Occupy UC Davis Calls Nov. 28 General Strike to Shut Down CA Campuses, Block Regents' Austerity Vote
Posted 19 hours ago on Nov. 22, 2011, 4:03 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Markin comment:
After the events of th elast week at UC/Davis and after now years of budget cuts this general strike by students and their supporters is a no- brainer. Fight for free, quality higher education for all!
The following proposal was passed by a massive general assembly today at UC Davis:
The UC Board of Regents, who not only represent but actually are this state’s richest one percent, has repeatedly shown itself to be utterly unfit to manage and represent the interests of the students, faculty, and workers who constitute the University of California.
Following two successive years of sharp tuition increases, accompanied by millions in department and resource cuts, layoffs, and furloughs, the board had the audacity to propose a new 81% fee increase and drastic budget reductions.
Undergraduate student fees have tripled over the past ten years, as we have seen an unprecedented explosion of student debt; and departmental budgets have shrunk, as academic and non-academic workers experience diminishing benefits, swelling workloads, and non-existent job security.
In the midst of the economic crisis, the Regents have intensified their pursuit of the project of privatization and de-funding that diminish the quality of education and quality of life for those across the UC, while consigning students’ futures to greater and greater sums of debt.
The Regents’ theft of an ostensibly public resource to fund “capital projects” such as construction projects and private research initiatives, demonstrate a clear conflict of interests that benefits a narrow administrative elite—both the Regents and their local appointees (chancellors and vice chancellors)—at the expense of the greater faculty, staff, and student body.
The familiar rhetoric of austerity demands our resigned compliance, as our learning and working conditions progressively deteriorate. We have seen recently and in years past that political dissent is met with increasingly violent displays of force and repression by University police.
The continued destruction of higher education in California, and the repressive forms of police violence that sustain it, cannot be viewed apart from larger economic and political systems that concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the few.
Since the university has long served as one of the few means of social mobility and for the proliferation of knowledge critical to and outside of existing structures of power, the vital role it plays as one of the few truly public resources is beyond question.
The necessity of reclaiming the UC has never demanded such urgency, as it continues to shift towards the corporate model, pursues dubious fiscal partnerships (such as those with the defense department and international agribusiness), and engages in disturbing collusion with financial institutions like US Bank (which is one of the largest profiteers from student loans).
As such, I propose that in light of the upcoming Regents’ vote on Monday the 28th, (which will be occurring on four campuses simultaneously, one of which being UC Davis), that we call for a general strike this same day, with the aim of shutting down campuses across the state and preventing the Regents from holding their vote.
In response to the intolerable effects privatization and austerity and the horrific repression of student dissent that has occurred throughout the last month, the GA, as a governing body of all concerned UC Davis students, will prevent the Board of Regents from continuing its unbridled assault upon higher education in the state of California.
This will entail total campus participation in shutting down the operations of the university on the 28th, including teaching, working, learning, and transportation, as we will collectively divert our efforts to blocking their vote[s]. In doing so students, faculty and workers assert the power—and the will—to effectively represent and manage ourselves.
Showing posts with label defend public education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defend public education. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Via "Boston IndyMedia"- Next Steps for the Occupy Movement by workers action
Next Steps for the Occupy Movement by workers action
(No verified email address) 17 Oct 2011
As the Occupy Movement gains strength nationally and internationally, questions of “what next” are popping up. Although there are no easy answers or ready-to-order recipes for moving forward, there are general ideas that can help unite the Occupy Movements with the broader community of the 99% — which is the most urgent need at the moment. Why the urgency? Writer Chris Hedges explains:
“The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this . . . They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets . . .”
The only reason that surviving occupied spots have been spared is because of the broader sympathy of the 99% combined with the direct participation of large sections of working people at marches and demonstrations. The corporate elite fear a strong, united movement like vampires fear sunlight.
Therefore, city governments are slow-playing the Occupy Movement where it is especially strong — New York and Portland, Oregon, etc. — and are attacking quickly in cities where momentum hasn’t caught fire —, Denver, Boston, etc. The massive demonstrations in New York and Portland have protected the occupied spaces thus far, as the mayor, police,and media attempt to chip away at public opinion by exploiting disunity in the movement or focusing on individuals promoting violence, drug use, etc.
