Epitaph on the Oshawa Fightback

        The harsh reality of the Unifor – GM agreement to “save” the jobs of Oshawa GM workers is undeniable.  Together GM workers and about 2,500 low paid workers employed by the supplier companies located in and around GM Oshawa will see a workforce of over 5,000 shrink to about 300.  What’s more, the long term employment of the 300 GM workers who will survive the assembly plant’s closure is uncertain.  No one is guaranteeing these remaining jobs to be located in a small stamping operation will survive past the 2020 Unifor – GM contract negotiations.  GM’s promises that there could eventually be up to 500 jobs are as worthless as its unkept job security promises to Oshawa workers in the past.

        The overlooked, poorly paid workers in the supplier operations are the most victimized by this agreement.  They get nothing.  By contrast, senior Oshawa GM workers eligible to retire or nearly eligible to retire can either get lucrative retirement incentives with pensions or the opportunity to fill a small number of job openings the agreement will create in what’s left of the St. Catharines GM plant. 

        Oshawa will be devastated.  To grasp this one only needs to recall how union leaders always said that every auto industry job generates six or more jobs in surrounding communities.  Do the math in order to grasp the magnitude of the economic hit Oshawa faces.  Oshawa only needs to recall what happened to Flint, Michigan after GM gutted its operations there slashing the workforce to a fraction of what it once was leaving behind a desperate population now living with a water supply poisoned by lead.

        This sorry outcome is all there is to show for an ineffective Unifor fightback to save GM Oshawa.  Hampered by a glaring lack of support from the rest of a labour movement (Unifor withdrew from the CLC in 2018), little support from Unifor  leadership where GM has other operations and an impotent boycott that pandered to xenophobia by targeting GM vehicles made by Mexican autoworkers this fightback was little more than a minor nuisance to GM.  Indeed, GM relished the lack of support for the fightback outside of Oshawa.  GM had to be especially pleased by the UAW’s lack of interest in supporting a Unifor fightback.

        Things did not have to turn out so badly.  GM retirees in Oshawa and St. Catharines, who are the backbone of what activism there still is in the auto sector, showed this.  They showed more willingness to fight back than the active members with the notable exception of the Oshawa GM workers who staged brief sit-in strikes immediately after the closure announcement.  The retirees also showed a degree of radicalism absent from auto since the Oshawa Fabrication Plant was occupied during the successful twenty day strike against GM in 1996. 

         Oshawa retirees did this by calling for the nationalization of GM Oshawa and retooling it to produce future-oriented, green vehicle technology.  Likewise, St. Catharines retirees wrote to Unifor President Jerry Dias calling for the plant to be handed over to the workforce and the community to continue operations much like idled factories in Argentina have been successfully occupied and run by the workers who worked in them.

        Unifor’s national leadership disregarded these ideas.  The agreement to ostensibly save 300 jobs is all they came up with instead.

        In effect, the Oshawa and St. Catharines retirees saw the closure announcement as an opportunity to save far more jobs, protect the community of Oshawa and produce non carbon emitting vehicles suited to addressing the accelerating climate change crisis.  Top Unifor leadership and leading federal and provincial politicians inexcusably failed to do likewise.  They weren’t interested.  Just as they aren’t interested in doing what’s necessary to tackle the accelerating climate change crisis.

        Consequently, most of the affected workers face a fate of trying to make it in an increasingly low wage economy involving more and more precarious work.  Meanwhile time is running out to seriously address an accelerating climate change crisis. 

         Every challenge presents an opportunity.  GM’s Oshawa closure announcement presented an opportunity to address the crisis facing these workers and the ecological crisis threatening the planet.  That opportunity was squandered.  It was squandered by leaders lacking vision who demonstrated their subservience to Capital by bending to the will of GM. 

Speech on Mumia Abu-Jamal – January 26, 2019                  

        I would like to focus my remarks entirely on our comrade Mumia Abu-Jamal who has suffered for so very long.   This is entirely appropriate because we could now be at a critical turning point in Mumia’s 37 year-long battle for justice and against his wrongful conviction for the murder of Daniel Faulkner.  Consequently, the possibility of freedom for Mumia remains remote but clearly less so than it did just a year ago.

