The pit bulls of the Harris government have been talking the talk of work reorganization throughout their time in office and they have put their words into action. The blueprint for their second term of office parodies the logic of the Toyota Production System by saying their goal is to make government “work smarter, faster and better”. It calls for bringing in more efficient management systems. Given current management theory this definitely means things like T.Q.M. Their spokespersons have also talked about breaking down “the silo mentality” which clearly indicates a familiarity with the theory of reengineering. They also talk about benchmarking which, in effect, means relentless efforts at continuous improvement or the continuous pursuit of new ways of working to squeeze more work out of fewer workers. Doing better with less is their stated objective.
The Harris government’s infatuation with benchmarking was apparent early in its first term of office. This was exemplified by the government’s omnibus bill, Bill 26, which was designed to facilitate the radical and sweeping restructuring of the public sector in Ontario. Entire sections of Bill 26 were devoted to benchmarking.
Furthermore, consistent with the practice of reengineering, the Ontario government took away powers from small, local governments and concentrated them in what is commonly referred to as “the centre ” or the backrooms of their regime where the real decision-making takes place. The Harris government has done this with a conscious desire to establish benchmarks or “best practices” and force them on local governments via legislation like Bill 26.
My point simply is that these things comprise a very major part of the Harris government’s agenda. My point is also to highlight that they pose a very serious problem for the labour movement in Ontario and Canada. Namely, its total failure to seriously acknowledge, never mind grasp, these critically important features of what is Harris’ or Capital’s current agenda.
This failure by the labour movement to adequately come to terms with the Harris agenda was painfully evident in 1997 during the fight against yet another piece of Harris government legislation designed to facilitate the restructuring and downsizing of the public sector, Bill 136. The union bureaucracy’s initial response to Bill 136 raised the spectre of a public sector general strike. But the union bureaucracy raised this spectre because Bill 136 was going to legally deny public sector workers’ the right to strike during the restructuring process. The union bureaucracy also did this because Bill 136 would have taken the responsibility for resolving public sector labour disputes away from the O.L.R.B. and given that responsibility to new bodies beholden directly to the Harris government and its fiscal goals.
Significantly, no general strike was ever seriously planned nor did momentum towards one develop. This inaction happened, in large part, because the Harris Tories agreed to withdraw the part of the bill taking away the right of public sector workers to strike. Significantly, the Tories did this after the leader of the largest public sector union in Ontario, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, repeatedly gave the government commitments that there would be no strikes during the restructuring. In other words, the leader of CUPE Ontario made a ban on strikes completely unnecessary. There was also no general strike because the Harris Tories made a minor concession by agreeing to continue to use the existing state structures to deal with public sector labour disputes and, in effect, enforce labour legislation they had crafted and implemented.
The union bureaucracy bombastically responded by claiming victory. The Ontario leader of the C.U.P.E. shortly thereafter declared the Harris government’s program, known as the Common Sense Revolution, to be over and dead. Yesterday we found out just how dead it is.
Meanwhile the Harris Tories massive restructuring of the public sector went ahead and some 16,000 public sector jobs were restructured out of existence as a result. Significantly, the Harris government had made it clear throughout the uproar over Bill 136 that it did not care much about the final form of the legislation as long as it got the government to where it wanted to go in terms of restructuring the public sector. That is precisely where it went.
My point is simple. Capital’s pit bulls in the Harris government had an agenda based in large measure upon reengineering and the radical restructuring of work processes in the public sector. The union bureaucracy, led by people who plainly don’t understand these things, had no effective counter strategy tailored to the Harris government's agenda. Consequently, the union bureaucracy only secured insignificant and cosmetic victories. Ultimately, Harris routed the membership of the public sector unions.
Furthermore, had the public sector unions not been routed we may not have seen the election results we saw yesterday. But we did and I am saying to you that the union bureaucracy bears direct responsibility for the decisive re-election of an openly Thatcherite government ultimately committed to crippling the labour movement in Ontario.
These things said some comments are definitely in order about the social democratic New Democratic Party in relation to the developments I’ve described in Mike Harris’ Ontario and in relation to the broader phenomenon of restructuring and work reorganization within the context of capitalist globalization.
The Ontario NDP’s criticisms of the Harris government’s agenda, since the Tories’ election in 1995, have differed little from those of the union bureaucracy. Worse still, to the extent that they have differed it is because the NDP leadership is to the right of the union bureaucracy.
None of this should have been surprising because the NDP had just held power and, while it held power, it engaged in its own public sector restructuring efforts designed to downsize the public sector and do so at the direct expense of the democratic rights of workers. Furthermore, in sectors like health care, public sector management in Ontario also engaged in reengineering and it aggressively promoted anti-worker obscenities like teams and TQM. All of this happened with the blessing of the NDP government of the day.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Canada other NDP governments did and are continuing to do the very same types of things. Reengineering is an ongoing phenomenon in the health care sector in British Columbia, where the NDP has been in power throughout the 1990s. B.C.’s NDP government is also a strong promoter of private – public partnerships in health care according to the President of the B.C. Nurses Union Catherine Ferguson, who I recently spoke to at length on this and related subjects.
Then there is the situation in Saskatchewan. That province is the birthplace of social democracy in Canada. I think I only need to tell you that a year after Mike Harris was elected as the Premier of Ontario he spoke to the infamous right-wing, corporate think tank, the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. The purpose of his speech was to make a progress report on the implementation of his government’s agenda. Harris told his audience of corporate admirers that when the Ontario Tories formulated their Common Sense Revolution for Ontario they had looked to Saskatchewan, where the NDP has been in power for a decade, to find their model for restructuring the health care system in Ontario.