To combat this dynamic, the Occupy Movement people needs to unite around common messages that they can effectively broadcast to those 99% not yet on the streets; or to maintain the sympathy of those who’ve already attended large marches and demonstrations. And although sections of the Occupy Movement
scoff at demands, they are crucially necessary. Demands unite people in action, and distinguish them from their opponents; demands give an aim and purpose to a movement and act as a communications and recruiting tool to the wider public. There is nothing to win if no demands are articulated.
One reason that the wealthy are strong is because they are united around demands that raise profits for the corporations they own: slashing wages and benefits, destroying unions, lowering corporate tax rates, destroying social programs, privatization, ending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, etc.
As the world rises up against economic injustice, Truthout brings you the latest news and analysis, free of corporate influence. Help support this work with a tax-deductible donation today.
To consolidate the ranks of the Occupy Movement we need similar demands that can inspire the 99%. These are the type of demands that will spur people into action — demands that will get working class people off their couches and into the streets! The immediate task of the movement is to broadcast demands that will agitate the majority of the 99% into action.
On a national level these demands are obvious: Tax the Rich to create a federal public jobs program, fully fund Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and other social programs, fully fund public education, single payer health care, end the wars. These are demands that can unite the Occupy Movement and working people nationally while preventing Democrats and Republicans from taking it over. Poll after poll has recorded that an overwhelming majority of the U.S. population strongly supports these demands, and many unions, including the national AFL-CIO have gone on record supporting them.
On a city and state level these demands can be translated to local issues; cities and states are facing budget deficits that are resulting in cuts to education, social services and resulting in more unemployment. Local Occupy Movements can demand that the local top1% pay more to make up for these, while also demanding that cities and states create jobs with this money.
Corporations are united in their purpose of profit chasing and social service slashing; so too must we be united in saving social services and taxing corporate profits, on a local and national level.
The Occupy Movement has more than room for an umbrella of demands from diverse sections of working class people, but now we must focus on what unites the vast majority, since the corporations have focused on dividing us for decades. The more diverse demands of the working class can find a safe place for expression and growth only within a mass, united movement.
There can be no doubt that the Occupy Movement will either continue to grow into a massive social movement or shrink until the corporate-elite are able to snuff it out. In order for the movement to grow, it must truly attract the broader 99%, not merely the most progressive 10%. Focusing on broad but specific demands that all working people will fight for will attract organized labor, the elderly, students, minorities, i.e., the whole working class.
A working class mass movement has not existed in the United States since the 1930s and 40s when it resulted in spectacular progressive change in America, even if it was cut short before European-style social programs were achieved. Nevertheless, the achievements of the mass movements of past generations are under attack — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a living wage, etc. Only a real working class movement can save these programs and expand them.
If the Occupy Movement fails, the far right will be emboldened. They are trembling at the potential power of the movement and have lost all momentum themselves. If we lose the initiative, they will immediately seize it to press their agenda further and faster. Only by expanding the movement can we extinguish the power of the corporate elite. We have history on our side; let’s not squander it.
The Occupy Movement represents a turning point in history. But in order to achieve its potential, it must reach out to the 99% and draw the majority into its ranks. Then it will have the power to change the agenda of this country, redraw the political map, and create a government that will operate in the interests of the vast majority, not the 1%. Once this change begins to unfold, there are no limits to what it could accomplish.
(No verified email address) 17 Oct 2011
As the Occupy Movement gains strength nationally and internationally, questions of “what next” are popping up. Although there are no easy answers or ready-to-order recipes for moving forward, there are general ideas that can help unite the Occupy Movements with the broader community of the 99% — which is the most urgent need at the moment. Why the urgency? Writer Chris Hedges explains:
“The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this . . . They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets . . .”
The only reason that surviving occupied spots have been spared is because of the broader sympathy of the 99% combined with the direct participation of large sections of working people at marches and demonstrations. The corporate elite fear a strong, united movement like vampires fear sunlight.
