At Rio Tinto Alcan in Saguenay and at Caterpillar’s Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London, workers have been locked-out facing obscene concessions. Approximately 30,000 City of Toronto workers are facing a lockout in early February. This is just the start of a cross-Canada bosses’ offensive against workers in 2012. This is no longer the normal back-and-forward of union negotiations — it is the beginning of naked class war by management against labour. This offensive can be defeated, but only with concerted solidarity action by every sector of the working class.
At Alcan, the issue is contracting out. Caterpillar is trying to reduce wages by over 50%. In Toronto, mayor Rob Ford has his sights set on CUPE’s job security language that protects workers against privatization. What all these struggles have in common is that big business and their friends in government are trying to roll back all of the gains that workers have fought for since the Second World War. The faster that workers and their organizations realize this new reality, the faster we will be able to beat back the onslaught.
The Conference Board of Canada, not traditionally a radical organization by any means, issued a report late in 2011. They predicted that 2012 would be a year of significant labour unrest. They stated, “The sense of frustration among public-sector unions is growing because they accepted restraint at the outset of the recession. As a result, the potential for job action in the public sector will be greater in 2012 than in previous years.” The report then went on to list the major workplaces that are entering negotiations this year: BC health workers, Ontario government workers, the Toronto District School Board, Sask Health, Canada Revenue Agency, and many others in smaller workplaces, both public and private. Almost half-a-million public sector and 100,000 private sector workers in major workplaces face a potential confrontation. The big three automakers, made up of 28,000 workers, are also entering bargaining. The CAW gave up huge concessions to supposedly save the companies last time. Will this mean that the bosses will lighten up this time around? Not at all; the past weakness of the union leadership in giving concessions is merely emboldening management to ask for more this time around.
The current issue of Fightback contains articles analyzing the Alcan and Caterpillar lockouts. The other key struggle that will set the pattern for the coming year is the City of Toronto lockout, so it is worthwhile going into more detail on this dispute. Right-wing mayor Rob Ford has set in motion an attempt to break the municipal unions. The CUPE locals representing Toronto’s inside, outside, and library staff have previously negotiated job security provisions that make it expensive for management to contract out, or privatize, city services. On the one side, there is no way the workers will agree to contract language that is merely the prelude to their redundancy. On the other side (despite what the reformists say), there is a structural deficit in city financing. This is the case of an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object, which can only be resolved by a conflagration.
Ford’s cronies label job security provisions as “jobs for life” that are supposedly not realistic. They ask why should CUPE workers have them while nobody else does. This is abject hypocrisy as it is Rob Ford’s Bay Street backers who enjoyed over $10-billion in bonuses in 2010, and multi-million dollar golden parachutes while they destroyed the economy. Their contention, that nobody has job security, only makes sense if you don’t consider the bankers and bosses to be human beings. The reality is that the majority of workers, especially unorganized workers, do not have job security. Rather than dragging organized workers down to the bottom, the labour leadership needs to massively campaign for all workers to receive such protection.
There is a large gap, between reality as it exists on the ground, and the conceptions of the “left” on Toronto council and even the leadership of the unions. The reformist left looks back to the old days when a deal can be done, money can be shifted around with creative accounting, and the crisis can be put off for another year. The same is true for the private sector, where the union leadership told workers to accept concessions now and things will return to “normal” in the future. Under present-day crisis capitalism, there is no returning to the old normal. Everything given up without a fight will merely embolden the bosses and their representatives to come back for more. To their credit, the union leadership is opposing the current round of attacks. OFL president Sid Ryan has called the London lockout a “line in the sand” for organized labour. However, we need to go further than that and understand the structural causes of this conflict if workers are going to win and make improvements.
On a capitalist basis, there simply is no money for workers. The crisis does not allow it. This does not mean that there is no wealth in society. The capitalists, the so-called 1%, have been doing fantastically over the past few decades, but to send this wealth in the direction of workers undermines the system itself. Any corporation that fails to attack workers, let alone gives improvements, will quickly fall back relative to its competitors. Caterpillar’s CEO Douglas Oberhelman expressed their philosophy very bluntly. He said that to survive you must approach your opponent like his company’s products attack a pile of rubble. “You really have to aim the guns out no matter where you are, whether it is government, private business or whatever institution it is … and really look at your competitor and beat them because if not, they are going to beat you.” This is the philosophy of class war that the bosses believe in. Workers’ organizations will not defeat this approach by denying it is a reality. It is as if you have two teams coming on to the ice: one is getting ready for curling while the other is lacing up their pads for hockey. Rather than complaining that the other side is not playing by the rules of a game that no longer exists, we need a leadership that is not afraid to go into the corners with their elbows raised. If the bosses are calling for class war, then workers have no choice but to beat them at their own game.
