watch disputes of this nature wreak unjustified hardship on those directly involved as well as those indirectly involved." King made it clear that his government supported the right to strike ("this government has said consistently that we believe in free collective bargaining"), but not to the point where it became effective - "we have never stated, although we adhere to collective bargaining principles, that there is an absolute right to indulge in economic warfare which, in many cases, threatens and jeopardizes the basic safety, comfort and health of citizens of this province."

King also made it clear that "government...is elected to represent the interests of all citizens of this province".

Attorney General Alex MacDonald spelled out the consequences of this philosophy as far as the right to strike is concerned: "we have to remember that our rights are founded upon duties; that the exercise of power without responsibility is tyranny; that the cost we must pay for our freedom in a social democracy is a certain measure of social discipline and respect for the rights of the other person" - in other words, put down your picket sign and button your lip. Forty thousand workers were ordered back to work by the NDP. Many of them evidently wondered why they had even bothered to vote NDP in the first place if it was going to act like a bosses' government, because they didn't bother to show up and vote for the NDP in the provincial election two months later, and the Barrett government fell.

On May 30, 1993, Mike Harcourt's NDP government passed the Educational Programs Continuation Act, ordering Vancouver teachers back to work.

On April 26, 1996, the Harcourt government passed the Educational and Health Collective Bargaining Assistance Act, which neutralized potential teachers' and hospital strikes four days prior to the calling of the 1996 provincial election.

On July 30, 1998, the NDP government of Glen Clark passed the Public Education Collective Agreement Act, which imposed a collective agreement on teachers.

On April 2, 2000, Ujjal Dosanjh's (NDP) government passed the Public Education Support Staff Collective Bargaining Assistance Act, which ordered striking CUPE school support staff back to work.


FIGHTBACK: It's time to start changing our unions
New Socialist http://www.newsocialist.org/

A new grouping of union activists, the Solidarity Caucus, has been formed in British Columbia. The Caucus was organized in response to the failures of the leadership of the BC Federation of Labour and their role in the deal which ended this spring's Hospital Employees Union strike. Although the caucus and the context out of which it arose is specific to BC, it is an important example of how union activists can organize against bureaucratic leaderships that fail to advance labour struggles. It is thus relevant for union activists in other provinces experiencing similar issues. Below we print the Solidarity Caucus Statement of Purpose . It's time to start changing our unions into fighting organizations that can meet the escalating attacks that have been coming our way for many years now. Doing that will require more than voting out one set of leaders and voting in another. This text intends to kick off the necessary discussion about what has been wrong for too long and what some real alternatives are.

British Columbia's labour movement has been crippled by a lack of vision, a lack of analysis, and bad internal and external politics. This was proved once again by the tragically unnecessary May 2 defeat of 43,000 courageous and defiant health workers along with tens of thousands of other workers who were poised to strike (or already striking) to give them effective support IN ACTION. But it wasn't just a defeat. It was a sell-out by leaders committed to an inadequate and therefore failing strategy.

The stakes in this fight were merely the Medicare system, the public sector's right to strike, thousands of union jobs and large-scale union-busting. Oh yes, and looking beyond the immediate battle, there was also the continuing unimpeded ability of right-wing corporate and government attackers to further ravage health care, crown corporations, union rights, social services, public education, the elderly, children at risk, women, the poor, Native people, etc., etc., etc.

On May 3, most British Columbian workers awoke asking why the fight had been called off. How could we NOT stand and fight with such a clear-cut battle and such widespread - and growing - solidarity?

The how and why of this retreat - and of many less dramatic failures to fight back in recent years - are contained in the analysis, vision and internal/external politics which have governed the leaderships and infrastructure of BC trade unions for decades. It runs like this:

1. The political pendulum swings back and forth from left to right. It is currently swinging right, but it will swing left again sometime in the future.

2. Labour's job is to keep the trade union movement together organizationally and hang on until the pendulum swings back our way.


3. The only way to (gradually) change the pendulum's direction and give it momentum once it has changed is through electoral politics - elect the New Democratic Party (NDP) and progressive municipal slates.

4. Small-scale, infrequent actions can be used to keep people involved, but large, coordinated, militant fightbacks - especially involving strike action - are to be avoided because they might alienate middle-of-the-road voters from unions and their NDP allies, thus weakening electoral chances.


5. If the members vote in convention or in local meetings for effective militant action, the leadership must ignore that and steer a moderate, ballot-box-oriented course - because the leaders understand these things, and the members don't.

6. Making alliances with progressive non-union social groups and organizations is necessary. But those forces must always be guided by the dictates of labour leaders and never be treated as real partners. They must accept electoralism as the primary strategy. And they must NEVER be allowed to influence significant numbers of trade union members with other strategic options.

The problems with this analysis/vision/strategy are many, serious and becoming increasingly evident

1. The pendulum is no longer swinging freely. On international, national, regional, and local levels, the corporate agenda is holding sway. Profiteers and their governments have blocked the return swing using international trade rules, massive transfers of public wealth to private hands through privatization and tax-shifting, coordinated threats of capital strikes against any jurisdiction that gets out of line and, if nothing else works, legislated gutting of democratic rights backed by police and military repression.

2. Preserving trade union organizations becomes increasingly problematic with escalating defeats. Union membership is reduced not just because of contract-shredding, massive layoffs in favour of low-wage contractors and right-to-work initiatives. It is also falling because, as former Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President Dennis McDermott said a generation ago, "You don't need a union to negotiate concessions." Multiplying defeats bring anger, demoralization, disunity and a feeling that unions are irrelevant. And this is even before we worry about the New Zealand experience of having a (Labour) government virtually abolish union collective bargaining rights.


3. The NDP in government is not the working class in power. The power still resides in the corporate boardrooms and Wall Street bond-rating agencies. This is why past NDP governments have focused on debt and deficit reduction, broken strikes legislatively and cut welfare benefits. Not only that, but electing the NDP in 2005, even if that were certain and we could count on them entirely, would be too late to fight off the attacks since 2001 and those still to come before voting day.

4. Without a militant and mobilized union movement leading all workers in an effective fightback, any NDP government elected will continue to implement the corporate agenda, possibly at a slower pace with a "more human face." Only real counter-pressure from working people can stop and reverse that dynamic.

5. After a generation of escalating defeats, union members who vote for militant action DO understand the stakes and strategic implications. They have witnessed the inadequacy of electoralism as a sole, over-riding strategy. Of course much more needs to be learned, and it can be learned through education, preparation and through struggle itself. Working people have proved this in many times and places. But this requires democracy, because democracy works. It works by bringing all of our intelligence, talents, skills, experiences and courage into the decision-making process. But where democracy really excels is when mistakes are made and must be corrected. The more involved everyone is in making decisions, the more easily we can see what went wrong and what new directions need to be taken.

6. Real, equitable alliances with social groups and organizations must be forged to avoid the isolation of unions and a growing sentiment among non-union workers that unions are only out for themselves. As well, the struggles of those groups are truly our struggles. They are about the communities union workers live in alongside non-union workers. Equally crucial is the fact that large-scale, militant job action requires community participation in planning and execution so we can minimize the harm done to those who are our true allies. This does not mean giving non-union groups the power to tell union members when, how and why they go on strike. That is a red herring.
New Direction

To move toward a labour movement that is genuinely militant, democratic and accountable to its members we must seek to implement a new set of strategies - from the BC Federation of Labour through each of the affiliated unions down to the level of local unions. The essential first step is to organize a broad grassroots opposition within our unions based on putting forward and continually improving new fightback tactics and strategies, on developing new modes of organizational functioning and electing leaders who will be accountable to the democratic decisions of the members.

As an absolutely necessary part of rearming our labour movement for the fights to come, we must challenge and replace the leadership. This must not be done on the basis of likes or dislikes. It must be done on the basis of an analysis that is more accurate, a vision that is more combative, strategies that are more effective and successful and modes of functioning that can mobilize and unite our members and our non-union allies.

What we saw in early May was a failure as significant as the 1983 sellout of the Solidarity movement. While it was Premier Gordon Campbell who ordered HEU (Hospital Employees Union) back to work, it was the leadership of the BC Federation of Labour and its major affiliates who enforced that return to work without even a murmur about giving those brave workers the right to vote on the so-called deal. And it was those leaders' totally deficient politics, outlined above, that have allowed them to justify this betrayal to themselves and to us.