Therefore, city governments are slow-playing the Occupy Movement where it is especially strong — New York and Portland, Oregon, etc. — and are attacking quickly in cities where momentum hasn’t caught fire —, Denver, Boston, etc. The massive demonstrations in New York and Portland have protected the occupied spaces thus far, as the mayor, police,and media attempt to chip away at public opinion by exploiting disunity in the movement or focusing on individuals promoting violence, drug use, etc.
To combat this dynamic, the Occupy Movement people needs to unite around common messages that they can effectively broadcast to those 99% not yet on the streets; or to maintain the sympathy of those who’ve already attended large marches and demonstrations. And although sections of the Occupy Movement
scoff at demands, they are crucially necessary. Demands unite people in action, and distinguish them from their opponents; demands give an aim and purpose to a movement and act as a communications and recruiting tool to the wider public. There is nothing to win if no demands are articulated.
One reason that the wealthy are strong is because they are united around demands that raise profits for the corporations they own: slashing wages and benefits, destroying unions, lowering corporate tax rates, destroying social programs, privatization, ending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, etc.
As the world rises up against economic injustice, Truthout brings you the latest news and analysis, free of corporate influence. Help support this work with a tax-deductible donation today.
To consolidate the ranks of the Occupy Movement we need similar demands that can inspire the 99%. These are the type of demands that will spur people into action — demands that will get working class people off their couches and into the streets! The immediate task of the movement is to broadcast demands that will agitate the majority of the 99% into action.
On a national level these demands are obvious: Tax the Rich to create a federal public jobs program, fully fund Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and other social programs, fully fund public education, single payer health care, end the wars. These are demands that can unite the Occupy Movement and working people nationally while preventing Democrats and Republicans from taking it over. Poll after poll has recorded that an overwhelming majority of the U.S. population strongly supports these demands, and many unions, including the national AFL-CIO have gone on record supporting them.
On a city and state level these demands can be translated to local issues; cities and states are facing budget deficits that are resulting in cuts to education, social services and resulting in more unemployment. Local Occupy Movements can demand that the local top1% pay more to make up for these, while also demanding that cities and states create jobs with this money.
Corporations are united in their purpose of profit chasing and social service slashing; so too must we be united in saving social services and taxing corporate profits, on a local and national level.
The Occupy Movement has more than room for an umbrella of demands from diverse sections of working class people, but now we must focus on what unites the vast majority, since the corporations have focused on dividing us for decades. The more diverse demands of the working class can find a safe place for expression and growth only within a mass, united movement.
There can be no doubt that the Occupy Movement will either continue to grow into a massive social movement or shrink until the corporate-elite are able to snuff it out. In order for the movement to grow, it must truly attract the broader 99%, not merely the most progressive 10%. Focusing on broad but specific demands that all working people will fight for will attract organized labor, the elderly, students, minorities, i.e., the whole working class.
A working class mass movement has not existed in the United States since the 1930s and 40s when it resulted in spectacular progressive change in America, even if it was cut short before European-style social programs were achieved. Nevertheless, the achievements of the mass movements of past generations are under attack — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a living wage, etc. Only a real working class movement can save these programs and expand them.
If the Occupy Movement fails, the far right will be emboldened. They are trembling at the potential power of the movement and have lost all momentum themselves. If we lose the initiative, they will immediately seize it to press their agenda further and faster. Only by expanding the movement can we extinguish the power of the corporate elite. We have history on our side; let’s not squander it.
The Occupy Movement represents a turning point in history. But in order to achieve its potential, it must reach out to the 99% and draw the majority into its ranks. Then it will have the power to change the agenda of this country, redraw the political map, and create a government that will operate in the interests of the vast majority, not the 1%. Once this change begins to unfold, there are no limits to what it could accomplish.
