Class war in Romania: Austerity and the dismantling of trade unions

By Maria Luisa Guevara

Published 8 November, 2025

A wave of austerity measures were implemented in Romania in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and subsequent Eurozone crisis. They represented another example of how austerity policies are nothing more than disguised class war on the working people. Austerity has been the perfect tool used by elites to dismantle the remnants of socialist era workers’ rights and completely cripple the trade unions. In this article, I will explore what this turbo-austerity program implied and its impact on trade unions in Romania. I will also analyse recent changes in legislation, dating from 2022, and how they may provide trade unions with renewed momentum today, as the country undergoes another austerity wave.

The long transition to capitalism

In the first 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of the “transition to capitalism”, Romania went through endless “reforms” meant to bring the country into the realm of the “developed” and “civilised” capitalist countries. These included the privatisation of dozens of state-owned companies, mostly through shady arrangements between politicians and business owners, which resulted in mass unemployment (see Figure 1). It also consisted of the devaluation of the local currency (Leu) and inflation rates of up to 12% in 1993 (Figure 2). These reforms were part of the Structural Adjustment Programs and Stand-by Agreements with the IMF, but also a requirement for Romania to join the European Union.

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Figure 1. Source: National Institute of Statistics (INS)

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Figure 2. Source: National Institute of Statistics (INS)

While in the 1990s there was no end in sight for this instability, the mid-2000s seemed to bring some stability, with Romania receiving EU member status in 2007. But this hopeful period was short-lived: the Global Financial Crisis hit Western economies in 2007-2008, and while it was not felt immediately in Romania due to its peripheral status in the global economy, its impact began to be felt in 2010. Indeed, Romania’s economy mostly relied on remittances from Romanians working in Spain and Italy — two of the countries hardest hit by the crisis. The subsequent Eurozone crisis further impacted remittances, and proved fatal for Romania’s trade unions and workers’ rights.

The 2010 turbo-austerity: A blueprint for class war

In 2010-2011, Romania experienced one of the most dire austerity programs in the 21st century — one less talked about than Greece’s austerity program under the diktat of the Troika, yet similarly destructive. The usual suspects were behind the plan, the IMF and the EU, imposing austerity measures in exchange for a 20 billion euro loan.

The austerity package was justified as “needed in order to reduce the public deficit” (6.5% of GDP in 2010). It was led by then-Prime Minister Emil Boc, under the presidency of Traian Basescu, both from the “liberal” right-wing Democratic Liberal Party (PD-L). The austerity package involved slashing public-sector wages by an incredible 25%, and old-age pensions by 15%.

Back then, the minimum wage was 600 lei (about 143 euros or 182 USD) while the minimum retirement pension was 350 lei (83 euros, 106 USD). Moreover, in 2010, absolute poverty affected 1.1 million people, out of a total population of 20.2 million (5.5%), while the population at risk of poverty was 41% of the population.

These measures were imposed undemocratically: the PM “assumed responsibility” through Article 114 of the Constitution, bypassing any parliamentary scrutiny (a common practice in Romania, showcasing a complete deficit of democracy).

The 2011 Social Dialogue Law and the demise of trade unions

The response from trade unions was swift: the early 2010s represent a period of resistance to austerity on a scale unprecedented since the 1989 “Revolution”.

The major trade unions managed to (separately) mobilise public-sector workers, pensioners, and pregnant women and mothers, whose child benefits were going to be slashed, for several large-scale protests lasting from the spring of 2010 until late autumn that same year. The protests peaked on October 27, when between 50–100,000 people protested in front of the government building (Victoria Palace). Pensioners took to the streets to protest because they had no money for medication. Public servants went on strikes to demand fair wages.

All these manifestations were met with violence from the Jandarmerie (a law enforcement institution, similar to the French Gendarmerie, belonging to the Army). Interestingly, the Police force also protested against austerity, though it was not repressed by the Jandarmerie. As a consequence of the September 24 protest, Interior Minister Vasile Blaga resigned while the Chief of the Bucharest Jandarmerie was demoted because he refused to intervene against the Police protest. Then, the Jendamerie decided to join the protesters and ensure they could protest free from repression.

Trade union power seemed to grow after this wave of protests. Though the past 20 years had not been easy for trade unions, with the media constantly portraying them in a negative light, the 2010 protests had shown to public sector workers that there was power in numbers. However, the government and employers’ associations had other plans. The government was more prone to discussions with employers than trade unions. As such, most of the labour law reforms after 1989 were undertaken by the government following intense lobbying by employers’ associations. 

This was also the case in 2011, when the Social Dialogue (SD) Law No. 62/2011 was passed. The SD law dismantled the collective bargaining procedure at the national level: up until then, 100% of employees from both public and private sectors were covered by a national-level unique Collective Labour Agreement (CLA), making Romania one of the few countries in the EU with such coverage. Following the 2011 SD law, coverage was slashed to 15% and CLAs were only possible at the sectoral level. 