An effective and durable general strike may or may not have been a real possibility, but that's not the issue. It was possible to inflict a resounding defeat on the Campbell Liberals and their corporate backers. On May 2 we were on the brink of BC labour's biggest struggle in decades - a massive strike wave that could have driven a stake through the heart of the Liberals' privatization of health care services. We had the biggest chance in three years to defeat Campbell, and it was torn from our fingers by the capitulation of our own leaders.

The sell-out of HEU was only the most spectacular of the leadership's betrayal, but there's no shortage of other examples. What about the silent complicity in the IWA (Industrial Wood & Allied Workers) raid on HEU? For over a year the leadership of the Fed stood by in utter silence while a rat union allied itself with the provincial Liberals, Aramark, Sodexho and the Compass Group. This was not just a raid - it was an act of sheer class betrayal, where the IWA teamed up with the Liberals as active accomplices in union-busting, and our leadership almost unanimously stood by, said nothing, and let them do it. And while we're at it, what about the IWA leadership's invitation to the government to legislate their own members back to work after a hard-fought strike against stiff concessions.

Struggles of Youth

Meanwhile the labour movement gave scant support beyond lip service to the struggles of youth against the six-dollar "starting" wage, to anti-poverty activists fighting welfare cuts and housing shortages, or to women fighting the closure of women's centres across BC. Since May 2002, union leaders have maintained their staunch commitment to NOT mobilizing massive unitary protests of members and non-members against Campbell and the corporate agenda.

Simultaneous with these betrayals has been another disturbing development. Over the last ten years, some BC union leaders have increasingly become a network of junior capitalists. Using billions from their members' pension plans and retirement investments, they have created a corporate empire. They control the largest venture capital firm in western Canada (Working Opportunity Fund), the largest developer of residential rental properties in BC (Concert Properties) and a network of companies involved in insurance, travel, investments and other activities. How many union members were shocked to learn recently of the $16,000 donation Concert Properties gave to Gordon Campbell's Liberals?

"Unfair," they say, "the Concert executives did that behind our backs." Well, what the hell do you expect when you pick Liberal corporate honchos like Jack Poole and David Podmore to manage your members' money? And how do you explain the directors' decision to join Canada's biggest P3 lobby group (alongside Aramark, Compass and Sodexho)?

In summary, the present BC union leadership has exposed its own political bankruptcy and democratic deficiencies. Our movement may not be able to long survive a continuation of their short-sighted vision and demonstrably inadequate strategies. It's time for the rank-and-file to start making changes within organized labour so we can effectively fight back against greedy bosses, privatizing governments and corporate globalization. If we don't, we will simply have to go through all this again. And again.

Militant Movement

We need a militant movement. In the face of our attackers we will get nothing and defend nothing except through educated, intelligent, prepared, coordinated and courageous militancy. Globalization means everything is under attack, even the very existence of our communities. Refusing to fight back is surrender. Refusal to get ready for the inevitable battles is suicidal.
We need a democratic movement with a leadership and members committed to fostering debate within the labour movement, not stifling it. Membership decisions must be carried out, not ignored as with the action program adopted unanimously at the 2002 BC Fed Convention. And members must ALWAYS have the right to vote on contracts, regardless of leadership opinions OR strike-breaking legislation. Internal union democracy and membership control is one of the strongest weapons in our arsenal.

We need a movement that mobilizes solidarity. "An injury to one is an injury to all" is not just a slick slogan. It is what "union" means in concrete practice - our united strength against our enemies. No group of workers should stand alone and suffer defeats while the rest of us go along as usual.

We need a movement that builds alliances. Unions fighting alone to confront the attacks on our rights will lose. Community groups fighting alone will lose. We need to reject all the tired old habits of control and domination, and seek to build coalitions where labour and community organizations come together as partners and allies working together. We need to build open coalitions, and reject the past policies of exclusion, manipulation and control.

We need an independent union movement. We will need to be prepared to fight against cuts, to preserve social services and to resist return-to-work laws under a future NDP government too. Defeating Gordon Campbell will not mean our work is done, not by any means. This does not mean no involvement with progressive candidates or parties during elections. It does mean that electoralism is not labour's sole strategy and that electoral support is critical support, based on the actions of the elected.

Right to Strike

We need a movement committed to reclaiming the unrestricted right to strike, by whatever means are necessary. At present, for all practical purposes BC's public sector workers have no legal right to strike. Ask HEU, the nurses, the teachers, the ferry workers. And now this de facto ban is starting to extend to private sector unions as well. Ask the IWA. The right to strike was only won by labour's willingness to defy unjust laws. It will only be preserved by our willingness to use our right to strike, legally if possible, illegally if necessary, whether the government in power is Liberal or NDP.

Such a labour movement is not beyond our grasp. We can see it in the HEU members who organized to defend their own jobs and the right of all of us to public health care. We can see it in the ferry workers' courage in the face of government and the courts. We can see it in those principled IWA activists who have publicly condemned and organized against their own union's raid on HEU. We can see it in all those hospital workers and teachers and electricians and transit workers who stood up against Bill 37, and all those longshore workers and city employees and millworkers and ferry workers who were ready to walk out and join in.

And we've also seen the beginnings of such a movement in conventions and local meetings where members are starting to demand that trade unions fulfill their historical role of fighting for ourselves and for all working people.
Building such a movement will not be the work of a moment. It will take time, commitment, creativity, some tolerance/patience with each other and enduring courage. We can and will put the fighting spirit back into our movement, along with the necessary changes that go along with that - in strategy, in modes of internal/external functioning and in leadership. The alternative is too grim to accept.


solidaritycaucus@shaw.ca

The individuals whose names appear below are supporting the views contained in this statement of purpose in a personal capacity. Organizations and unions are listed for identification purposes only

Maryann Abbs
member,CEP 468; community activist, Vancouver

John Ames
executive officer, BCGEU component 5, local 503;
Vancouver and District
Labour Council delegate; member Vancouver GMB IWW,
Vancouver

John Black
former president, Malaspina Faculty Association
(CIEA), Malaspina
College,
Nanaimo

Jim Brown
member, Telecommunication Workers Union, local 30,
North Vancouver

Gretchen Dulmage
vice-chair, HEU/CUPE Childrens and Womens Hospital
local 6010; VDLC
delegate; member,
VDLC executive, Vancouver

Claudio Ekdahl
executive member, BCGEU local 603; VDLC delegate;
international
solidarity and grassroots activist, Vancouver

Gordon Flett
union activist, Vancouver

Sandra Giesbrecht
shop steward and trustee, HEU Royal Jubilee Hospital
local, Victoria

Ken Hiebert
member, International Longshore and Warehouse Union,
local 500,
Vancouver

Paul Houle
shop steward and executive member at large, BCGEU
local 603,
Vancouver

David Maidman
member, Ironworkers local 712, New Westminster

Andy Mathisen
member, IWA local 1-3567, New Westminster

Jack McCamy
2nd vice president, CEP local 298, Kitimat

Gene McGuckin
editor, The Pulper, CEP local 1129, Vancouver, chair
of bargaining
committee

Michele Mishler
member, HEU, Richmond Hospital

Will Offley
B.C. Nurses Union member and activist, Vancouver

Jeff Pazik
member, IWA local 1-3567; president, Woodworkers for a
Fair Forestry
Policy
Society, Richmond

Darrell Pinkney
HEU chairperson and representative, HEU Equity
Standing Committee,
Nanaimo

Bob Peacock
chairperson, HEU Broadway Pentecostal Lodge local;
member of HEU
Provincial bargaining committee; former member of
provincial executive,
Vancouver

Susan Roth
member, IWA Canada local 1-85; elected official and
chairperson, Beaver
Creek
Improvement District, a local public corporation, Port
Alberni

Susanne Shaw
member, CEP 514 and CUPE local 873, Port Alice

Sharyn Sigurdur
member, United Food and Commercial Workers Union;
founding member, Members for Democracy (MfD), Mission

Bob Smith
editor, "New Routes", CAW local 111, Vancouver

Gregg Steele
shop steward, HEU Royal Jubilee Hospital local,
Victoria; solidarity and grassroots activist, Victoria

Rick Tait
member, Teamsters local 155, Vancouver

Dan Tkachuk
member CUPE 382, Greater Victoria School Board

John Tregilges
former chairperson, BCGEU local 503, Vancouver

Bob Wilson
member and trustee, CEP local 468; delegate to
Victoria Labour Council

John Yano
member, HEU, St. Vincent's Hospital local, Vancouver





LESSONS FROM THE PAST

Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, thetrade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with
their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.