Monday, September 26, 2011
From The Pages Of "Spartacist Canada"-Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Spartacist Canada No. 170
Fall 2011
For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Working people everywhere have paid with their jobs, benefits and pensions to bail out the bankers and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Amid this devastation, profits are soaring once again along with CEO salaries and bonuses. Having bilked the public purse of billions for this “recovery,” the capitalist rulers are whipping up an outcry against public sector workers and their unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions in this country have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a one-sided class war by the ruling class. Two years ago, leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) surrendered some $20 an hour in wages and benefits to help bail out Chrysler and General Motors, a demoralizing defeat that helped set the stage for broader attacks. Nickel miners in Sudbury went through a year-long lockout in 2009-10 that ended with major concessions by the union. Steelworkers in Hamilton remain locked out in a bitter battle over pensions that began late last year. The workforces in both these industries, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, have been decimated by many years of job cuts.
With fewer than one in six workers in the private sector now in unions, public sector workers—71 percent of whom are organized—now make up by far the largest proportion of union members in Canada. Yet many public sector unions remain constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike. Without the ability collectively to withdraw their labour, the workers are left at the mercy of the employer. A union that can’t (or won’t) strike is like a lion without claws or teeth.
Governments at all levels, led by the Harper Conservatives, are now moving to further curtail the right to strike. Emboldened by their majority status, the Tories brought down legislation in early summer that forced nearly 50,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to take down picket lines and return to work or face huge fines and the seizure of union assets. In addition to banning strikes for four years and kicking Canada Post’s rollback demands to a government-appointed “arbitrator,” the law imposed a wage settlement even lower than the corporation’s last offer.
CUPW leaders had launched city-by-city rotating strikes in early June. When workers in Toronto and Montreal were brought out simultaneously in a one-day strike on June 14, the company responded with a countrywide lockout. The Tory back-to-work edict came less than a day later, an unconcealed act of collusion with union-busting management. Making clear that it was declaring war on all union struggles, the government also moved to break a strike by 3,800 Air Canada customer service agents. In this case, the CAW union leaders quickly abandoned the strike, signing a deal that accepted multiple concessions, notably on pensions, the central issue in the strike.
Such attacks are not only coming from the federal Tories. Earlier this year, the Ontario Liberal government banned strikes by Toronto transit workers at the behest of the city’s right-wing mayor Rob Ford, who is preparing a frontal assault on city workers through outsourcing and job and service cuts. From coast to coast, the rulers are bringing down the austerity axe on tens of thousands more jobs, claiming this is necessary to “balance the budget” and “keep Canada competitive.”
Labour Tops and NDP: Obstacles to Struggle
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. But struggle against the onslaught of the ruling class has been undermined by a labour leadership that accepts the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows. The union tops couple this with fealty to the NDP social democrats, or in some cases the Liberals, around a program of Canadian nationalism and protectionism which falsely asserts that the workers share a common interest with Canadian big business and governments.
The New Democrats, now Her Majesty’s Official Opposition in parliament, postured against the Tories’ recent back-to-work laws. But the NDP’s claim to stand on the side of striking workers is sheer hypocrisy, as shown by its record of breaking strikes and jailing union leaders while running governments in various provinces. In 1975 the first-ever NDP government in B.C. broke the strikes of pulp workers, railworkers, supermarket employees and propane truck drivers. A generation later, in 2000, they broke a strike by school support staff. In Ontario, an NDP regime jailed the president of CUPW’s Toronto local for defending picket lines in a 1991 strike, and in 2008 the Ontario New Democrats endorsed Liberal legislation breaking a strike by Toronto transit workers.
Down-the-line supporters of Canadian capitalism, in the midst of the postal showdown the NDP endorsed Harper’s call for a three-month extension of support to the brutal NATO military assault on neocolonial Libya. The very day CUPW members were forced back to work, foreign affairs minister John Baird visited Canadian NATO troops in Italy, where he signed a bomb destined for use against Libya that included the message, “This postal service don’t strike.” This powerfully underscores the link between imperialist war abroad and attacks on workers at home.
The eulogies from ruling-class spokesmen for NDP leader Jack Layton following his recent death from cancer are a measure of the services rendered to Canadian capitalism by the New Democrats, and by Layton in particular. The Tory government gave Layton an official state funeral, while Stephen Harper saluted his “dedication to public life.” It is instructive to contrast the bourgeoisie’s laudatory treatment of the late NDP leader to its unconcealed contempt for the poor and unemployed; its racist repression of immigrants and refugees; its imperialist pillage of the semicolonial world. The social role of the NDP has been, and remains, to tie the working people to supporting the rulers’ violent and barbaric social system, perhaps cushioned by a few cosmetic and highly reversible reforms.