The SD law also included other restrictive measures, such as raising the representation threshold of a trade union to 50+1% of employees in a company or a sector (branch of activity). It also made it more difficult to form a union, requiring at least 15 employees from the same company. This was done in a context where 90% of Romanian companies had less than 9 employees.

The right to strike was also negatively impacted: the law introduced a series of administrative requirements, including needing 50+1% employees willing to go on strike (close to impossible to achieve), and introduced the concept of an “illegal strike” in cases where trade unions did not gathered all the administrative paperwork needed to initiate a strike. An “illegal strike” carried with it serious legal consequences, and was deemed a felony. Moreover, the law made solidarity strikes illegal (solidarity strikes are strikes started by workers at a company in solidarity with their comrades at a different company, or even in a different economic branch, who are already on strike).

The 2011 SD law was essentially capital’s counter-offensive against the increased power of organised labour that had resisted an austerity program meant to restore capital’s profitability in the wake of a crisis. The law was designed to cripple workers’ ability to collectively resist (collective bargaining, strikes) against the increased extraction of surplus value. This legal offensive was needed to create the “ideal” conditions for capital accumulation: a working class stripped of its power to collectively bargain cannot but accept a smaller share of the wealth it produces.

The impact of the law was devastating for trade unions. Over the course of 11 years, confidence in trade unions diminished and membership plummeted to less than 20% in 2013 (down from about 40-45% in 2008). By losing their ability to go on strike and form new trade unions in smaller companies, trade unions became a shell of their former self. 

The impact was felt at the personal level as well: in my interviews with older trade unionists, now in their 50s-60s, they are very pessimistic and have lost hope, while young trade unionists do not have a very strong culture of trade unionism. There are very few young people in trade unions, and need serious capacity building to bring them up to speed to what trade unions need.

New hope against old capitalist tricks

So badly were trade unions affected that even the European Commission started to be alarmed. In 2022, the EC warned the Romanian government that its labour law was so skewed in favour of employers that it risked causing permanent damage to societal cohesion, and that there was a high risk of unrest in the coming years. As such, the EC conditioned access to the National Recovery and Resilience Plans to the passing of a new Social Dialogue law, 367/2022, which although not perfect, is much friendlier to TUs.

It maintains the concept of an illegal strike, but gives trade unions a 24-hour window to resolve any administrative issues and ensure their strike is legal. It also allows for solidarity strikes, and has lowered the representation threshold to 35% for negotiating a CLA and initiating a strike. It also allows new trade unions to be formed in companies with 10+ employees or by 10+ employees from different companies but belonging to the same economic sector (as defined by NACE code). While this law is not a panacea, it gives trade unions some room for manoeuvre. Nevertheless, decades of attacks has left a permanent scar on Romanian trade unions.

Today, we are witnessing more austerity in Romania. Complaining that the public deficit is too high (9.7% of GDP), the government has started another austerity wave. The first package of measures was passed in the summer of 2025, which saw the freezing of public sector wages and all retirement pensions until the end of 2026 (essentially a pay cut as inflation keeps rising); a freeze on all hirings in public sector jobs; a rise in the VAT (a regressive tax on the poor); and the removal of access to public health insurance for dependants (stay-at-home mothers, elder parents without pension, people with disabilities, etc). The package also included a doubling of taxes on capital, but which were very low to start with: taxes on dividends went from 8% to a timid 16%, while taxes on banks’ profits went from a minuscule 2% to a tiny 4%.

A second package focuses on “increasing public administration’s efficiency” by firing 10-30% of public servants in some services, as well as increasing tax collection capabilities and reducing expenses in the public healthcare sector. However, the package has not been adopted in its entirety because it also contained provisions for increasing the pension age for magistrates (currently at 48 years of age) to 65, like the rest of the population, as well as lowering their special pensions (currently an average of 4000 euros monthly while the average public pension is 370 euros a month.)

So far, trade unions have not initiated significant strikes nor have there been mass protests like in 2010. There have only been small weekly pickets during the summer, which peaked on September 8 when a 10,000-strong protest took place in Bucharest. The trade union confederations also managed to agree to hold a major protest on October 29th, with four out of five confederations participating.

The conditions are ripe for a real class war in Romania — the material basis for public discontent is obvious. But in the absence of a socialist alternative to channel popular anger into a coherent anti-capitalist strategy, the far-right “populist” party AUR (Alliance for the Union of Romanians) is monopolising the discourse on relevant issues (housing, wages, poverty, etc.) while distracting popular anger away from the capitalist class towards scapegoats (migrants, “the globalists”) and organising endless protests in favour of far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu.

There is a clear need for a united front of the left in Romania. The small pockets of left-leaning and Marxist groups must coalesce and overcome their petty theoretical disputes. They must overcome their Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) origin and integrate more blue-collar workers and trade unionists, in order to help trade unions rebuild the organisational capacities they lost in 2011. With the spectre of AUR looming large, our task as socialists is to reclaim the narrative of discontent, transforming the fight against austerity from a series of financial demands into a unified political struggle for working class power.