THE PRINCIPLES OF REVOLUTIONARY UNIONISM
(IWA)
International Workers’ Association

1.- Revolutionary unionism, basing itself on the class struggle, aims to unite all workers in combative economic organizations, that fight to free themselves from the double yoke of capital and the State. Its goal is the reorganization of social life on the basis of Libertarian Communism via the revolutionary action of the working class. Since only the economic organizations of the proletariat are capable of achieving this objective, revolutionary unionism addresses itself to workers in their capacity as producers, creators of social wealth, to take root and develop amongst them, in opposition to the modern workers’ parties, which it declares are incapable of the economic reorganization of society.

2.- Revolutionary unionism is the staunch enemy of all social and economic monopoly, and aims at its abolition by the establishment of economic communities and administrative organs run by the workers in the field and factories, forming a system of free councils without subordination to any authority or political party, bar none. As an alternative to the politics of State and parties, revolutionary unionism posits the economic reorganization of production, replacing the rule of man over man with the administrative management of things. Consequently, the goal of revolutionary unionism is not the conquest of political power, but the abolition of all state functions in the life of society. Revolutionary unionism considers that along with the disappearance of the monopoly of property, must come the disappearance of the monopoly of domination; and that no form of State, however camouflaged, can ever be an instrument for human liberation, but that on the contrary, it will always be the creator of new monopolies and new privileges.

3.- Revolutionary unionism has a two-fold function: to carry on the day-to-day revolutionary struggle for the economic, social and intellectual advancement of the working class within the limits of present-day society, and to educate the masses so that they will be ready to independently manage the processes of production and distribution when the time comes to take possession of all the elements of social life. Revolutionary unionism does not accept the idea that the organization of a social system based exclusively on the producing class can be ordered by simple governmental decrees and maintains that it can only be obtained through the common action of all manual and intellectual workers, in every branch of industry, by self-management of the workers, such that every group, factory or branch of industry is an autonomous member of the greater economic organism and sistematically runs the production and distribution processes according to the interests of the comunity, on an agreed upon plan and on the basis of mutual accord.

4.- Revolutionary unionism is opposed to all organizational tendencies inspired by the centralism of State and Church, because these can only serve to prolong the survival of the State and authority and to sistematically stifle the spirit of initiative and the independence of thought. Centralism is and artificial organization that subjects the so-called lower classes to those who claim to be superior, and that leaves in the hands of the few the affairs of the whole comunity -the individual being turned into a robot with controlled gestures and movements. In the centralized organization, society’s good is subordinated to the interests of the few, variety is replaced by uniformity and personal responsability is replaced by rigid discipline. Consequently, revolutionary unionism bases its social vision on a broad federalist organization; i.e., an organization organised from the botttom up, the uniting of all forces in the defense of common ideas and interests.

5.- Revolutionary unionism rejects all parliamentary activity and all collaboration with legislative bodies; because it knows that even the freest voting system cannot bring about the disappearance of the clear contradictions at the core of present-day society and because the parliamentary system has only one goal: to lend a pretense of legitimacy to the reign of falsehood and social injustice.

6.- Revolutionary Unionism rejects all political and national frontiers, which are arbitrarily created, and declares that so-called nationalism is just the religion of the modern state, behind which is concealed the material interests of the propertied classes. Revolutionary unionism recognizes only economic differences, whether regional or national, that produce hierarchies, privileges and every kind of oppressions (because of race, sex and any false or real difference), and in the spirit of solidarity claims the right to self-determination for all economic groups.

7.- For the identical reason, revolutionary unionism fights against militarism and war. Revolutionary unionism advocates anti-war propaganda and the replacement of standing armies, which are only the instruments of counter-revolution at the service of the capitalism, by workers’ militias, which, during the revolution, will be controlled by the workers’ unions; it demands, as well, the boycott and embargo of all raw materials and products necessary to war, with the exception of a country where the workers are in the midst of social revolution, in which case we should help them defend the revolution. Finally, revolutionary unionism advocates the preventive and revolutionary general strike as a means of opposing war and militarism.

8.- Revolutionary unionism recognizes the need of a production that does not damage the environment, and that tries to minimize the use of non-renewable resources and uses, whenever possible, renewable alternatives. It does not admit the ignorance as the origin of the present-day environmental crisis, but the thirst for earnings. Capitalist production always seeks to minimize the costs in order to get more earnings to survive, and it is unable to protect the environment. To sum up, the world debt crisis has speeded up the tendency to commercial harvest to the detriment of the subsistence agriculture. This fact has produced the destruction of the tropical forest, starvation and disease. The fight for saving our planet and the fight for destroying capitalism must be joint or both of them will fail.

9.- Revolutionary unionism asserts itself to be a supporter of the method of direct action, and aids and encourages all struggles that are not in contradiction to its own goals. Its methods of struggle are: strikes, boycotts, sabotage, etc. Direct action reaches its deepest expression in the general strike, which should also be, from the point of view of revolutionary unionism, the prelude to the social revolution.

10.- While revolutionary unionism is opposed to all organised violence regardless of the kind of government, it realizes that there will be extremely violence clashes during the decisive struggles between the capitalism of today and the free communism of tomorrow. Consequently, it recognizes as valid that violence that may be used as a means of defense against the violent methods used by the ruling classes during the struggles that lead up to the revolutionary populace expropiating the lands and means of production. As this expropiation can only be carried out and brought to a successful conclusion by the direct intervention of the workers’ revolutionary economic organizations, defense of the revolution must also be the task of these economic organizations and not of a military or quasi-military body developing independently of them.

11.- Only in the economic and revolutionary organizations of the working class are there forces capable of bringing about its liberation and the necessary creative energy for the reorganization of society on the basis of libertarian communism.



























socialism

labour

Canada

Politics

economy

anarchism

political

Will Canadian Labour Accept Free Trade?

In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. Karl Marx

Canadian Labour Congress President Georgetti
Opens Pandora’s Box


Last week Ken Georgetti, President of the Canadian Labour Congress declared that the labour movement’s twenty-year opposition to Free Trade was a failure. In no uncertain terms Georgetti opened up a Pandora’s box, well ok he backpedaled immediately afterwards, claiming he said no such thing, but it was too late the box was open.

There has been a great outcry and gnashing of teeth heard through out the labour movement, and its coalition partners in the Anti-Free Trade/Anti-Globalization movement, in Canada. While editorial writers and business press pundits applauded the CLC’s newfound pragmatism.

There will be massive repercussions to Brother Georgetti’s announcement on Wednesday September 22, 2004, a day that will go down in “infamy”. On that day the CLC issued a press release entitled: “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.

The press release announced the CLC Industrial Strategy Conference and quoted portions of Georgetti’s speech, where he “issued the collective challenge… urging the country's labour leadership to work towards a new industrial policy that, while acknowledging the post-free-trade-agreement world, would promote a more activist role for government in steering marketforces towards jobs-rich economic development.”[i]

Then he went on to say; "The reality today is that much of our domestic economy is part and parcel of a North American economy. And to a much greater extent than was the
case before the FTA and NAFTA. Nor are we immune to the pressures on North
American manufacturing posed by the rapid rise of China and developing Asia to
world dominance in the production of consumer goods. Nor to the recent rise in
the offshoring of services."[ii]

Brother Georgetti crying crocodile tears wrote a hasty letter to his Executive Council, Officers of Affiliated Organizations and Presidents of Labour Councils saying he was misquoted by the National Post on their front page story of September 22.




“The CanWest chain (publishers of the National Post), in a front page story this morning, alleged that, in a speech I was to deliver at the Canadian Labour Congress "Industrial Policy Conference", I said that we were wrong about free trade and were not opposed to the free trade agreements.”

“The story is a deliberate and malicious falsification of what I said.The actual speech that I delivered, which is identical to the copy the National Post had, is posted on the CLC website (http://www.clc-ctc.ca). I encourage you to go to the website and read the speech.”