Unchain the Unions!
The social power of public sector workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public sector unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern society. While the capitalist media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against these unions, the truth is that some hard class struggle would win plenty of allies among the unemployed, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the ruling class.
“Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” 1912).
In the face of the rulers’ savage offensive, the number of strikes has plummeted. Last year saw the fewest in more than half a century; by some measures, labour struggle in Canada is at its lowest ebb since the 1930s. What stands in the way of the necessary militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy, which has for the most part surrendered abjectly in the face of the austerity onslaught, the continuation of decades of bowing before the bosses.
Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Toronto rolled over with barely a peep of protest when the Ontario government banned their right to strike. Two months after the short-lived CAW strike at Air Canada, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leaders called on the airline’s flight attendants to accept a tentative deal that threatens their pension plan. A letter by the president of CUPE’s Air Canada Component, Jeff Taylor, sought to justify the betrayal: “One of the main deciding factors is the Conservative government, a government that would rather enforce back-to-work legislation than allow your union to strike. This was a key reality that drove the bargaining committee’s decision” (Toronto Star, 21 August). The union tops preach that struggle is not possible, that workers will just have to eat it. Nonetheless, 87 percent of the union voted down the sellout deal.
In the case of CUPW, while the union’s leaders refused to swallow Canada Post’s outrageous demands, they at no time sought to unleash the full power of the union on the picket lines. Their strategy of rotating strikes meant that the mail kept flowing until the company moved to shut down operations in preparation for the government intervention. The CUPW tops even offered to call off the strikes if management reinstated the old, expired contract. And once the lockout began, their only response was a series of punchless rallies featuring stale “solidarity” rhetoric from union bureaucrats and NDPers.
The miserable defeatism that characterizes today’s union misleaders threatens disaster for the workers. Labour has never won anything by meekly accepting the bosses’ rules. Once, unions themselves were illegal under the capitalists’ laws. It took “illegal” strikes, notably by postal workers, to win the right to organize for hundreds of thousands of government workers in the 1960s. The best working-class leaders recognized the need to face down state repression and go to jail if necessary for the workers’ cause. As we wrote last issue, in an article titled “All Labour Must Stand With CUPW!” which was distributed heavily at postal worker pickets, rallies and meetings:
“It is in the interests of the entire working class that CUPW beat back the bosses’ onslaught. If the union movement is to wage the battles necessary for defense of the workers and all the oppressed, a political struggle is necessary to get rid of the sellouts atop the labour movement who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged.”
—SC No. 169, Summer 2011
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The question of turning the unions into fighting organizations for the working class is fundamentally a political one. In an article written more than 70 years ago, the Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940).
The economic devastation that now stalks the capitalist world is the product of the workings of a deeply unjust and irrational social system based on production for profit derived from the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labour as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. Many feel that the best they can do is to try to hold onto their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the workers and set them one against the other in a fight to survive can and will also propel them forward to unity in battle against the class enemy.
What are the obstacles to such united class struggle? First and foremost is the lie that there is a “common interest” or possible “partnership” between the exploited and the exploiters. The working class must champion its own interests, which are also the interests of all the oppressed. Thus in this country the labour movement must defend the national rights of Quebec against the chauvinist Canadian rulers and their NDP handmaidens. Anti-Quebec bigotry divides the working class, with workers in English Canada rallied behind their “own” exploiters and those in Quebec pulled into the framework of bourgeois nationalism. The New Democrats have a long history of supporting “united Canada” chauvinism against Quebec. This includes endorsing the Clarity Act, which seeks to ban Quebec’s democratic right to national self-determination. They have renounced none of this.
Various reformist leftists (echoing bourgeois commentators) assert that the NDP’s surge in Quebec in the federal election means that national antagonisms are a thing of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth. The continued significance of the national question was underlined in its own way by the furor whipped up in English Canada when it emerged that the NDP’s new interim leader, former federal public sector union leader Nycole Turmel, was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. While Turmel asserted that she has always backed “Canadian unity” and only joined the Bloc because it was a purportedly “progressive” force in her native Quebec, this was of no consequence to the witchhunters of the Canadian ruling class, for whom even a hint of possible support to “separatism” is tantamount to sedition. As revolutionary internationalist opponents of chauvinism and oppression in all their manifestations, we Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.
