On Friday, July 8 at 5 a.m., Rogers Communications, the Canadian telecom giant, had a service blackout that would last 19 hours, marking its second major outage in a little over a year. Millions of Canadians were completely shut out of communicating by phone or internet, and due to many Rogers customers having phone/internet bundles, this meant that many workers had access to neither. While it was later revealed to be the result of a failed “maintenance update”, this was not communicated to the general population until well after the crisis had been resolved, and further details have not been released.
This meant that during the crisis, customers were left without support, and forced to scramble to find ways of going about their day-to-day lives. This most visibly resulted in a flood of workers going into cafés and libraries, in the hopes that those facilities had a Bell connection. All that at a time when the BA.5 Omicron variant is on the rise, with many provinces having removed COVID precautions, leaving every worker more vulnerable to catching the virus. Border services were also affected, leaving many workers, including refugees and immigrants, stranded with no timeline presented for when services would resume. Government services, banking services, border services—all of these were affected by the outage.
As the services Canadian workers use become increasingly digitized, service interruptions and blackouts can have a profound effect on all of society’s functions. Many aspects of production rely on having an internet connection. Cellphones and computers, once luxury items, are now essential devices for a worker to navigate today’s society. An increasing number of workers rely on phone and internet for their work, including those who now work from home due to COVID, as well as the increasing number of gig workers. This latter group in particular includes many of the most exploited and oppressed workers in Canada, and interruptions of this type can have a particularly brutal impact on their livelihood. Businesses were unable to process debit and credit transactions, leading many of them to close early, depriving the workers of a day’s wages. Ironically, after the ongoing COVID pandemic had caused many businesses to stop accepting cash, with customers adjusting correspondingly, the Rogers outage quickly led to the exact opposite situation, with cash becoming the only possible form of payment!
What might be most criminal in all of this was the lack of access to emergency services, revealing the fact that there is no currently existing backup service for providing emergency assistance. This means that for every worker who had a medical emergency, a fire, a domestic disturbance—unless they found a connection with another service provider, they were left completely stranded. This event has impacted the lives of every worker in Canada and deepened their frustrations with an already inadequate and costly service, raising further skepticism that anything will improve under the current conditions.
For decades, Canada has had the dubious reputation of having the most expensive, low-quality and least reliable telecommunications services in the advanced capitalist countries. This recent incident has only served to highlight that position globally, being covered by the British newspaper The Guardian, the U.S. news services Reuters and Bloomberg, and many others. According to a report from Rewheel/research in 2021, a data plan that gives 100 gigabytes of data, with 10 MB/second download speed and over 1,000 minutes of talk time, costs a minimum of US$117.25 in Canada. A comparable plan in Australia costs US$34.10, in Switzerland it is US$22.77, and in France it costs only US$8.90. Prices like these are literally unheard of in Canada, where even lower-cost plans, with a corresponding reduction of quality in service, are often a significant portion of a worker’s budget. This recent service interruption only highlights the naked robbery of the working class by this Canadian cartel of communications companies.
Rogers along with Bell and Telus make up 90 per cent of the phone and internet market in Canada, which they have held for decades. As monopoly powers in the market, they have no financial incentive to improve services or reduce prices—this would lower profits with no real guarantee that they would then be able to substantially raise them in the future. All the while, the Canadian working class is left to continue dealing with eye-watering prices and shoddy services. In light of this crisis, there have been calls to break up these monopolies, saying that competition between multiple providers will create incentive to lower prices and improve services. With the increasing concentration of capital and ownership into fewer and fewer hands, many Canadians see these calls as not only a push for lower prices and better services for workers; they also see it as an attack on corporate greed and the excesses of capitalism. All that said, anyone should be immediately suspicious when Anthony Lacavera, managing director of Globealive, an investment firm that had a stake in the recent Rogers-Shaw merger bid, is calling for independent competition as a solution to this problem.
As Marxists, we have absolutely no sympathy for the parasites on the corporate boards of these monopolies, and we have full agreement on the need to vastly improve working Canadians’ phone and internet services. That being said, we have to look at any proposal or reform on its merits. In the short term, a breakup of these monopoly powers has the potential to reduce costs and improve service, but it will only do these things while it remains profitable for the capitalists to do so—the moment it ceases to be profitable for the capitalists, workers will end up exactly where they are now. As the process of competition on the market plays out, more and more companies are pushed to the wall. This necessarily leaves fewer and fewer companies on the market, and once they occupy a singular position in the market, they are free to do as they wish, with no real challenge from other companies. The fact that Bell and Rogers offer very similar rates and services, despite being different companies, reveals the fact that they have more to gain by not challenging the status quo. Capitalists are out for themselves and no one else, and if they happen to provide some benefit to the workers here or there, this is incidental to their interests at root. They cannot be relied upon to provide the workers with what they need—only the working class themselves are up to the task.
As stated previously, internet and phone use has become central to many of the tasks that workers go about as a part of their daily lives. Any such service and its access should not be left to the whims of a small group of self-interested capitalists; it should be run for the interests and benefit of those who use it. The workers of these companies, by doing the work that makes these services possible, can play the most powerful role in fighting against the bosses that benefit from our exploitation. Workers know more about how their company actually works than the bosses do. When workers are driven to fight against the exploitation of their bosses, they reflect the fight that every worker is compelled to take on for themselves. The workers are more than capable of taking over control of these companies, and if they were to do so, they would run them more efficiently, on the basis of democratic planning. As these workers, and workers in other large companies, take on these tasks, they would be able to coordinate production together, allowing for better services, better working conditions, and assist all workers, nationally and internationally, against the clique of capitalists who stand in the way of a better world.
The Rogers outage and the resultant societal failures highlights the need to take the telecommunications industry out of private, for-profit, production and put it into the hands of workers who will run this essential service on the basis of need.