The same logic works in the public sector. Corporations demand a lowering of the wage cost at the same time as they demand a lowering of the cost of taxation and the social wage. This means attacking public services. We will see this playing out at a variety of different levels over the next year, especially in Ontario, Quebec, and the federal government, which all have significant debt and deficits. The City of Toronto has had a structural deficit ever since the Mike Harris regime downloaded services, such as welfare, onto the city. Ever since then, municipal governments have put off the crisis by moving money around, selling things off, delaying maintenance, etc. The reformist David Miller regime tried to play this game for seven years, but that did not stop them from provoking a 39-day municipal strike and a wildcat Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) strike. As opposed to the reformists, the Rob Ford regime is intent on solving this contradiction. They will solve it by laying off thousands of workers, cutting services and transit to the bone, and privatizing and contracting out everything that remains. They admitted this after being defeated in January, when $19-million of cuts were overturned in the city budget. TTC chair Karen Stintz effectively said that the cuts would just be put back on the table next year.
Both the workers and the bosses understand that the status quo is untenable. In some way this goes to explain why a moron like Rob Ford could win an election. Only a few in society do not understand this reality — it is the leadership of the workers’ movement has yet to come to this conclusion and still clings to the past. This is why we think that it was a mistake for CUPE 416 president Mark Ferguson to propose a three-year wage freeze in a vain attempt to forestall a lockout, or to gain public sympathy. It will do neither. From the perspective of management it just looks like an act of weakness, inviting further aggression. This was not helped by the frankly nervous delivery by the representative of Toronto’s outside workers. From the perspective of the general public, it will not win sympathy as it merely plays into the narrative that it is the workers who caused the crisis. Where is the wage freeze for Bay Street that actually caused the crisis? How many CEOs have been fired? How many CEOs have been locked up for destroying people’s livelihoods? Finally, this approach will not work from the perspective of the workers themselves. The danger is that the workers will be demoralized by such actions and ask, “What are we fighting for? More of the same?” when the status quo is already unsatisfactory. We don’t believe that this mistake is decisive, but if this approach is not halted, it will be very difficult to achieve victory. It is good that CUPE has launched a million-dollar advertising campaign to win public support, but when you look at the content of these ads the message is, “CUPE workers are nice workers — please be nice to us,” rather than really going on the counteroffensive against the Ford regime.
Rob Ford, Stephen Harper, and corporate Canada want to balance the structural deficits in society by levelling down. However, the overturning of $19-million in cuts shows that corporate interests can be defeated by mass mobilization. The 23-21 defeat of Rob Ford was a symbolic victory, but over $300-million in cuts and service reductions still went through (including over 1,000 layoffs and the contracting out of municipal cleaning staff). If the workers’ organizations stay with the old methods, then even the services saved this year, the day care centres, pools, and transit routes, will be on the chopping block next year. We need a permanent solution to this crisis. These attacks impact the entire working class and the entire working class needs to be mobilized to defend our communities. The organized labour movement will naturally be at the head of this fight back and should lead the whole of society against the attacks on decent jobs and services. We need solidarity action, not just in words but also in deeds, against the bosses’ offensive. Locked-out workers cannot be left to starve out on a cold picket line. If the bosses can do without the labour of one section of workers, let’s see how they cope without the labour of others. One-day sympathetic strikes at other workplaces in London and Toronto will show the bosses that locked-out workers are not alone. If that does not work, then a one-day citywide general strike, with an appeal to unorganized workers to join in to defend services, should be put on the order of the day.
Finally, we need to insist that the leadership of the movement rejects the notion that these attacks are somehow an aberration from the normal functioning of capitalism. As they said in the Occupy movement, “The system isn’t broke, it was meant to work this way!” When our representatives accept the logic of the system, then we get wage freezes, concessions, and irresolute leadership. Instead, we should adopt the socialist conception that the bosses have no right to rule, that workers create all wealth, and that if the capitalists cannot provide for the people then it is time for them to get out of the way and we will build a new society without them. With this approach we will see what concessions management are willing to throw our way to save their system. With this approach we have a chance of actually winning a new society, where the word “austerity” is only mentioned in history books.