To unite the working class in anti-capitalist struggle, it is necessary to champion the rights of immigrants and oppose the rulers’ stepped-up campaigns for deportations and the detention of refugees. It is necessary to fight for women’s rights including free 24-hour child care and free abortion on demand. It is necessary to oppose Ottawa’s repressive “anti-crime” hysteria and the “war on terror” hysteria against Muslims and other minorities. The working class must take up the cause of all the oppressed!
The labour bureaucrats and New Democrats claim that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of Canadian capitalism. This road has led to disaster. It is necessary to fight for the perspective of mobilizing labour’s immense potential power against the exploiters, taking up such demands as jobs for all through sharing the available work at no loss in pay; a massive program of public works to rebuild crumbling roads, hospitals, schools and transit systems; for decent pensions, health care and other social services for everyone, fully guaranteed by the state. Such measures will not be granted by the capitalist ruling class, whose only interest lies in maintaining its profits and privileges.
The achievement of such basic measures, and more, requires a fight for the workers to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters through socialist revolution. Only then can we begin the rational reorganization of society in the interests of the vast majority. The fight for a class-struggle leadership to rebuild the unions is linked inextricably to the fight to forge a binational, multiracial revolutionary workers party including through political struggle against NDP-style social democracy. The need for revolutionary Marxist leadership is today posed acutely, not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation, but to do away with the source of that devastation, the capitalist system itself.
Fall 2011
For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
Defeat Capitalist War on Public Sector Workers!
Working people everywhere have paid with their jobs, benefits and pensions to bail out the bankers and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Amid this devastation, profits are soaring once again along with CEO salaries and bonuses. Having bilked the public purse of billions for this “recovery,” the capitalist rulers are whipping up an outcry against public sector workers and their unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions in this country have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a one-sided class war by the ruling class. Two years ago, leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) surrendered some $20 an hour in wages and benefits to help bail out Chrysler and General Motors, a demoralizing defeat that helped set the stage for broader attacks. Nickel miners in Sudbury went through a year-long lockout in 2009-10 that ended with major concessions by the union. Steelworkers in Hamilton remain locked out in a bitter battle over pensions that began late last year. The workforces in both these industries, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, have been decimated by many years of job cuts.
With fewer than one in six workers in the private sector now in unions, public sector workers—71 percent of whom are organized—now make up by far the largest proportion of union members in Canada. Yet many public sector unions remain constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike. Without the ability collectively to withdraw their labour, the workers are left at the mercy of the employer. A union that can’t (or won’t) strike is like a lion without claws or teeth.
Governments at all levels, led by the Harper Conservatives, are now moving to further curtail the right to strike. Emboldened by their majority status, the Tories brought down legislation in early summer that forced nearly 50,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to take down picket lines and return to work or face huge fines and the seizure of union assets. In addition to banning strikes for four years and kicking Canada Post’s rollback demands to a government-appointed “arbitrator,” the law imposed a wage settlement even lower than the corporation’s last offer.
CUPW leaders had launched city-by-city rotating strikes in early June. When workers in Toronto and Montreal were brought out simultaneously in a one-day strike on June 14, the company responded with a countrywide lockout. The Tory back-to-work edict came less than a day later, an unconcealed act of collusion with union-busting management. Making clear that it was declaring war on all union struggles, the government also moved to break a strike by 3,800 Air Canada customer service agents. In this case, the CAW union leaders quickly abandoned the strike, signing a deal that accepted multiple concessions, notably on pensions, the central issue in the strike.
Such attacks are not only coming from the federal Tories. Earlier this year, the Ontario Liberal government banned strikes by Toronto transit workers at the behest of the city’s right-wing mayor Rob Ford, who is preparing a frontal assault on city workers through outsourcing and job and service cuts. From coast to coast, the rulers are bringing down the austerity axe on tens of thousands more jobs, claiming this is necessary to “balance the budget” and “keep Canada competitive.”