“We are not going to allow the National Post to get away with this misrepresentation of the position of the CLC or its Officers. The CLC has instructed its legal counsel to immediately initiate legal action against National Post and other newspapers in the
CanWest chain, which continues to propagate these lies.”[iii]

Brother Georgetti did not mention the fact that his speech was quoted in the Globe in Mail, nor did he mention their editorial where they too also claimed it was good to see the CLC finally accept what was inevitable, Free Trade was here to stay. Nor did he say he was going to sue the Globe and Mail like he was going to do with the CanWest chain.

So when the Globe and Mail editorial says: “Forward to the fascinating recent exchange between Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, and Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Auto Workers. Normally one wouldn't expect as much as a sliver of daylight between two Canadian labour leaders on an issue of substance. But this week Mr. Georgetti broke the mould. He acknowledged that the Earth is round. "Contrary to some of our most pessimistic predictions," reads a new CLC policy paper, "[the free-trade era] has not been an economic disaster."[iv]

Zounds, for Brother Hargrove, this was heresy indeed. Both the original Canada-US free-trade agreement and the North American free-trade agreement must be ripped up, he loudly insisted. Mr. Georgetti, apparently stung by the implication that he has caved in to the capitalist running dogs, quickly moderated his moderation. "We don't accept it," Mr. Georgetti said of free trade. “We just want to find ways to work with it.”[v]

Obviously Brother Georgetti doth protest too much against CanWest, blaming the messenger so to speak. Clearly the Globe and Mail editorial writers are also misinformed according to Brother Georgetti’s slander suit letter to the labour movement.

Murray Dobbin, outspoken critic of free trade, in his column in the Friday, Sept 24 Globe and Mail, made the case that the CLC was wrong to embrace free trade, as the source of Canada’s recent economic boom[vi]. Was he taken by the “lies” of CanWest, could he have misread the meaning in what Georgetti said? Could the Globe and Mail be mistaken in the quotes they used from Georgetti’s speech? Could the Globe editorial, which sounded very much like the one published by the Vancouver Province, a CanWest paper, have been wrong about the CLC changing its position on the FTA, NAFTA (and what of the upcoming FTAA?).

Nope neither the National Post or the Vancouver Province, CanWest papers, nor the Globe and Mail nor Murray Dobbin got it wrong, Brother Georgetti acknowledged it’s a post free trade world. And you always have to careful about ‘new thinking’, which always smacks of neo-conservative rhetoric.


But what else did Brother Georgetti say in his speech that could possibly be interpreted, or as he now says ‘misinterpreted’, as saying opposition to Free Trade is a thing of the past? Well lets take him up on his challenge and read from his speaking notes.

“All that said, I think we, in the labour movement, need to re-think the role and nature of industrial strategies. I say this because the present economic context is different in some very important ways from the late 1980s.

That is when we last advanced a comprehensive industrial policy agenda as an alternative to the Free Trade Agreement.

In many, many ways, our critique of the FTA was correct.

More than 300,000 workers lost their jobs in the brutal re-structuring of the early 1990s. And many industrial communities were devastated. We will neither forgive nor forget the fact that the promised labour adjustment programs were never put in place.

But, at the same time, we must recognize that the lost jobs have been slowly recovered. And we must also recognize that omelettes are not easily unscrambled. Corporations have restructured their production chains so that goods now cross and re-cross the border in hugely complicated ways.

A larger share of our manufacturing production is now exported to the US than is consumed here at home.

In the services sector, we are now seeing the same type of continental integration between the two countries.

The reality today is that much of our domestic economy is part and parcel of a North American economy. And to a much greater extent than was the case before the FTA and NAFTA.

Some people see the performance of our industrial economy under free trade as proof positive that the ‘leave it all to the market’ approach works. And there have been some successes... at least if we look at the raw numbers on production and jobs. But those statistics mask the serious decline in the quality of industrial jobs.

Throughout the 1990s, we relied far too much on a low Canadian dollar to compete with the US and to create new jobs. While the immediate impact of the higher dollar has been less that many of us feared, many sectors nonetheless now face a very uncertain future.

We see a troubled steel industry, an auto industry starved of the major new investments we need in assembly plants, and a clothing industry facing a major adjustment challenge.

This might sound like an unduly negative assessment. But I am not saying anything that has not been documented – in report after report – on the problems of industrial Canada.

I want to compliment the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association, in particular, for recognizing the need for both a critical assessment of our recent performance, and the need to collectively face up to the challenges of the near future.

We will hear from their chief economist, Jayson Myers, at lunch. I hope his remarks will kick-off a spirited and constructive exchange of views. We may well have our differences, but we both share the goal of building a stronger industrial base here in Canada.

The labour movement can only be an active actor in shaping the economy if we have our own ideas and our own strategies. Once again, I can only stress the importance of this conference... and the necessity for each of you to contribute your experiences and viewpoints.

Our common task today and tomorrow is to debate issues, to revisit old ideas, and to develop new thinking.

Let me just briefly identify five key issues which I think deserve discussion, and which I'm sure will be addressed by some of our panellists...(sic)

First, what are the links between the trade deals and industrial policy?

There is little doubt that the trade deals deprived us of some tools of industrial policy which were used in the 1970s and 1980s. These tools include: the ability to require higher levels of resource processing; to control domestic energy prices; and to set conditions for Canadian content on foreign takeovers.

But the trade deals still empower governments to provide support to industry for research, training, and regional development. Many countries have been much more aggressive in pushing the trade pact envelope.

We in Canada should and must find creative ways to achieve our economic goals in different ways than in the past.

We also need to discuss the extent to which we should be thinking about industrial strategies in a North American rather than purely Canadian context. Particularly with regard to those sectors that have become so closely integrated in the era of the FTA and NAFTA.

Does it, for example, make sense today to talk about sectoral trade deals?

Second, where does energy fit in?

The trade deals have more or less locked us into a North American energy future. As prices rise, energy exports will likely become an even more important driver of the Canadian economy.

We are already witnessing the expansion of the tar sands, offshore exploration and development, new pipeline construction, and so on.

By contrast, taking Kyoto implementation and global warming seriously could underpin green industrial strategies... strategies focussed on new jobs in energy conservation and renewable energy. Can we do both? Or, do we have to choose?”[vii]

Brother Georgetti not only challenges the CLC traditional opposition to Free Trade he now also poses the fact that perhaps the labour movement needs to adjust its thinking about Kyoto as well!

Well that’s not such a shocker either. What Brother Georgetti is really saying, is that the labour movement should accept the reality of Free Trade agreements and ameliorate them. Which is not much different than what his American counterparts have been saying in their own way, or the way the ICFTU and ILO have responded to the issue of the WTO.

But first let us here from someone familiar with the original debate on Free Trade,
Dr. Karl Marx. And what is the good doctor’s diagnosis of the problem?

“Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of
establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say,
of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that
dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more
or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system
helps to develop free trade competition within a country. Hence we see
that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt
as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain
protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against
feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of
its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same
country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while
the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities
and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the
extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social
revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I
vote in favor of free trade.”[viii]


Hmm, Marx certainly does not view Free Trade as being reformable, and sees it as forcing a revolution by increasing the growth of the proletariat in relation to the growth of capital. In fact he sees that it is an outgrowth of capitalism after a period of protectionism, in other words it is the flip side of the coin. “But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive.”

And perhaps that is what Brother Georgetti means when he says: “But, at the same time, we must recognize that the lost jobs have been slowly recovered. And we must also recognize that omelettes are not easily unscrambled. Corporations have restructured their production chains so that goods now cross and re-cross the border in hugely complicated ways.”[ix]




Maybe he is a Marxist while his old social coalition allies in the protectionist/nationalist Anti-Free Trade movement like the Maude Barlow and her Council of Canadians, Mel Hurtig, Tony Clarke, the NGO’s and the anti-globalization movement, and yes even Murray Dobbin, are being the real conservatives.

Nah, Brother Georgetti has not embraced dialectical materialism anymore than he views the working class as being a social revolutionary force. He is simply being a pragmatic trade unionist in the tradition of Samuel Gompers. He may agree that the free trade system is destructive, and that it “breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point.” But create a social revolution, never!

Remember this is the head of the Labour congress, the greatest collection of private and public sector ‘business’ unions in Canada. While supportive of the NDP, one and all, social revolution, well that’s going a bit far. Brother Georgetti like his NDP counterparts are merely being pragmatic social democrats.