Maria-Luisa Guevara is a nom de guerre of a Romanian researcher and activist for housing rights, workers’ rights of non-European workers and progressive issues in general. You can read here writings at on Substack.

 

‘Slums’ of Victorian Manchester housed wealthy doctors and engineers, new study reveals

University of Cambridge

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image: 

An 1838 print showing people in and outside a terraced house in Manchester, above and below street level.

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Credit: Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries

 

 

Work, shopping, church and the pub kept different classes apart far more than ‘residential segregation’ in 1850s Manchester, undermining key assumptions about the Industrial Revolution. Historians have long assumed that Manchester’s middle classes sheltered from the poor in town houses and suburban villas. But by mapping digitized census data, new research shows that many middle-class Mancunians including doctors and engineers lived in the same buildings and streets as working-class residents including weavers and spinners.

 

• Over 60% of buildings housing the wealthiest classes also housed unskilled labourers.
• Over 10% of the population in Manchester’s ‘slums’ belonged to wealthier employed classes.
• Stark differences in work routines, recreational lives, shopping, public services, policing and pervasive discrimination isolated classes far more than residential segregation.

 

[Research paper proofs and images available here]

 

Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism, visited Manchester in 1842 and began recording examples of rampant inequality in the rapidly industrialising city.* He described a commercial core encircled by ‘unmixed working-peoples’ quarters, then the ‘middle bourgeoisie’ and further beyond, the upper classes. Many historians have relied on Engels’ account but the conflation of class division and spatial segregation has come under increasing scrutiny.

Now Cambridge University historian Emily Chung has used data from the digitized 1851 census to precisely map where people from different social classes were actually living in the city. Her findings, published today in The Historical Journal, are startling and undermine the idea that different classes clustered in separate parts of the city.

“Manchester’s wealthier classes did not confine themselves to town houses in the city centre and suburban villas, as we’ve been led to believe,” Emily Chung says. “I found doctors, engineers, architects, surveyors, teachers, managers and shop owners living in the same buildings as poor weavers and spinners.” 

“Segregation in cities remains a major concern in many parts of the world, including Britain, so understanding what people experienced in Manchester, one of the world’s first industrialised cities, is really important,” Chung says. “It teaches us that where we live matters but other factors can be even more influential. How people work, shop and relax divides social groups and can even make them invisible.”

Chung, a PhD researcher at St John's College, Cambridge, used ordnance survey maps, commercial directories and the 1851 census to link individuals to their specific residential address. She spent eight months painstakingly pinpointing buildings using known landmarks, including pubs, to guide her. At her most efficient, Chung could map 700 buildings per day. AI isn’t yet capable of doing this work accurately. Chung then used this huge dataset to analyse spatial patterns.

She used official occupational descriptors and wage data to categorize individuals into one of six classes:

1. Professional Occupations such as doctors, engineers and clergymen

2. Managerial and Technical Occupations, and Dealers, including shop owners

3. Skilled Occupations including clerks and those employed in the transport and building industries

4. Partly-Skilled, including police and labourers in semi-specialist industries

5. Unskilled general labourers

6. Unskilled labourers in the textile, mining and agricultural sectors

 

Chung found that the commercial district to Manchester’s southwest was significantly more socially diverse than the residential zones of the city to the north and east. But even in Ancoats, the main working-class slum which so appalled Engels, around 10% of the population belonged to the wealthier employed classes. Across the city, the working-class represented 79.3% per cent of the population on average.  

Looking at Manchester’s surrounding townships, Chung found that Cheetham had a higher proportion of upper-middle-class residents while Salford, traditionally viewed as a ‘working-class’ suburb, closely mirrored Manchester’s mixed population, as did Hulme and Chorlton-Cum-Medlock.

 

Sharing buildings

 

Chung’s findings became even more interesting when she zoomed in on individual buildings. She found that over 60% of the buildings which housed the wealthiest occupational classes also housed unskilled labourers.

“This was a big surprise,” Chung says. “I started with the city centre and I thought the pattern might end there but as I moved onto the next part of Manchester, I kept finding this mixing. The most exciting moment was discovering that one in ten people living in Ancoats, the notorious working-class slum, were middle-class.”

“Middle-class Mancunians might have seen their homes as stepping stones to something better,” Chung says. “But architects and shop owners also valued the convenience of living close to where they worked. Commuter trains weren’t popular yet.”

Chung argues that while different classes lived cheek-by-jowl, the construction, design, and maintenance of housing in 1850s Manchester limited interaction between them. In the first half of the 19th century, Manchester couldn’t build houses fast enough to keep up with its booming population.

“Manchester grew almost organically with very little regulation and developers were determined to make maximum profit from as little land as possible,” Chung says.

To do this, they converted existing buildings into subdivided tenements. More respectable ground- and first-floor units could be rented to one or two middle-class households, while multiple poor families were crammed into filthy underground cellars.

“Manchester’s housing experiment stacked multiple households one on top of another. Different classes were living so close together but walls, ceilings and different routines minimised interaction between them,” Chung says.