Labour Tops and NDP: Obstacles to Struggle
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. But struggle against the onslaught of the ruling class has been undermined by a labour leadership that accepts the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows. The union tops couple this with fealty to the NDP social democrats, or in some cases the Liberals, around a program of Canadian nationalism and protectionism which falsely asserts that the workers share a common interest with Canadian big business and governments.
The New Democrats, now Her Majesty’s Official Opposition in parliament, postured against the Tories’ recent back-to-work laws. But the NDP’s claim to stand on the side of striking workers is sheer hypocrisy, as shown by its record of breaking strikes and jailing union leaders while running governments in various provinces. In 1975 the first-ever NDP government in B.C. broke the strikes of pulp workers, railworkers, supermarket employees and propane truck drivers. A generation later, in 2000, they broke a strike by school support staff. In Ontario, an NDP regime jailed the president of CUPW’s Toronto local for defending picket lines in a 1991 strike, and in 2008 the Ontario New Democrats endorsed Liberal legislation breaking a strike by Toronto transit workers.
Down-the-line supporters of Canadian capitalism, in the midst of the postal showdown the NDP endorsed Harper’s call for a three-month extension of support to the brutal NATO military assault on neocolonial Libya. The very day CUPW members were forced back to work, foreign affairs minister John Baird visited Canadian NATO troops in Italy, where he signed a bomb destined for use against Libya that included the message, “This postal service don’t strike.” This powerfully underscores the link between imperialist war abroad and attacks on workers at home.
The eulogies from ruling-class spokesmen for NDP leader Jack Layton following his recent death from cancer are a measure of the services rendered to Canadian capitalism by the New Democrats, and by Layton in particular. The Tory government gave Layton an official state funeral, while Stephen Harper saluted his “dedication to public life.” It is instructive to contrast the bourgeoisie’s laudatory treatment of the late NDP leader to its unconcealed contempt for the poor and unemployed; its racist repression of immigrants and refugees; its imperialist pillage of the semicolonial world. The social role of the NDP has been, and remains, to tie the working people to supporting the rulers’ violent and barbaric social system, perhaps cushioned by a few cosmetic and highly reversible reforms.
Unchain the Unions!
The social power of public sector workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public sector unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern society. While the capitalist media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against these unions, the truth is that some hard class struggle would win plenty of allies among the unemployed, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the ruling class.
“Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’” (“Economic and Political Strikes,” 1912).
In the face of the rulers’ savage offensive, the number of strikes has plummeted. Last year saw the fewest in more than half a century; by some measures, labour struggle in Canada is at its lowest ebb since the 1930s. What stands in the way of the necessary militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy, which has for the most part surrendered abjectly in the face of the austerity onslaught, the continuation of decades of bowing before the bosses.
Leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Toronto rolled over with barely a peep of protest when the Ontario government banned their right to strike. Two months after the short-lived CAW strike at Air Canada, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leaders called on the airline’s flight attendants to accept a tentative deal that threatens their pension plan. A letter by the president of CUPE’s Air Canada Component, Jeff Taylor, sought to justify the betrayal: “One of the main deciding factors is the Conservative government, a government that would rather enforce back-to-work legislation than allow your union to strike. This was a key reality that drove the bargaining committee’s decision” (Toronto Star, 21 August). The union tops preach that struggle is not possible, that workers will just have to eat it. Nonetheless, 87 percent of the union voted down the sellout deal.
In the case of CUPW, while the union’s leaders refused to swallow Canada Post’s outrageous demands, they at no time sought to unleash the full power of the union on the picket lines. Their strategy of rotating strikes meant that the mail kept flowing until the company moved to shut down operations in preparation for the government intervention. The CUPW tops even offered to call off the strikes if management reinstated the old, expired contract. And once the lockout began, their only response was a series of punchless rallies featuring stale “solidarity” rhetoric from union bureaucrats and NDPers.