And let’s not quibble about who is or is not a business union. Whether it is CUPE and CAW (already Brother Buzz Hargrove is wrapping himself in the flag of protectionism and seeking dance partners in the Anti-Free Trade movement) or Steel and the Building Trades, social unions, public sector unions, or private sector, they are all the same. They exist to ameliorate the hardships of capitalism, to get a better deal for ‘their’ workers, to make capitalism share a portion of its profits with the proletariat. But challenge capitalism, never.

Nor is the CLC new found coziness with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association anything less then the usual politics of tripartism and recognition of the need for a new social contract.

As Murray Dobbin points out in his article “did free trade and structural adjustment bring the promised flood of new foreign investment? Industry Canada says no. Over the whole period of free trade over 95% of foreign investment in Canada has been devoted to buying up Canadian companies - activity that more often means layoffs, not new jobs.
Ironically, this structural adjustment of the country has been done for the benefit of a surprisingly small part of the economy. Less than 25 per cent of what we produce in goods and services is exported, yet we have severely compromised the domestic economy in order to be trade-competitive with the US.”[x]

In the spirit of his new found belief in Continentalism Brother Georgetti, sounding more like CNN’s Lou Dobbs than Dobbin, says: “Nor are we immune to the pressures on North American manufacturing posed by the rapid rise of China and developing Asia to world dominance in the production of consumer goods. Nor to the recent rise in the offshoring of services."[xi]

The FTA and NAFTA have created a continental protectionist-trading block that benefits a single common signatory; the United States. The FTA, a bilateral agreement, the NAFTA a trilateral agreement that includes Mexico, and finally the FTAA, a trilateral agreement between the continental trading block of NAFTA, with Latin America and Caribbean countries. It is protectionism none the less. The key protectionist market is still the US and in all these agreements they play the main role. In fact no matter how many countries are involved the agreements in effect are a series of bilateral agreements with the US to curtail their protectionism.

It has not protected Canada or Mexico from being punished by the United States when it has seen fit to impose trade barriers around its own steel industry, or with punishing Canada through penalties around exporting cheap soft wood lumber, or Mexico with penalties over its exporting cheap tomatoes.

That Brother Georgetti should believe that the Canadian Labour Movement should reconsider its opposition to NAFTA does not mean he wants to leave the trade agreement as it is. No like his international counterparts, in ICFTU and the ILO he wants the labour movement to use side agreements, and reform these acts.

And he does it from a protectionist position, no different than Dobbin’s or Barlow’s, except his is a Continental perspective while they remain staunch nationalists. Like them he too wants to work with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters to protect Canadian Capitalism, which is whom the majority of the unionized industrial workers in Canada work for.

In a sense it is also provincial perspective of Southern Ontario writ large on the National body politic when Brother Georgetti calls for a New Industrial Policy with labour at the table, a new tripartism between labour, capital and the state. In other words as the good Doctor said, “Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is …beginning to make itself felt as a class, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons…, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country. “[xii]

Mel Hurtig, Maude Barlow, Murray Dobbin and Buzz Hargrove all want to defend a nationalistic mixed capitalist economy, within a social democratic state. Brother Georgetti and Brother Hargrove in reality want the same thing, a made in Southern Ontario industrial policy which means, that it has to be a Continental strategy, as it was with the now defunct Auto-Pact. Brother Georgetti is just a bit more honest about, then Brother Hargrove.

And what fear does Brother Georgetti have about US economic policy? Well the attacks on outsourcing impact Canada. We are key to the outsourcing of telephony and IT. We are equal to India in number of jobs outsourced from the US to Canadian call centres according to a UN study issued the same day as the CLC began its conference.

These are the new service industries that have replaced those lost manufacturing jobs.




Recently New Brunswick, which is identified as the most aggressive province in outsourcing, paid $825 million to a US company to create a call centre with 500 jobs.
Now unlike India and the United States these jobs are being unionized. So business unions in Canada in the Service Sector may soon be agreeing with Georgetti about the need to enforce the FTA and NAFTA to save these jobs from the incessant protectionism of the United States.

When NAFTA opened up the market between Canada, the United States and Mexico, industrial jobs moved to Mexico, and to Canada. In fact Canada developed a larger industrial manufacturing base with higher productivity than its American or Mexican counterparts, according to figures provided by Sam Gidden and Leo Panitch, in their recent critique of globalization in Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review[xiii]. How could that be? Well while we lost some industrial jobs in some sectors particularly around the Southern Ontario US beltway. Many auto related. But we have also gained industrial development in secondary and tertiary production.

The growth of Stronach’s Magna parts company, which is non-union, is one example. The impact not of Free Trade, but of just in time production methods, is the reason for Magna’s success. The whole auto sector as well as other North American industries restructured in the nineties, laying off workers and middle management in the thousands and selling off its secondary and tertiary manufacturing arms while buying up financial and loan businesses. GM made more off its financial sector, credit card and loans, last year than it did selling cars and trucks.

Canada has benefited by having secondary and tertiary manufacturing developing in southern Ontario and Quebec. Hence Gidden and Panitch’s assertion that industrial production has grown faster in Canada then in the United States or Mexico. What infuriates Brother Hargrove is that most of this is non-union.

But a case in point of how Canada benefits from this new industrial production transfer, is the case of a car seat manufacturer in the United States. Located in the Lower East Side of LA, this company was one of the few industrial employers in that impoverished neighborhood that was the source of the LA riots. After the riots everyone claimed that the Lower East Side need economic inputs and job creation. Well the car seat manufacturer ignored this and moved these much-needed jobs north to Quebec. Why? One is the exchange rate between the Canadian dollar and the U.S. dollar, lowering our real economic costs of production, it was given tax incentives from the Quebec and Canadian government, and finally the clincher, Canada’s Medicare system saved the company millions.





Why did production jobs move to Mexico, well they didn’t really, production shifted across North America, when the new trade agreements opened up the Continental market of Canada, the US and Mexico, all sorts of readjustments were made. Some production shifted to Mexico, Volkswagen and other car manufacturers opened new plants in Mexico. Japanese car manufacturers opened up new production in Canada, and German manufacturers began moving production to the United States, where worker productivity was higher and cheaper than German workers! This later move eventually resulted in Daimler-Mercedes Benz buying out Chrysler.

Outsourcing and privatization are the key to this restructuring of capitalism in the global context. Globalization is capitalism moving to tendencies to monopoly in the G20 countries, excess importance being put on finance capital, and the move to create a mass working class base in the developing world where outsourcing of production can be shipped too. This shift is clearly towards Asia, China in particular.

Why the G20? Because this is a broader definition of the industrialized countries that are making the new continental trading blocks. Recently the president of Intel, the US monopoly chip maker, told Brazilians that the company would not be moving its production to that country because wages and benefits were too high! Instead Intel was moving into China, where wages and benefits are still low. Like the German car manufacturers moving to North America after NAFTA, now the manufacturers are looking to Asia and China.

But we have also lost other industries, milling, meat packing, for example are now direct branch plants of their American parents. Where we once had many secondary agricultural industries, we have lost them, only to have them replaced by American conglomerates. Which makes sense since we are predominately exporting to the U.S. market. And again these conglomerates such as Cargill and IBP Packers, or ADM, which was, sold Robin Hood Mills, are reshaping agriculture into agribusiness. Just as Monsanto is with control of both herbicide and genetically modified canola. The market is rapidly industrializing and the family farm across North America is doomed.

Maple Leaf is one of the few packinghouse chains left in Canada, and it has a virtual monopoly. Like other McCain businesses, which has the monopoly on potato production in the Maritimes, McCain and Maple Leaf prove that privatization and competition in the market lead inevitably to monopoly not greater competition. But hey everyone knows that since that is why it is called Monopoly capitalism.







Take Air Canada, which has been deregulated by the Federal Government, in the era of NAFTA. Was it the trade agreement, and the ideology of open skies, that led to the mess that is Canada’s airline industry? No. Air Canada’s need to be the single player in the market that drove them to absorb Canadian Airlines, and several other small carriers.

And then after overextending themselves in a limited market, becoming the sole monopoly, they declared bankruptcy in order to gain enough capital from pension funds, wage freezes rollbacks and layoffs, that the company could attract capital to maintain its monopoly. And who had the capital to buy the airline? A Hong Kong business man.