Just consider the implications of this for the labour movement in Canada. This shows that a viciously right-wing government in Ontario committed to reengineering and radically downsizing the public sector drew inspiration and ideas from a government formed by the same political party the union bureaucracy champions. Indeed, this is the party it dogmatically holds up as a genuine alternative around which we should be rallying and which we should be working to elect. What a testament to the political bankruptcy of the union bureaucracy and what a testament to its abysmal failure to even begin to come to terms with the restructuring agenda being deployed against workers with devastating consequences. I believe this definitively shows that, contrary to what many here in the U.S. think, the labour movement in Canada is hopelessly adrift and is in a state of absolute but totally unacknowledged crisis.
Sadly, there is even more to be said in this respect. When it comes to considering this subject in relation to the central labour organization in Canada, the Canadian Labour Congress, I have a real problem. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry in response. The truth of the matter is that pathetic. One only needs to make a quick overview of recent developments with respect to the CLC’s policy or lack thereof on work reorganization.
The CLC addressed the issue of work reorganization in a trite and inconclusive way in its 1996 Constitutional Convention’s Action Plan by noting the growth of part time, term/contract and homework and by correctly relating these phenomena to downsizing, tech change and work reorganization. The 1996 CLC Action Plan acknowledged that work reorganization poses “serious problems” for unions. It also said that it created opportunities for unions without, however, in any way defining what these so-called opportunities are? I wonder why?
The most candid part of this small portion of the CLC’s Action Plan made reference to teams, multi-skilling and multi-tasking plainly admitting that organized labour has found them “disorienting”. These things said the 1996 CLC Action Plan’s bold conclusion was that the resulting issues “need to be discussed on a movement-wide basis”.
In the three years since the 1996 CLC Action Plan was adopted as policy no such discussions on a movement-wide basis have openly taken place let alone with meaningful rank and file worker input. Consequently, we have seen no results of such discussions and if any discussions did take place they were held behind closed doors and those were brought to an effective halt.
All of this became brutally apparent at the 1999 CLC Constitutional Convention in Toronto last month. The only text dealing with work reorganization made available to the delegates was the text of a resolution on work reorganization written by the CLC Left Opposition and adopted by my CAW local, my labour council and two other local unions. It appeared in the Resolutions Book but predictably never made it to the floor of the convention.
Meanwhile, the CLC’s 1999 Action Plan, the main policy document of the convention, totally ducked the question. Yet everyone who was at the convention is from or represents a workplace or workplaces that are being profoundly transformed by Captial’s work reorganization blitzkrieg. And I should add that when I went to one of the microphones during the debate of the Action Plan and attacked it for this gaping omission, and for other reasons, the response was near silence.
The CLC, like the union bureaucracy in general, is totally bankrupt on this question. The result is a huge and strategically critical policy void that has directly contributed to the kinds of disastrous defeats I’ve noted in Ontario. And make no mistake about it, as time goes on the consequences of this void will be more and more disastrous.
The reason for this is very simple and very basic from a labour perspective. The continuing failure of unions to effectively address the changes wrought by the relentless deployment of corporate work reorganization strategies is leading to, and can only lead to, a steady decline in the power of unions on the shop floor. Furthermore, an ongoing loss of union power on the shop floor inevitably causes unions to cease to be dynamic and thriving class-based organizations capable of taking effective action both in the workplace and in society at large. This is so simply because workers measure the unions they belong to primarily by the ability of these unions to affect what happens in their immediate workplace and to them in their jobs.
This plain fact stands at the very centre of everything I am saying here. Indeed, recognition of this led to the effort to follow up on the formation of a viable Left Caucus in the Canadian Autoworkers union (formed partly in response to the CAW’s increasing inclination to reconcile itself to lean manufacturing) and kick start a left opposition focused on the Canadian Labour Congress Convention. This is now a formation that aspires to give rise to a potent left opposition throughout the Canadian labour movement.
Briefly, the CLC Left Opposition was formed just over half a year ago and it has already held two public events. More are planned. We also succeeded in sending about 20 resolutions to last month’s CLC Constitutional Convention with the support of two labour councils and five local unions. Fourteen of these made it into the resolutions book and two were incorporated verbatim into composite resolutions adopted by the convention. One of these resolutions dealt with the plight of AIM leader Leonard Peltier. And it has since become very clear that our efforts to mobilize in solidarity with Leonard Peltier, in large measure, pushed the CLC to once again take up his case in a meaningful way after many years of negligence. We also brought two women involved in a protracted UNITE! strike against concessions and blatant gender discrimination to the convention to mobilize support for their struggle much to the dismay of the UNITE! bureaucracy in Canada and without the blessing of the CLC leadership.
Most importantly, we are continuing to plan and to organize and have established a small but very significant network of employed and under employed and unionized and non-unionized workers that extends throughout most of Canada. Our main tools in doing this are a web site we constructed with an e-mail discussion list open to anyone interested in being part of it and the use of the Labournet Canada web site where many of our documents and links to our web site can be found. This means we have the kind of infrastructure necessary for building a real opposition across the country and really turning it into a potent force. And, I might add, that in this respect we have an organizing capability far superior to anything which any other left formation that has appeared in the Canadian labour movement have ever had, including the tiresome formations which were initiated by the Communist Party of Canada.
Beyond that we have a core of highly experienced labour activists many of whom hold significant and influential positions in either local unions and or labour councils. In short, we have a real base to build on. Furthermore, given the depth of the crisis within the Canadian labour movement, manifested by the types of things I’ve outlined here, we have very fertile soil to work with in building such an opposition. And, I am convinced, we can build such an opposition.
Such an opposition can be built by being aggressive, determined, and outspoken worker activists. And it can be built by effectively addressing absolutely crucial issues, like work reorganization, where the union bureaucracy has fallen flat on its face and where it will most definitely continue to fall flat on its face to the detriment of the entire Canadian working class. Thank you.
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