BY BARRY WEISLEDER
TORONTO — Labour Day parades across Ontario and other parts of Canada will march under darkening clouds on September 1 — regardless of the weather. A number of trade unions are giving way as a rising tide of employer demands for concessions threaten to further undermine unions and working people's conditions across the country.
In mid-July, the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) in Ontario agreed to wage and benefit concessions, including C$2 to $3 less pay per hour, reduced vacation time and more Sunday shifts for employees at the new Loblaws super-stores. The UFCW brass signed the deal with Loblaws without putting it to a vote of the members affected. In exchange, the union gets automatic recognition (and dues deductions) at the new stores.
Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers' Union, according to the July 19 Toronto Star, "said he's worried such deals will drive down wages in the grocery industry". But Hargrove's union has delivered major concessions to Air Canada, the financially troubled, recently privatised, national airline. The rollbacks were in work rules, reduced vacation time, the elimination of shift loadings and the disappearance of 800 jobs — with more losses to come at Jazz, an Air Canada-related carrier.
In late July, the traditionally militant Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) negotiated an unusually long, four-year contract with the Canada Post Corporation. The deal included a number of concessions. Despite some gains for the 6000 previously unrepresented rural and suburban mail carriers, and a 3% wage hike for other CUPW members in each of the four years, the union agreed to the elimination of severance pay (after a pay out to those currently entitled), the institution of uncapped monthly employee premium payments for dental and extended health benefits and reduced reimbursement for some drug expenses.
Teachers' unions in Ontario recently achieved salary improvements for full-time teachers of 3.5% per year (after more than a decade of losing ground). But teachers' union bureaucrats are signing contracts that see the position of education support staff, including substitute teachers, fall farther behind. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) has reduced the scope for local autonomy in its constitution, and its leadership is seeking to crush local resistance to anti-worker concessions in job security, wages and benefits.
On April 23, the OSSTF imposed trusteeship on the Toronto substitute teachers' 1500-member bargaining unit, following removal of its re-elected local president (the writer of this article) from office on January 1. The unprecedented (in the OSSTF) seizure of local finances and local bargaining rights, and the banishment of an elected officer for 32 months (on frivolous and specious grounds) is a glaring example of an attack on union democracy and local militancy. Substitute teachers and their allies are fighting the attack with protest rallies, petitions and legal action.
In British Columbia (BC), the reactionary Liberal Party provincial government of Gordon Campbell has slashed thousands of public service jobs, ripped up collective agreement rights and opened the door to contracting out and privatisation of services in long-term care and acute care hospitals. Currently, some 20,000 employees, mostly members of the Hospital Employees' Union, are facing job losses, and residents of the facilities fear a sharp decline in their living conditions.
On June 17, the Vancouver and District Labour Council unanimously called on the BC Federation of Labour to implement an action plan adopted last November, including a province-wide general strike. Yet a date for action seems agonizingly elusive.
In Quebec, the neoliberal regime of Jean Charest is poised to follow its counterparts in Ontario and BC. Quebec unions, inured to years of Parti Quebecois social cuts, are slowly embarking on actions to resist the coming onslaught.
The good news is that some unions are resisting the demands for anti-worker concessions.
Steelworkers have been on strike at Inco mines in Sudbury, Ontario, since May 30, resisting proposed cuts to health benefits. United Steelworkers of America members have also rejected management demands in contract talks at Stelco in Hamilton, Ontario. (Radicals have won elections in Hamilton's USWA Local 1005, as well as at USWA's large support staff local at the University of Toronto.)
Activists in the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) are engaged in energetic organising drives and related campaigns.
But the number of new bargaining unit certification applications in Ontario, Canada's most populous and most industrialised province, has fallen markedly over the past eight years. In 2001-02, the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) received only 625 applications, and allowed only 307, placing only 16,255 workers in newly certified bargaining units. In 1994-95, the fiscal year before the new ultra-conservative government of Mike Harris amended the labour law to make union organising much more difficult (and union decertification much easier), the OLRB received 1077 applications and granted 762 certificates covering 32,116 workers — a 71% success rate.
Cuts in public sector spending, particularly in health care and education institutions, plus job losses in the private sector due to the economic downturn, are compounding the decline in union representation.
Another big factor is the totally uninspiring approach of union leaders towards the deepening neoliberal agenda. Particularly infamous was the abandonment of the anti-Tory "Ontario Days of Action", which included 12 individual city-wide general strikes. Equally sad was the premature curtailment of the 1997 Ontario-wide teachers' strike. Since then, most unions are more inward looking and defensive — a breeding ground for member demoralisation and contract concessions.
Not surprisingly, working people find it more difficult to fight the bosses' agenda with one hand tied behind their backs. Removing that restraint entails rank-and-file workers challenging the dominant, and increasingly intolerant and repressive, union bureaucracy.
On Labour Day, our watch words should be: stop concessions; restore union democracy; rebuild the power of our unions with class struggle policies, action and leadership.
[Barry Weisleder is a leading member of the Socialist Action organisation in Canada.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 20, 2003.
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