The miserable defeatism that characterizes today’s union misleaders threatens disaster for the workers. Labour has never won anything by meekly accepting the bosses’ rules. Once, unions themselves were illegal under the capitalists’ laws. It took “illegal” strikes, notably by postal workers, to win the right to organize for hundreds of thousands of government workers in the 1960s. The best working-class leaders recognized the need to face down state repression and go to jail if necessary for the workers’ cause. As we wrote last issue, in an article titled “All Labour Must Stand With CUPW!” which was distributed heavily at postal worker pickets, rallies and meetings:
“It is in the interests of the entire working class that CUPW beat back the bosses’ onslaught. If the union movement is to wage the battles necessary for defense of the workers and all the oppressed, a political struggle is necessary to get rid of the sellouts atop the labour movement who strangle the workers’ fighting spirit. It is in the crucible of the class struggle that a new leadership of the unions can be forged.”
—SC No. 169, Summer 2011
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The question of turning the unions into fighting organizations for the working class is fundamentally a political one. In an article written more than 70 years ago, the Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940).
The economic devastation that now stalks the capitalist world is the product of the workings of a deeply unjust and irrational social system based on production for profit derived from the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labour as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. Many feel that the best they can do is to try to hold onto their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the workers and set them one against the other in a fight to survive can and will also propel them forward to unity in battle against the class enemy.
What are the obstacles to such united class struggle? First and foremost is the lie that there is a “common interest” or possible “partnership” between the exploited and the exploiters. The working class must champion its own interests, which are also the interests of all the oppressed. Thus in this country the labour movement must defend the national rights of Quebec against the chauvinist Canadian rulers and their NDP handmaidens. Anti-Quebec bigotry divides the working class, with workers in English Canada rallied behind their “own” exploiters and those in Quebec pulled into the framework of bourgeois nationalism. The New Democrats have a long history of supporting “united Canada” chauvinism against Quebec. This includes endorsing the Clarity Act, which seeks to ban Quebec’s democratic right to national self-determination. They have renounced none of this.
Various reformist leftists (echoing bourgeois commentators) assert that the NDP’s surge in Quebec in the federal election means that national antagonisms are a thing of the past. But nothing could be further from the truth. The continued significance of the national question was underlined in its own way by the furor whipped up in English Canada when it emerged that the NDP’s new interim leader, former federal public sector union leader Nycole Turmel, was until recently a member of the Bloc Québécois. While Turmel asserted that she has always backed “Canadian unity” and only joined the Bloc because it was a purportedly “progressive” force in her native Quebec, this was of no consequence to the witchhunters of the Canadian ruling class, for whom even a hint of possible support to “separatism” is tantamount to sedition. As revolutionary internationalist opponents of chauvinism and oppression in all their manifestations, we Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.
To unite the working class in anti-capitalist struggle, it is necessary to champion the rights of immigrants and oppose the rulers’ stepped-up campaigns for deportations and the detention of refugees. It is necessary to fight for women’s rights including free 24-hour child care and free abortion on demand. It is necessary to oppose Ottawa’s repressive “anti-crime” hysteria and the “war on terror” hysteria against Muslims and other minorities. The working class must take up the cause of all the oppressed!
The labour bureaucrats and New Democrats claim that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of Canadian capitalism. This road has led to disaster. It is necessary to fight for the perspective of mobilizing labour’s immense potential power against the exploiters, taking up such demands as jobs for all through sharing the available work at no loss in pay; a massive program of public works to rebuild crumbling roads, hospitals, schools and transit systems; for decent pensions, health care and other social services for everyone, fully guaranteed by the state. Such measures will not be granted by the capitalist ruling class, whose only interest lies in maintaining its profits and privileges.
The achievement of such basic measures, and more, requires a fight for the workers to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters through socialist revolution. Only then can we begin the rational reorganization of society in the interests of the vast majority. The fight for a class-struggle leadership to rebuild the unions is linked inextricably to the fight to forge a binational, multiracial revolutionary workers party including through political struggle against NDP-style social democracy. The need for revolutionary Marxist leadership is today posed acutely, not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation, but to do away with the source of that devastation, the capitalist system itself.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- "Death By A Thousand (Budget) Cuts"
Click on the headline to link to the above article via the Renegade Eye blog.
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