 

Segregating routines

 

Occupational status played a major role in segregating people through their daily routines, Chung argues. Before the introduction of labour reforms, many of Manchester’s semi- and unskilled workers put in twelve-hour days, six days a week, trapping them inside while wealthier people were free to move around the city, working, shopping and socialising.

The middle and upper classes had flexible access to shops and markets but factory workers often had to wait for their wages on Saturday evenings before they could buy food.

Chung says: “While Victorian London and Liverpool bustled with daytime activity, Manchester’s public spaces were almost deserted. Its streets were rarely occupied by weavers and doctors at the same time.”

 

Leisure and culture

 

The cultural and recreational habits of Manchester’s different classes reinforced their segregation, Chung argues, highlighting the opposing institutions of church and pub.

In this period, Manchester’s middle classes were increasingly drawn to church while the city’s 600 pubs had a far greater pull on the working classes. Churches no longer distributed poor relief as they had under the Old Poor Laws and public services made many poor people feel ashamed.

Even when the poor did attend, many churches and chapels deliberately kept different classes apart. Morning services rented out pews on an annual basis, and catered towards the middle and upper classes, while afternoon or evening services were more likely to be frequented by the working class who could not afford regular rents.

Pubs offered more welcoming and affordable respite for working-class Mancunians but, Chung points out, as soon as they went outside the city’s police were ready to re-enforce class segregation.

“Even small groups of working-class men were made to disperse by officers on rotation,” Chung says.

“They were determined to keep the city’s middle-and upper-class dominated public realm clear, clean and calm, so they forced the working poor out of sight into more neglected parts of the city.”

“What the Victorians ‘thought’ was happening in Manchester still matters, but comparing these perceptions against concrete geographic patterns means we can reconstruct life in the city more accurately. Then we can understand how those perceptions arose.”

One thing that remains a mystery is how multiple families from different classes shared outdoor toilets or privvies. “Annoyingly, this isn’t something that people wrote about at the time,” Chung says. “I suspect that the middle classes still used chamber pots so they weren’t so reliant on shared privvies.”

Emily Chung is a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), which has been busting myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history for over 60 years. Her PhD is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

 

Reference

Emily Chung, ‘Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester’, The Historical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X25101246

 

Notes to editors

* Friedrich Engels’ journal entries became The Condition of the Working-Class in England (published in German in 1844) and Manchester had a major influence on his political views, fueling his opposition to the bourgeoisie. He was not alone in portraying Manchester as a city where different classes lived apart and rarely interacted. In 1841, Canon Richard Parkinson decried that there was ‘no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed’.

---

Journal

The Historical Journal

DOI

10.1017/S0018246X25101246 

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester

Article Publication Date

21-Oct-2025

Spinning, no. 6 from JR Barfoot's The Progress of Cotton (1840). In this period, Manchester was the centre of the cotton industry and referred to as 'Cottonopolis'. Before the introduction of labour reforms, many of Manchester’s semi- and unskilled workers put in twelve-hour days, six days a week, trapping them inside while wealthier people were free to move around the city, working, shopping and socialising.



A depiction of St Peter's Church and the Theatre Royal on Peter Street, Manchester, around 1855. At this time, Manchester's streets were rarely occupied by rich and poor at the same time. The cultural and recreational habits of the city’s different classes reinforced their segregation. Manchester’s middle classes were increasingly drawn to church while the city’s 600 pubs had a far greater pull on the working classes.



Union Street Mill, Ancoats, Manchester. Engraving by John McGahey after Samuel Austin, 1835. Emily Chung found that even in Ancoats, the main working-class slum in Manchester, around 10% of the population belonged to the wealthier employed classes.

Credit
Image courtesy of Manchester Libraries





Historian Emily Chung stood in front of a Victorian building. Emily Chung is a PhD researcher at St John's College, Cambridge and a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), which has been busting myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history for over 60 years.

Credit
Guillaume Proffit

TWO GOOD LOCAL HISTORY SITES FOR LEFT WING ALBERTA

The Edmonton Hunger March of 1932

Forgotten Edmonton

https://www.forgottenedmonton.com › blog › the-edmo...

Dec 20, 2022 — The Hunger March of 1932 is inextricably linked to the material and socio-economic conditions of Alberta during the Great Depression.

Bucking Conservatism

Athabasca University Press

https://www.aupress.ca › app › uploads › 12028...

PDF

by Poundmaker staff member, Eugene (Devil inside) Plawiuk.13 In contrast to ... founding meeting of Canada's first national socialist party, the CCF, was held.

368 pages' 

 

Monday, May 02, 2016

THE ALBERTA NDP THE PARTY OF OIL WORKERS

THE COINCIDENTAL BIRTH OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS AND THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA

Rachel Notley warned New Democrats that adopting the LEAP manifesto which demands the end of oil extraction from the Tar Sands as well as conventional and shale gas plays, and NO pipelines, would put the Eastern arm of the party in direct conflict with a party that is proudly Albertan and directly involved in the oil industry history in the province even more so than the long ruling party the PC’s.

