On 27th April, a group of young workers, members of the Toronto Young New Democrats and supporters of Fightback, traveled to the City of Vaughan, Ontario to visit a large warehouse and loading yard owned by retail giant Sears Canada Inc. The warehouse workers, members of United Steelworkers Local 9537, have been locked-out since 1st April.
Why have these workers been forced from their jobs and onto the picket line? “There’s one reason only. They want to get rid of the union,” said one worker.
This Sears warehouse is unlike most others for one reason—the workers here have organized. The union is less than two years old, and the pending new contract (which the employer has refused to even bargain on) would have been one of the first in which the workers could raise their employment and living standards to a decent level through a collective agreement. Instead, they are preparing for a long struggle for the union’s very existence.
“They didn’t want to hear anything,” said Harry, a warehouse worker. “They told us we only have to adhere to company policy. Well, the only problem with that is, right now, they can change that policy any time they want to whatever they want. That’s why we need a contract.”
This struggle is not just a fight for better wages or conditions, but a fight for democratic trade union rights themselves. Sears is afraid that if the Vaughan workers are successful in forming a union and bettering their working conditions, that it will spread to other warehouses. The corporation wants to break the union, not just because of the 500 employees at this workplace, but to strike a blow to the labour movement as a whole.
This attack on the warehouse workers is not an isolated case. Across the country, and indeed the world, the bosses are attacking workers: from working hours to pay, from benefits to pensions and severance. The standards of living for working people is being driven down by the bosses on the auspices that there is simply no money to pay for the “extravagance” of the organized working-class.
The bosses are asking the workers to pay for the cost of the economic crisis, which workers did not cause. Are the bosses really out of money? Last year, Sears posted a massive $245-million profit. Edward S. Lampert, the chairman of the board of the Sears Holding Corporation, Sears Canada’s parent company, is estimated to have a personal net worth of $2-billion!
“This lock-out is part of a systemic attack on workers rights, using the downturn in the economy to push an advantage, while reporting record profits to their shareholders just two days ago,” said Susan Wallace, the federal NDP candidate for Toronto-Centre, who was also walking the picket lines.
While the bosses collect their billions (that is to say, our billions), they play poor as an excuse to hammer the workers and further inflate their profits. The Liberals and Tories have handed out billions of dollars in corporate welfare in the form of bail-outs to some of the richest corporations. There is a world of money being horded by Bay Street, all of which, at the end of the day, will come out of workers’ pockets.
What is needed is a workers’ solution to the crisis. The nationalization of the top 150 banks and corporations under democratic workers’ control is the only way to ensure that all the wealth workers create isn’t leached away.
“The government of Canada should tell these big companies that you cannot throw people out of work,” said Harry, “If they want to leave, hey, they can go wherever, but these warehouses and factories and whatever else, that stays here with us.”
An attack on one of us is an attack on us all. The labour movement, and its political arm the NDP, must fight to defend the right to organize and even more fight for the ideas of democratic worker control of the economy, an end to corporate domination of workers lives and for a new, free, and socialist society.