       Two developments clearly attest to this and show why this could be a turning point.  One is the December 27, 2018 decision by Judge Leon Tucker before the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.  Tucker’s decision allows Mumia and his legal representatives to reargue his appeal before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.  This happened because the U.S. Supreme Court in a prior precedent setting case admonished the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania judiciary stating a fair trial requires that Judges not hear their own cases and decisions.  Therefore, they cannot sit in judgement on appeals of their own making.

      Judge Tucker correctly saw a conflict of interest having recognized that Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille should have recused himself from a hearing on Mumia’s appeal rights given that Castille was the Philadelphia District Attorney when Mumia was earlier appealing his wrongful conviction.  By not recusing himself Castille was effectively denying Mumia an impartial hearing consistent with Mumia’s constitutional rights and the judicial principle of procedural fairness. 

       Earlier Castille had also effectively denied Mumia his right to have a judicial hearing before an impartial person in 1995 by bringing the original trial court judge Albert F. Sabo out of retirement to hear Mumia’s only evidentiary hearing in 1995.  This sordid judicial history makes Tucker’s decision to order a fair hearing a real departure from what Mumia has experienced up till now. 

       Judge Tucker’s decision is actually the first favourable ruling in the 37 year long legal battle and persecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Mumia himself recognizes this.  In a message recorded from prison Mumia commented on the decision by remarking that the proceeding which resulted in Judge Tucker’s ruling marked the first time he has ever been in front of a Pennsylvania judge who was not paid for by the other side meaning by Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police.

      Nonetheless, two days ago the State appealed Tucker’s decision in what is an obvious attempt to block an appeal by Mumia from going forward.  At a minimum this will drag things out and prolong Mumia’s ordeal.  But if the State does not manage to block an appeal from going forward the way is open for a possible new trial in which the suppressed, manufactured and bought evidence that was used to wrongly convict Mumia could be exposed.  In other words, Mumia’s legal team could get the opportunity to reargue their case for Mumia in court armed with uncovered evidence of how he was railroaded in the original trial that resulted in his wrongful conviction and death sentence that was later reduced to life in prison.

      It is also very significant that this important legal development was followed just two weeks later by another development which one of Mumia’s past legal advocates, Rachel Wolkenstein, believes could shed new light on the police-inspired frame-up of Mumia.  Namely, on January 10, 2019 six boxes of legal files relating to Mumia’s case were discovered in an obscure Philadelphia storage room.  This means that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s prior representations to the courts that it had produced the complete files for the courts to review in Mumia’s case has been proven wrong.  Indeed, nothing in the Commonwealth’s database on Mumia’s case showed the existence of these six boxes of files of evidence.

       Rachel Wolkenstein believes this revelation could expose the actions of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office and the Fraternal Order of Police in the handling of Mumia’s case.  This remains to be seen. 

       But there certainly is reason to believe the discovery of these files could unearth buried evidence helpful to Mumia’s case.  Logic and the history of this case would have it that this evidence would never have vanished as it did and remained unexposed in Discovery if it had served the purposes of the prosecution who remain hell bent on seeing Mumia die in prison.  In other words, this new evidence could expose prosecutorial misconduct of the type that has been so often exposed in the hundreds of cases in the U.S. in which the Innocence Project has succeeded in overturning wrongful convictions and having innocent and mostly persons of colour released from prison usually after many years of wrongful incarceration.

     So, given these two, related and potentially crucially significant developments in Mumia’s case there is now a compelling and obvious need for an immediate escalation of the international struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Renewed mobilizations in support of Mumia are arguably as, if not more, imperative than they have ever been precisely because if they are strong enough then they can lead to his exoneration especially subsequent to these developments.  This would spare Mumia from continuing to be subject to what amounts to a slow execution by having him remain incarcerated in a maximum security prison and persistently denied the level of medical treatment he so badly needs and deserves given his age and declining health.  We must act now to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.