It was the development of oil and energy in Alberta that created new wealth and a new industrial province after WWII. The discovery of oil not only brought the oil industry but also the oil and energy workers union, a small American union that had an arm in Alberta, the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers OCAW. In Alberta it was beginning its organizing of workers in the field and in the new gas and chemical plants being built between Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan.

This was the post war boom, the party in power was Social Credit, and while  there was no NDP there was an active labour political movement housed in the AFL and Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, members belonged to the Communist Party, the CCF and some still belonged to the OBU and IWW.

Edmonton had a history of electing labour council members as Mayor, Aldermen (women), school board trustees and Hospital Board members. Elmer Roper  longtime labour activist, CCF activist and candidate, owner of ABC Printing and publisher of Alberta Labour News would be elected Mayor of Edmonton after the creation of the NDP by the merger of the CCF with the newly created post war Canadian Labour Congress.

The sixties saw the growth of the labour movement in Canada and in Alberta, including the creation of an active movement of organizing public sector workers, provincially, municipally and federally. The Federal Workers Union originating in Calgary would merge with the Ontario based National Workers Union to create what we know as the Canadian Union of Public  Employees, the Civil Service Union of Alberta would become a union known as the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

But throughout the oil boom of the fifties and sixties the union most associated with the provincial NDP was the Oil Chemical and Atomic Energy Workers Union under the leadership of Neil Reimer and his assistant Reg Baskin

That’s right the party was brought to life in Alberta by Oil Workers in the provinces new Energy market. Its first party leader was Neil Reimer, who would meet a charismatic young politician a contemporary of Peter Lougheed and Joe Clark at the University of Alberta, Grant Notley who would go on to become party Leader and its first elected MLA.

Notley himself did not represent Edmonton but his home region, the oil rich north of Alberta, the Grand Prairie, and Peace River riding.

As it had since 1936 the Social Credit party of Alberta held power in the province as a one party state, under the permanent leadership of Premier Ernest Manning, Preston’s daddy.  The New Democratic Party of Alberta focused its energy not only on consolidating union power in the party as well as the voices of the left and progressives but in challenging that Social Credit domination of Alberta Politics.

This was also the time of the Cold War and the Anti Communist Witch Hunts, a time being anti war, anti nuclear war, pro labour, was considered suspect. Where union members who were left wing were exposed to police spying, where padlock laws in Quebec had been used to raid imprison and steal property belonging to those accused of opposing the Duplesis regime or who were suspect of being Reds.

Duplessis ‘s party in Quebec aligned with that provinces Federal Social Credit Party which was aligned with Alberta’s Party as well. In both provinces the left faced one party dictatorship which reminded many despite their democratic trappings of the forces they had been fighting against in WWII.

As in Alberta it would be the post war labour movement in Quebec under Louis Lebarge that would mobilize politically as well as economically against the Old Regime, his right hand was a young activist lawyer named Pierre Eliot Trudeau. And like Alberta they were building a provincial and national party; the Liberals.

This then is the historical basis for the differences between the left in Quebec and the rest of Canada and why it took so long to breech these two solitudes, as was done in 2012 under Jack Layton and the federal NDP.

Premier Rachel Notley, the daughter of Grant Notley, the first NDP MLA ever elected to the Legislature, the first opposition member elected against the Social Credit party of Ernest Manning  had this rich history as her prologue at this week’s national NDP Convention in Edmonton where the party adopted the LEAP manifesto which challenges the very energy economy that makes Alberta a modern industrial state.

This province created the NDP under the leadership of  Neil Reimer, an oil worker and oil union organizer.  Neil was the first leader of the Party, and Reg Baskin was his right hand in their union and the party.

Neil also created the modern Canadian Energy Workers union,  Neil and Reg first represented oil workers in the new industry in the province with the OCAW  oil chemical and atomic workers of Canada, which had one other base of expansion; Louisiana.  He and Reg made it the Canadian Energy Workers Union, which became CEP merging with the Canadian Paper workers unions in BC, and now has consolidated with CAW to create UNIFOR.

Neil’s daughter was Jan Reimer two term Mayor of Edmonton during the 1990’s and while party labels are not used in Edmonton municipal elections everyone knew that we had an NDP mayor.

Meatpackers, a union that disappeared in the eighties with amalgamation of the meat packing industry into a smaller and smaller oligopoly, was a militant base of union workers and activists including communists and socialists, that was a large base for the party, as was Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488.

These were the post war unions that were the party’s base in Edmonton and across the province. Federally the postal workers were a strong backbone for the Federal Party, though there were two separate unions at that time, letter carriers and inside workers, the latter being more left wing and militant with OBU IWW communist, socialist and Trotskyist activist workers.