Telus is another case in point. Formerly Alberta Government Telephones, now privatized Telus first gobbled up Edmonton Telephone, a city phone company that was on the cutting edge of technological innovation in telephony especially fiber optics. Then Telus gobbled up BC Tel. It split the countries long distance market between itself and BCE (Bell Canada). Next it moved into mobile cell phone market, and has proceeded to dominate that market as well, buying up its competitors, leaving it and BCE and Rogers cable as the players in the cell phone market. As it out laid cash for these purchases it did not translate that into profits. And low and behold too rapid an expansion of the business left it asset wealthy and cash shy, like Air Canada. And the result was, wait for, layoffs, rollbacks and wage freezes.

Canada and Quebec have benefited from the protectionism of our markets for the past fifty
years. It has created a bourgeoisie in both states. And both states have used government to aid business development. Whether it is a private company benefiting from subsidies or a former crown corporation now privatized, or a IT firm with a contract for service, privatization and outsourcing have been the engines of capitalist expansion rather than the free trade agreements per se.

Now we are benefiting from the privatization of crown corporations and the expansion of secondary and tertiary manufacturing, as well as a growth in the technology and service sectors. In the nineties the Canadian government and provincial governments restructured as did the private sector. Greater emphasis is placed on contracting out and outsourcing. This has a greater impact on the economy than the trade deals did themselves. See Labour in the Global Economy,[xiv] where we assert that privatization is the problem not globalization.

Bombadier is a case in point, as is CN rail. Bombadier a private company a major employer in Quebec has for the past decade benefited from Federal Government largesse and grown into an international competitor. CN was privatized and again its first act to become profitable was to layoff thousands of workers. CN has used this capital to then expand and buy up American railroad holdings. Again picking up pension plan and benefit monies as well as wages, as it again laid off thousands of workers. The former federal bureaucrat who was made president of CN, Paul Tellier was so successful in his transformation of CN into a private monopoly, that Bombadier hired him to restructure their company. Which he promptly did with, you guessed it, more layoffs.

Without the restructuring there would have been no free trade.

As Dr. Marx points out: “Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say,
of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that
dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more
or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system
helps to develop free trade competition within a country.”[xv]

The Nationalists who oppose Free Trade are calling for a made in Canada capitalism, whose time has come and gone. Now the integration of the market on the Continent is underway it is resulting in internal conflicts that the FTA and NAFTA were supposed to pave over. In particular US protectionism and jingoism.

Canada suffers illegal protectionist taxation by the US on our soft wood lumber exports, and a closed border to our live cattle in order to bolster the flagging American meat packing companies. Mexico faces protectionist tariffs against its tomato exports and increased jingoism against ‘illegal aliens’ read Mexicans, entering the US.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs has been an outspoken jingoist against so called open borders and the illegal alien invasion of the US. Not since the 1920’s have we seen such anti-alien hysteria.

The simple fact of the matter is that whether it is outsourcing production, or undocumented workers, the market wants cheap labour. And what the market wants the market gets. Thousands of workers are employed in sweatshops in the United States, thousands are employed as nannies, gardeners, and service workers for the ruling class.

If there wasn’t low paid work then these workers would not stay. The contradiction is that there is. And if low paid work, read indentured servitude, is required to increase profits companies will employ it wherever they can, and if they can open up the labour markets under free trade agreements so much the better. Capital moves, labour is held back from moving, and capital goes to newly industrializing nations, creating a new proletariat.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs begins to sound a lot like Brother Georgetti and Brother Hargrove when it comes to the issue of outsourcing. Of course he too focuses on India and China, and not Canada. Common cause has been made with American labour that China is the problem of outsourced American jobs. During the WTO protests in Seattle, the Teamsters may have made peace with the Turtles (the environmental movement) but the still retained their good old racist jingoism by focusing their protests not against the WTO but the American trade agreement with China. Them foreigners (who are not white people) are taking our jobs.

Just like Brother Georgetti, American labour and its ruling class have made China the global boogieman of expanding capitalism. And then enter the Democrats, presidential candidate John Kerry and the Democrats have been quick to embrace protectionism against outsourcing and in the case of Canada against beef exports to the US.

And while the free trade agreements may have eased some of this, the reality is that starting in the nineties the whole movement of capitalism was towards outsourcing and privatization. Government restructuring and corporate restructuring went hand in hand the result being that computer technologies and IT were seen as logical for outsourcing, and the services that go with greater computerized communications and telephony.

“Canada ranked a close second to India, attracting 56 new call centres in 2002 and 2003, the report found. India had 60 and Britain was third with 43. Indeed, more than half of all new call centres went to developed countries.

The UN also reported that Canada was among a group of just four countries that controlled 70 per cent of the estimated $32-billion (U.S.) yearly market for offshored services in 2001. The others were Ireland, India and Israel.”[xvi]

Why developed countries? Because as the captains of industry are so oft to say; ‘we need and educated work force.’ And you need infrastructure provided in industrialized countries. China and India are industrialized countries. Certainly they have a mass peasantry, but over the past fifty years a tremendous expansion of industrial development has occurred. As it has all over the pacific region and now in Africa as well as the Middle East and Latin America.


This is the new world market. Cellphone manufacturing in Finland, France, and the US.Car factories in England, France, Italy, Canada, the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Russia Korea, China, Japan. Large scale agribusiness like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Monsanto, displacing family farms in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Canada, the United States, England, Brazil, Africa, etc.

Outsourcing is the key to increasing capital profitability, in order to stave off the falling rate of profit.

So while American commentators like Lou Dobbs or politicians like Kerry denounce the loss of American jobs to outsourcing, their Canadian nationalist counterparts are saying the same thing. And their only solution is of course increased protectionism, close the borders. As much an impossibility today as it was in 1848.

The war in Iraq is another case of privatization, there were more mercenaries used than in any other conflict. Food services to troops, housekeeping services, engineering services were also all provided by private contractors. The war in Iraq was a Cato Institute wet dream of contracted out services. It was the first privatized war, a contracted out conflict, the new face of 21st Century warfare.

The labour movements focus in Canada and the United States has always been on how they can reform the trade agreements, as well as mobilizing popular support opposing them. One sector of movement was joining its coalition partners opposing Free Trade while another was at the table bargaining for sectoral agreements on labour, the environment, social services, etc. Brother Georgetti has not abandoned dealing with Free Trade agreements, he has merely abandoned his coalition partners and their nationalistic/sovereignty agenda.

Under the ideology of privatization and outsourcing labour must abandon their nationalistic jingoism, regardless of their national identity. And this is much harder. Since in Canada and Europe the labour movement is social democratic, it can only visualize a reformed capitalism. In the words of Ed Broadbent, patriarch of the New Democratic Party; “We are social democrats we believe in a mixed economy.” For Ed, and Brother Georgetti and indeed the entire labour movement in Canada, socialism is NOT on the agenda. A national social democratic state is the best possible world for these pragmatists.

In America, the labour movement is fiercely nationalistic, to the point of jingoism. The chants of USA, USA, USA, and We’re Number 1, can be heard in their opposition to free trade. And the Teamsters have been the epitome of jingoists, attacking Mexican truck drivers or China with a barely disguised racism.

And true to its national identity the labour movement in each country can only see the impact of a restructured capitalism as an effect on its own members. It does not even speak for the working class of its nation so divided is the house of labour, in every country, from the class which gave it birth.

Unlike the newly formed unions in the developing countries like Korea, Indonesia, etc. the labour movement in the industrialized countries of Europe, North, Central and South America, are corporations. Like their business counterparts these corporations have well heeled executives, servicing representatives, communications and marketing departments, benefits and claims specialists in effect the entire organizational structure of a corporate bureaucracy.

In the case of Canada we have a branch plant economy which also has branch plant unions such as the Steelworkers, UFCW, SEIU, Teamsters, building trades, etc. These unions in Canada reflect the national character of social democracy and tripartiteism making them more suitable than their American parent bodies for a Continental perspective.

In fact they look like positively socialist compared to their American counterparts. And in the Canadian labour movement, CUPW, CAW, CUPE, NUPGE, CEP, and other non branch plant industrial or social unions look positively communist as do their Quebec counterparts the CSN, FTQ, CSQ.

Brother Georgetti is not alone in his views of the need for a Continental policy of tripartiteism. Brother Gerard of the Steelworkers the first Canadian elected president of both the US and Canadian International is a long time supporter of tripartite schemes with employers and government.