It was the discovery of tar sands oil that led to the growth of the province, the union and the NDP. It was also this discovery and its needed development during the Arab Oil Crisis of 1971 that led to the end of the Social Credit government, its movement, but not its essence. In its place came the newest members of the Alberta Legislature elected in 1967 for the first time, the Lougheed Progressive Conservatives. They would be joined by Grant Notley and the NDP in opposition in 1968, when Grant won a by-election in Spirit River.

The “Progressive” element in the Lougheed PC’s represented the post war Liberal base among the non Anglo ethnic communities in Edmonton and Calgary, such as the recent post war immigration of Ukrainians, Italians, Portuguese, Greek, European, Asian, and Displaced Peoples. The Liberals had no political existence in Alberta since they were wiped out by the United Farmers/ Labour Party coalition in 1921.

Even Lougheed’s conservatism was not the neo conservative Austrian school embraced by the republican lite Preston Manning cons of today, it was classical liberal capitalism, that progressive aspect of capitalism that sought to ameliorate through regulation what short comings capitalism itself may suffer from despite its idealism of being the ‘ideal’ system.

The history of the Alberta NDP is the history of the Oil Workers and the Oil Industry in Alberta, even more than it is for the current batch of Conservatives provincial or federal.  The NDP in Alberta grew up with the oil industry with its workers and their union. For the Alberta NDP to reject both the LEAP manifesto and those call for the end of pipelines is natural and should have been expected by those who know the party history in the province.

For those who fail to understand this historic base of the party in Alberta fail to understand the social democratic politics of the oil industry, the NDP has long supported a form of nationalization under public ownership and increased workers control through unionization.

This occurred in the case of Suncor which was the earliest of the oil sands operators, before the Syncrude conglomerate was created.  In the early seventies after the Lougheed government promoted the oil sands, Suncor began mining operations.  Neil Reimer’s new Canadian Energy and Paperworkers union, CEP, got its birth in a long and bitter historic strike at the Suncor operations.

CEP went on to organize refineries in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan.

It tried but failed to organize Syncrude due to its conglomerate ownership and its concerted anti union efforts over the decade of the seventies into the eighties. Today unionized Suncor has bought out Syncrude so this situation opens it up to unionization decades later.

The seventies and eighties saw massive growth in the province including growth in both private and public union membership.

This also saw the success of the NDP and the left in Edmonton. While Grant Notley was a lone NDP member in Alberta Legislature, Edmonton saw a left wing U of A Prof David Leadbeater elected alderman.  Notley was joined in the house by Ray Martin, from Edmonton.

The NDP elected Ross Harvey its first federal MP from Alberta in the eighties from the old packing plant and union district of Edmonton Beverly. This was at the height of the Arab Oil Crisis of early eighties, which the Conservatives in Calgary blamed on the NDP Liberal National Energy Plan, NEP, which included the creation of the Canadian Publicly Owned Oil and Gas Company PetroCanada.

PetroCanada was a success and saved Calgary and the Lougheed Government during this oil crisis, it was able to buy up, nationalize, American oil companies like Gulf Mobile, Texaco, Chevron,  as well as smaller Canadian and American oil companies that were going broke or bailing out of Calgary heading back to Dallas and Huston.

And CEP was there to unionize it. Today PetroCanada is no more the Liberals privatized during the Austerity crisis of the Nineties, and Paul Martins Liberal Government sold off the last of our shares prior to the 2006 election.

Ironically it is Suncor that bought them and then bought up PetroCan and absorbed it., just as it has done with its competitor Syncrude.

It would be during the late eighties and early nineties that under Ray Martin the NDP would gain a record number of seats, going from 2 to 23 and status of official opposition. But by the time of the middle of nineties and the Austerity panic of debt and deficit hysteria and the birth of the neo conservative movement that two city Mayors, Ralph Klein of Calgary and Lawrence Decore of Edmonton would battle it out for Premier of the Province, Klein for the PC’s and Decore for the Liberals. Both ran on Austerity budgets, one promised massive cuts the other brutal cuts. It was a close election the losers were the NDP who were wiped out as a third party.

In Edmonton we had a new NDP mayor to replace Decore, Neil’s daughter Jan Reimer, joined by another leftist alderman the bus driver Brian Mason. The NDP centred itself in Edmonton at this time and got elected the enormously popular  team of Pam Barrett and Raj Pannu.

The CEP was critical in supporting the NDP at this time, including having its past president Reg Basking become leader of the Party.

After the shocking early death of party leader Pam Barrett, former alderman Brian Mason ran in her riding, Highlands, which also covers the Federal riding of Beverly that Ross Harvey once represented and won her seat in the house. Raj Pannu became the first Indo Canadian leader of an NDP party in Canada.  After he stepped down Brian Mason became the leader of the party.

The party went from four seats to two to four until Brian stepped down and the party elected Grant Notley’s daughter, Rachel Notley, who had sat in the house with Brian through all those ups and downs in electoral success.

The party base is the labour movement and left across the province and no less important unions such as CEP, IBEW, Carpenters and UA488 all involved in the oil sands and the petrochemical industry in Alberta.

So why are the various wags and pundits surprised when the Alberta NDP does not LEAP off the edge of a cliff named STOP PIPELINES, STOP DIRTY OIL.