Unions in social democratic states in Europe have spent many years in tripartite social contracts with governments and business. In Canada the last industrial policy developed by the CLC was a tripartite agreement under Joe Morris in the 1970’s but that ended in acrimony when the Trudeau government brought in wage and price controls.

The eighties and nineties have been an unprecedented attack on workers in the industrialized countries. And these attacks continue today, mainly through wage concessions, restructuring full time work to part time work, demanding greater flexibility in working schedules, rolling back wages and attacking benefits, gutting pension plans as a source of quick cash for mergers and acquisitions, moving jobs offshore.

At the same time as these jobs moved offshore, they developed new economic zones of industrialization. This saw the boom in newly industrialized countries, such as the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc. and with production comes the transformation of farmers and peasants into wage slaves, chained to the machines of Nike, Adidas, Ford, GM, etc. Once a working class develops it becomes self conscious, surprise surprise, just as the good Doctor prescribed, the working class begins to develop organizations, to defend itself against the worst excesses of capitalism in other words unions.

In order to defeat working class self-organization capitalism developed the Free Trade Zones, areas of sweatshops and low waged production, under military rule, with a concentration camp type atmosphere of a captured group of workers. Not unlike the early days of capitalism with its company towns of the late 19th and early 20th Century, or the relief camps of the dirty thirties in Canada, or the gulags in Russia. Still this has not stopped workers from organizing. And free trade zones are not just limited to the newly industrializing countries or the Third World, we have these zones in Canada in the Maritimes, and in the United States where they are called new economic zones, usually capitals attempt to revive urban ghettos.

Once production expands and becomes a major industry it employees a wider group of workers, it expands its area of dominance and hegemony, and can no longer exist within its ‘zone’. Once that happens the workers again organize such is their need and strength, and understanding that these are now permanent jobs, permanent existence. Gone is the village, gone is the peasant farm, gone are the days of planting and fishing, here is existence from dawn to midnight in the air-conditioned, fluorescent lit, concrete factories in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Haiti, Indonesia, etc. And yet these workers, such as those in Nicaragua have organized themselves, when they can, when they are not murdered by the military goons of capital.

And who employs these workers? Canadian companies, American companies, French, German, British, Japanese, companies. Capitalism needs to create these zones of primitive accumulation regardless of nationalism, nation states or national agendas and whether it had Free Trade agreements or not.

“You thousands of workers who are perishing, do not despair! You can die
with an easy conscience. Your class will not perish. It will always be
numerous enough for the capitalist class to decimate it without fear of
annihilating it. Besides, how could capital be usefully applied if it
did not take care always to keep up its exploitable material, i.e., the
workers, to exploit them over and over again?

But, besides, why propound as a problem still to be solved the question:
What influence will the adoption of free trade have upon the condition
of the working class? All the laws formulated by the political
economists from Quesnay to Ricardo have been based upon the hypothesis
that the trammels which still interfere with commercial freedom have
disappeared. These laws are confirmed in proportion as free trade is
adopted. The first of these laws is that competition reduces the price
of every commodity to the minimum cost of production. Thus the minimum
of wages is the natural price of labor. And what is the minimum of
wages? Just so much as is required for production of the articles
indispensable for the maintenance of the worker, for putting him in a
position to sustain himself, however badly, and to propagate his race,
however slightly.

But do not imagine that the worker receives only this minimum wage, and
still less that he always receives it.

No, according to this law, the working class will sometimes be more
fortunate. It will sometimes receive something above the minimum, but
this surplus will merely make up for the deficit which it will have
received below the minimum in times of industrial stagnation. That is
to say that, within a given time which recurs periodically, in the cycle
which industry passes through while undergoing the vicissitudes of
prosperity, overproduction, stagnation and crisis, when reckoning all
that the working class will have had above and below necessaries, we
shall see that, in all, it will have received neither more nor less than
the minimum; i.e., the working class will have maintained itself as a
class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after
leaving many corpses upon the industrial battlefield. But what of that?
The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have increased.

But this is not all. The progress of industry creates less expensive
means of subsistence. Thus spirits have taken the place of beer, cotton
that of wool and linen, and potatoes that of bread.

Thus, as means are constantly being found for the maintenance of labor
on cheaper and more wretched food, the minimum of wages is constantly
sinking. If these wages began by making the man work to live, they end
by making him live the life of a machine. His existence has not other
value than that of a simple productive force, and the capitalist treats
him accordingly.

This law of commodity labor, of the minimum of wages, will be confirmed
in proportion as the supposition of the economists, free-trade, becomes
an actual fact. Thus, of two things one: either we must reject all
political economy based on the assumption of free trade, or we must
admit that under this free trade the whole severity of the economic laws
will fall upon the workers.” [xvii]

While Brother Georgetti was addressing the CLC on the need for a new tripartite industrial policy, a conference on outsourcing was being held in New York where the Canadian Government, the same government that Brother Georgetti wants to develop a new industrial policy. Well Ottawa has a policy;

“ Ottawa's Export Development Corp. is financing Canadian foreign investments that lead to the outsourcing of jobs when it believes those deals help companies remain competitive in world markets, EDC executive vice-president Eric Siegel. He described a rapidly changing global marketplace in which companies increasingly locate production where it is most cost-effective.

That's what it takes to be competitive in a globalized world," he said. "And EDC has to fit within this model to fulfill its mandate of support for Canadian businesses seeking prosperity in the global marketplace.

He said Canadian firms are no longer making just one-off export sales --- for which the EDC typically provides credit and insurance -- but are also exporting services and making overseas investments as part of the globalization of their supply chains.

Nearly one-third of all world trade is now intra-firm, as companies ship components across national borders for further processing.

Mr. Siegel said the federally owned EDC needs to support those ventures in order to "stay relevant" to the Canadian corporate sector that it serves.

The EDC will even participate in sales made by foreign subsidiaries of Canadian companies, on the grounds that a healthy branch plant benefits the parent company.

"You have to respond to those competitive forces. It's impossible to ignore or to resist them -- inevitably you'll be impacted by them," he said in an interview after his presentation.

"So if we're going to be helpful to Canadian businesses, we have to accept them to some extent."

According to EDC research, the Canadian economy benefits tremendously from overseas investments, even when some jobs are lost at home, because companies win new customers in global markets and return dividends and earnings to the home country.

"So the investment itself may look like an export of jobs abroad, but in fact, it really is producing benefit and jobs at home. But it takes longer for those benefits to obviously accrue," he said.

The EDC executive acknowledged the growing concern that globalization is leading to a "race to the bottom," in companies take advantage of weaker labour and environmental standards to gain a competitive advantage.

EDC also helps finance the expansion of Canadian plants, even when they are owned by foreign companies, where they are clearly aimed for the export market.

In 2002, the federal Crown corporation supported Mexican auto parts maker Nemak's expansion of aluminum auto parts plants it bought from Ford Motor Co. It later financed Nemak's purchase of Canadian machinery and equipment for its Mexican plants.

In his presentation, Mr. Siegel said the EDC is committed to increasing its presence in emerging markets, even though Canada continues send 85 per cent of its exports to the United States. Nearly 20 per cent of EDC business last year -- or $11-billion of a total of $52-billion -- covered deals in such markets.”[xviii]

It is the development curse of capitalism, it must expand or it will collapse on itself. The working class that capitalism needs for its self-perpetuation, and which it has created worldwide over the last fifty years will hasten that collapse. As Dr. Marx puts it:

“The whole line of argument amounts to this: Free trade increases
productive forces. If industry keeps growing, if wealth, if the
productive power, if, in a word, productive capital increases, the
demand for labor,the price of labor, and consequently the rate of wages,
rise also.

The most favorable condition for the worker is the growth of capital.
This must be admitted. If capital remains stationary, industry will not
merely remain stationary but will decline, and in this case the worker
will be the first victim. He goes to the wall before the capitalist.
And in the case where capital keeps growing, in the circumstance which
we have said are the best for the worker, what will be his lot? He will
go to the wall just the same. The growth of productive capital implies
the accumulation and the concentration of capital. The centralization
of capital involves a greater division of labor and a greater use of
machinery. The greater division of labor destroys the especial skill of
the laborer; and by putting in the place of this skilled work labor
which anybody can perform, it increase competition among the workers.

This competition becomes fiercer as the division of labor enables a
single worker to do the work of three. Machinery accomplishes the same
result on a much larger scale. The growth of productive capital, which
forces the industrial capitalists to work with constantly increasing
means, ruins the small industrialist and throws them into the
proletariat. Then, the rate of interest falling in proportion as
capital accumulates, the small rentiers, who can no longer live on their
dividends, are forced to go into industry and thus swell the number of
proletarians.

Finally, the more productive capital increases, the more it is compelled
to produce for a market whose requirements it does not know, the more
production precedes consumption, the more supply tries to force demand,
and consumption crises increase in frequency and in intensity. But
every crisis in turn hastens the centralization of capital and adds to
the proletariat.

Thus, as productive capital grows, competition among the workers grows
in a far greater proportion. The reward of labor diminishes for all,
and the burden of labor increases for some.”[xix]


So which Canadian capitalist enterprise should the working class and its labour movement align with? Which one is not outsourcing, contracting out, privatizing, moving offshore, restructuring, laying off, freezing wages, or otherwise brutalizing the working class for profit?

The opposition in the streets to the Free Trade agreement did not translate into political action at the polls, the place the labour movement is so fond of placing its trust in. In the 1988 election the Liberals stole the NDP anti-free trade rhetoric and won a minority government, soon to be replaced by the pro-free trade Mulroney Tories. After which we had the Liberals promise to abrogate free trade and eliminate the GST if reelected. And as we all know that promise was the same as “the check is in the mail”. Even in this last election where the left in the form of the NDP and the BQ in Quebec did not even mention the Free Trade agreements.

The Anti Free Trade movement has moved on to become the Anti-WTO, Anti FTAA the Anti-globalization movement and its subsequent World Social Forum. And their solution to American Imperialism and rampant capitalism, is social democracy and national sovereignty in each country. Again the pandering to national identities in a world economy. Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians feels right at home with the Tobin Tax advocates of the ATTAC from France, and every one loves Lulu of Brazil. Well they did until he too was forced by capitalism to roll back pension and social benefits, and provide a workable corporate state for capital.

Fifty years ago NGO’s were created and developed a corresponding ideology of development and underdevelopment, the third world, north and south divides, the peasant agrarian economies and the industrialized economies. That was then this is now. What is being called globalization, free trade, is the expansion of capitalism around the world, now finally into the last of the Stalinist regimes; China.

Capital moves but labour is restricted to its ghettos in the nation state. The attack on immigrant workers and economic refugees is nationalistic jingoism that has failed to be addressed by the labour movement. Workers without frontiers is the movement that labour should be embracing, certainly the capitalists are with importing of workers from the newly industrialized countries to work in their packinghouses and factories in North America and Europe.

Indentured servitude of farm workers, nannies and others in Canada is slavery by any other name, and needs to be confronted as such. A recent report from the United States claimed that as many as 10,000 people work in that country in conditions of indentured servitude, or modern slavery. This is separate from the thousands of undocumented workers who serve the American sweatshop economy.

“Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word
_freedom_. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in
relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.

Why should you desire to go on sanctioning free competition with this
idea of freedom, when this freedom is only the product of a state of
things based upon free competition?

We have shown what sort of brotherhood free trade begets between the
different classes of one and the same nation. The brotherhood which
free trade would establish between the nations of the Earth would hardly
be more fraternal. To call cosmopolitan exploitation universal
brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the
bourgeoisie. All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition
gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic
proportions on the world market. We need not dwell any longer upon free
trade sophisms on this subject, which are worth just as much as the
arguments of our prize-winners Messrs. Hope, Morse, and Greg.

For instance, we are told that free trade would create an international
division of labor, and thereby give to each country the production which
is most in harmony with its natural advantage.

You believe, perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar
is the natural destiny of the West Indies.

Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about
commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there.

And it may be that in less than half a century you will find there
neither coffee nor sugar, for the East Indies, by means of cheaper
production, have already successfully combated his alleged natural
destiny of the West Indies. And the West Indies, with their natural
wealth, are already as heavy a burden for England as the weavers of
Dacca, who also were destined from the beginning of time to weave by
hand.

One other thing must never be forgotten, namely, that, just as
everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches
of industry which dominate all others, and secure to the nations which
most largely cultivate them the command of the world market. Thus in
international commerce cotton alone has much greater commercial than all
the other raw materials used in the manufacture of clothing put
together. It is truly ridiculous to see the free-traders stress the few
specialties in each branch of industry, throwing them into the balance
against the products used in everyday consumption and produced most
cheaply in those countries in which manufacture is most highly
developed.

If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at
the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen
also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich
itself at the expense of another.”[xx]

If the labour movement wanted to really be radical, rather than another industrial bailout for Southern Ontario, the movement would look at mobilizing its funds and abilities to organize the unorganized on a global basis. And where workers are organized linking worker to worker with them so that a strike in Korea has an impact across the globe, to begin to take up struggles across borders, and not just in information pickets but actual sit down strikes, and occupations.

But don’t expect the corporate unions in North America to do this. The North American labour movement is not a class struggle organization let alone a voice of the working class, as a class for itself.

In Canada the labour movement would rather sick their lawyers on NAFTA, or Provincial anti-labour acts then call for political strikes, or heaven forbid a General Strike. The CLC called its lawyers in their case against CanWest, rather than calling for a one day political protest strike against the offending media organization, which is unionized. The use of lawyers is the weapon of corporations not class struggle organizations.

Modern business unions are corporations, in fact so much so that instead of expanding to organize the unorganized, they would rather raid each other, or expand through the corporate restructuring so favored by capitalism; mergers and acquisitions. To reform monopoly capitalism, you need monopoly unions, to defeat it you need a world wide class struggle and new forms of class struggle organizations and movements.

To paraphrase the good Doctor, the Workers of the World have no country. Something that Brother Georgetti and the Anti-Free Trade/Anti-Globalization movements fail to understand.
[i] CLC PRESS RELEASE SEPT. 22, 2004; “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.
[ii] CLC press release Sept. 22, 2004; “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.
[iii] SEPTEMBER 22, 2004 LETTER TO:
Members of the Executive Council, Ranking Officers of Affiliated Organizations and Presidents of Labour Councils
Re: National Post Story and Free Trade
Kenneth V. Georgetti President. CLC
[iv] THE FREE-TRADE SHUFFLE, Globe & Mail Editorial, September 24, 2004
[v] CLC PRESS RELEASE SEPT. 22, 2004; “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.
[vi] FREE TRADE HAS COST US DEARLY, By Murray Dobbin, September 24, Globe and Mail,
also posted on www.rabble.ca
[vii] SUBJECT: SPEAKING NOTES TO THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY CONFERENCE
Publish date: September 22, 2004 Author(s): Canadian Labour Congress
[viii] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[ix] SUBJECT: SPEAKING NOTES TO THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY CONFERENCE
Publish date: September 22, 2004 Author(s): Canadian Labour Congress
[x] FREE TRADE HAS COST US DEARLY, By Murray Dobbin, September 24, Globe and Mail,
also posted on www.rabble.ca
[xi] SUBJECT: SPEAKING NOTES TO THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY CONFERENCE
Publish date: September 22, 2004 Author(s): Canadian Labour Congress
[xii] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xiii] Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, "American Imperialism and EuroCapitalism: The Making of Neoliberal Globalization," pp. 7 - 38. Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review Number 71/72, Autumn 2003/Winter 2004 Internalizing Global Capitalism http://www.carleton.ca/spe/
[xiv] Le Revue Gauche #1 Global Labour in the Age of Empire
Paper presented at the Alberta Social Forum October 2003, and at a Public Meeting of the Council of Canadians, Red Deer Feb 17, 2004 Presented on behalf of the IWW Edmonton GMB http://edmonton.iww.ca/
[xv] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xvi] OFFSHORING OF JOBS BIG BENEFIT FOR CANADA Only India attracted more, UN report says
By Barrie McKenna With a report from John Saunders Thursday, September 23, 2004 –
Page A1 Globe and Mail
[xvii] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xviii] EDC SEES SOME JOBS OUTSOURCING AS NECESSARY
Will finance foreign investments that help Canadian companies remain competitive
Globe and Mail, Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - Page B8
[xix] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xx] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848