In the finest of social democratic traditions, the Alberta NDP will do no such thing nor should it be expected to. It will ameliorate the worst of the environmental damages that the fossil fuel industry has and can be expected to cause. They will create a green plan, and expand the carbon fuel tax the PC’s brought in.

 It will do what the conservatives would not do, and that is eliminating Alberta’s Socred PC dirty energy economic backbone: coal. And that is the real dirty energy in Alberta, coal fired utility plants. These plants are evenly divided between private ownership, with state support from the ruling Socreds and PC’s, TransAlta Utilities, and publicly owned municipal utilities EPCOR and ENMAX. TransAlta is the original P3 funded by taxpayers under the Socred and spun off to become a private company where government cabinet members retire to the board of.

Even Lougheed was tied to the coal industry representing his old employer Mannix Inc, as a board member of Luscar Coal, which during the nineties created a major controversy with its efforts to mine outside of Jasper National Park.

Contrary to Greenpeace and other environmentalists who claim oil sands are the dirtiest energy the real dirty energy on the Palliser Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan is coal.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel that needs to be kept in the ground. There is no such thing as clean coal!

There is however clean petrochemical fuels, that is the nature of refining, creating finer and finer grades of hydrocarbons; ethenes, benzenes, oil and gas for plastic production, diesel etc.

That is the reason for both the Joffre and Scotford massive refining projects and the plan for the heartland refining project, which would allow the province to crack and refine bitumen into secondary and tertiary hydrocarbons.

That is what the future of the energy is in Alberta, stopping the use of coal, refining hydrocarbons and shipping them south, east, and west.

Why would the NDP limit the provinces ability to ship what it processes.

As I have pointed out the pipeline west will probably go through the Peace River Athabasca highway route to Prince Rupert, which coincides with BC Site C dam development and its LNG  pipeline development, giving pipeline companies an alternative to going to Kitimat via the BC Sacred Bear Rainforest.

Energy East will be built and the NDP will promote as it did in the eighties, the idea that Alberta energy for a fair price should go east. What occurred instead was it was shipped to refineris in Ontario and Quebec at discounted prices where it was refined and sold to the US while oil was imported from the Middle East.

This was the original idea of the NEP that the NDP and Liberals promoted to Lougheed, and he agreed to! And like the NDP this was his vision for Alberta oil before he died.

While the LEAP manifesto is suitably left wing green etc, even shudder, anti capitalist ( read anti corporations) it is not something either the labour movement or NDP in Alberta will agree to do much more about than debate. Debate will be welcome, dictat not so much.

LEAP like most environmentalism today fails to take into consideration that even if workers had control of publicly owned energy companies, we would still be producing hydrocarbons, and will be even after the glorious Socialist Revolution.

The dirtiest energy causing climate change is not oil sands in Alberta or Venezuela it is coal and wood burning worldwide.  That is the challenge we face to shut down coal, and wood burning, not to accept the myth of Clean Coal, and to make sure we ameliorate environmental damage caused through hydrocarbon production.

You want to keep something in the ground its coal, and the biggest fight back in Alberta today is the utility lobbies who oppose the Alberta NDP Government ending of coal fired utilities.

In Alberta the NDP is the party of oil and oil workers. Never forget it. The old Social Credit of Preston Manning’s daddy’s day and the PC’s of Lougheed Klein were both parties of coal.

Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

No Taxes for the working class. That should be the watchword of the Left.

Left blogger a Class Act bemoans the state of the Canadian left on his blog. He says; "When is the left going to quit trying to be like its opponents,and begin to define itself by it's own actions and ideology?Give the people a real choice,a choice that stands for something,but above all principaled."

Exactomundo. When the Reform party was created it based itself not on the neo-conservatism of the Reaganites but on Western Canadian populism, a populism based on the Left. Recall, referendum, the attack on taxation, were all antebellum left wing causes at the begining of the 20th Century.

Socialism as Class Act calls it. It included the ideology of the producer republic, Georgism in the United States, the Cooperative Commonweal in Canada and the UK. It included syndicalism for the working class, and producer cooperatives for farmers and small producers. It was anti-monopoly and anti-rentier, pro land ownership. See Rothbard’s Reds Redux


Socialism at the begining of last century was not yet tainted with Bolshevism. And I use that term deliberately to distinguish it from communism. For within the anarchist and statist socialist movements were movements of communism, which went farther and further in their critique of capitalism than the anti-state socialists did.

Unfortunately the socialist dream, or vision, was lost in the coming forth of the social democratic movement and its statist ideal of the welfare state. Far from dying at the end of WWI in Canada the CCF called for social revolution, as did many of the socialists of the day. They still had only had a small taste of government, in this case the Socialist Party of Canada had been crucial to maintaince of power for the provincial Liberals in B.C, in the last days of fin de sicle 19th century.

The Socialist movement in Canada coalesced around the CCF, the Communist party and the OBU. With the destruction of the later and the success of the former in gaining political power provincially and representation federally came the end of the extra parlimentary left in Canada.

By the 1960's the CCF and the labour movement had purged the radicals and were now liberal social democratics just like their German predecesors of the century before.

The extra-parliamentary left was centred around the anti-Nuclear Bomb movement, Our Generation magazine, and what could be loosely called an anarchist left. One that was sceptical that state power could change anything.

Today the NDP and its social democratic ilk are really liberals in a hurry. And thus the plight that Class Act finds us in. We go back to the orginal debate between State Socialists and Anti-State Socialists. Is socialism a set of principles and and ideal to strive towards or is it the pragmatic logic of gaining state power.
It is of course the former since the latter has been a historic failure.

Since I of course do not believe it is the latter, I hardly consider the NDP or even the Trade Unions on the left. That is they cannot concieve of a program of workers and community control that is a radical challenge to the corporate/financial and state monopoly. They in effect are , as the left communists call them, the left hand of capitalism. They merely wish to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism while maintaining the status quo.

Expect no real answers from them on how to change or challenge the system.

But thank goodness the long march to Ottawa by the neo-conservative right in Canada has finally ended in a minority government. Because they too called for a revolution in politics as usual. And they too have ended up being no such thing, just business as usual.

Where the left failed during the past two decades was to see that what Reform had harnassed was a real grass roots disgruntlement of the working class towards politics as usual. Not always reactionary, it was based on feeling powerless and wanting to feel in power over our own lives.

The Left never got it. Whenever the NDP called for taxing the rich, the guys in the Alberta Gas Plants, unionized, and paid overtime saw it as an attack on their wages. It didn't matter that the NDP meant the Rich, as in the 1% of Canadians that own all the wealth, or the corporations, their message was lost on the working class. And for good reason.

We hate taxes. We love services. And we will pay for services, but we hate taxes. And why shouldn't we, over the past fifty years the federal and provincial tax base has moved from the corporations to picking the pockets of you and me.

The NDP finally realised this simple fact during the 2004 election and during the last sitting of the house. They called for more tax breaks for the working class. But because this runs counter to their state socialism, they were faint hearted in their calls, faint hearted in their attack on the Liberals and Conservatives as parties of the rich and entrenched power. The so called special interests.

The fact is that the Conservative government in Ottawa is about to launch a massive assault on the working class through taxation.

They will fund their 1% GST cut by eliminating tax breaks the Liberals brought in. They will give out a baby bonus that will be taxed. They will fail to transfer funds to day care programs clawing them back.

The Left should be calling for no taxation for anyone who earns $100,000 a year or less. Period. That is the mass of the working class in this country.

No party currently will call for this and for the elimination of user fees and the GST. For these are the little taxes that hurt, the death by a thousand cuts that so irritate each and every wage slave in Canada.

Tax the Corporations NOT the People, should be the watchword of the Left. Want Daycare and Medicare, the corporations should pay, out of pre tax profits. It is social capital that they directly benefit from in their bottom line, its what makes them competitive against the American capitalist model.

Eliminate all corporate tax loopholes. Eliminate offshore investment havens for the Rich. And in the process this will eliminate the Tax Department.

The Left should attack the failure of the Reformers, who are still out there as the recent Fireweed Forum on Democracy showed, and the parliamentary reformers,
to address the real issue of political reform in Canada.

The need for real democracy, directly elected revocable delgates to constiuent assemblies. To the right to referndum, to a renewal of Canada as constitutional confederation of the people not a con job. See my Abolish The Senate

On economic renewal we should be calling for the creation of peoples banks, the deregulation of banking from the hands of the State into the hands of the people as pools of capital for usage with institutional pension funds and workers investments to build small and medium sized worker/producer cooperatives.
See Michael Alberts Economic Participatory Democracy project; Parecon.

This deregulation would also eliminate large banks as holders of capital in the national interest. That role should be continued by the Bank of Canada, which delegated it to the national banks twenty years ago under the Mulroney Conservatives.

We don't need a state in Canada we need a confederation of peoples and communities in a federal system not of Trudeau's making or Harpers but in the Proudhonist model of self government.


And this cannot be done through electoral means, it takes a social revolution. The Reform party tried to do this from the Right and the NPI and other attempts to reform the NDP did it on the left and the result is Jack Layton and Stephen Harper. Nothing changed.

So Class Act I agree with you that the Left needs renewal. And the Left needs first to divorce itself from the existing liberal social democratic parliamentary mileu.
Then and only then will it become an authentic voice for Canadians who are frustrated and pissed off with the system as it is. We have been told to embrace change for twenty years by the neo-cons as they privatized public services. That change for change sake ideology is deeply embedded in all of capitalism corporate and managerial structures now. It gives us a window to challenge the very system of capitalism with a real Left agenda of People Power.


Also see:

Unite the Left
A Peoples Program for Alberta

Left, Right and Liberty

State-less Socialism

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Plutocrats Rule

WRITTEN IN 2006

 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for OBU ALBERTA