Niagara Transit System Submission

    I have asked for the opportunity to be able to speak to you because I am passionately opposed to your plan to add 154 diesel buses to the Niagara Transit System.  From a climate perspective it is most reprehensible given that we face an accelerating climate crisis that is not being addressed with anything approaching the seriousness that it so clearly demands.

       But I’m not here to address that.  I’m here to address the fact that the diesel fumes that will continuously be emitted from the 154 diesel buses are highly carcinogenic.  The International Agency for Research into Cancer (IARC) unequivocally accepts that exposure to diesel fumes significantly increases the risk of developing lung cancer.  It also maintains there is a plausible link between exposure to diesel fumes and other types of cancer; particularly bladder cancer.  Diesel fumes also cause serious throat irritation and are particularly harmful to anyone with asthma.

       This means that your planned purchase of these diesel buses will directly put at risk those workers who will drive them or otherwise work with them and, to a lesser extent, anyone who is frequently around these buses.

        I speak from first-hand experience.  I and other advocates who have handled WSIB occupational disease claims have been successful in filing claims for workers who developed lung cancer due to exposure to diesel fumes.  As a result, those corporation who exposed the workers who developed lung cancer due to their exposure at work to diesel fumes were made liable for the serious harm done to the health of the workers in question.

       Your decision to buy these diesel buses indicates that no one considered the hazardous health effects of exposure to diesel fumes.  Furthermore, it’s apparent that no one has any grasp of how costly successful claims for lung or bladder cancer can be especially if the affected worker dies as a result and has either a surviving spouse and or dependents.  A surviving spouse will be entitled to a surviving spouse’s pension for life, all at the expense of the employer.

       This means that the decision to purchase these diesel buses, based upon up front purchasing costs, was poorly informed with respect to the potential costs and displayed reckless disregard for the potential consequences for the workers who will drive them and any others who will be exposed to their cancer-causing diesel fumes.

      The decision to purchase these diesel buses should be abandoned.  If it is not, I will welcome any opportunity I get to represent those who will be its victims and relentlessly fight to win their claims with maximum costs to the employer.  You.

 

Speech at June 1, 2023 Injured Workers Day in Toronto

 

       To begin with I bring you greetings and solidarity from Sue James in Peterborough who is the principal spokesperson for the Occupational Disease Reform Alliance (ODRA).  What is ODRA?  It is a coalition of occupational disease victims, the widows of occupational disease victims, trade unionists and workplace health and safety activists.

      The ODRA was formed in response to the emergence of clusters of occupational disease cases in cities across Ontario resulting in the deaths of large numbers of workers.  One of these clusters was located in the city I am from, St. Catharines, where dozens of workers employed by GM died of diseases like mesothelioma and lung cancer due to prolonged exposure to asbestos in their workplace.  For me, this has meant representing workers dying of these diseases and meeting with them in cancer wards of hospitals, hospices and in their homes after they were sent home to allow them to die in familiar surroundings with family members by their side.

      My experiences are only too familiar to the members of ODRA.  Collectively these experiences, fuel our activism and our outrage at the murder of workers by employers.  But what particularly enrages us is the knowledge that only a small percentage of the workers who develop occupational diseases will file a WSIB claim in response and get their claims allowed.  This means they are being denied justice.  This is what must change.

      This means that the legislation pertaining to workers compensation and the WSIB’s Operational Policies must be changed to finally enable the allowance of far more occupational disease claims at the WSIB.  This can be done.  It has been done with respect to Firefighters and, as a result, the number of occupational disease claims successfully filed for Firefighters has substantially increased.  The same thing must happen for all Ontario workers.

      That is why ODRA has four demands:

1.     Award compensation for workplace diseases that far exceed the disease rate occurring in the general community population.

2.     Award compensation for cancers associated with working with cancer causing chemicals and other agents rated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 and or Group 2 carcinogens.  This means making a presumption that they are occupational in nature.

3.     Award compensation for diseases where workers were exposed to several carcinogens and other chemicals that may promote cancer development or enhance the toxic effects.

4.     The WSIB abandon its impossible search for absolute certainty and consider multiple sources of scientific evidence available including medical and community and worker-based research.

If these demands are met the situation will change and it will change for the better delivering a lot more justice for workers with occupational disease.

One last thing must be said.  Over a year ago the ONDP tabled Private Members Bill 125 in the Ontario legislature which, if passed, would make the changes we advocate the law.  We call on the ONDP to re-introduce Bill 125 in the legislature and we demand that the Ford government fully support it.  If it does. we will finally see more justice for workers with occupational diseases because the WSIB will be legally compelled to change its Operational Policies to incorporate our demands.

      Our fight on these issues has been a long, hard one. But we are determined to continue it until we win.  We will not fight to compromise with those who won’t hold corporations that murder workers to account.  We will only fight to win. Fight to win!

 Letter to the St. Catharines Standard

     The resumption of truck assembly at GM Oshawa (GM back to making trucks in Oshawa) is a good news story, up to a point. What was not been reported anywhere is the fact that the cessation of assembly operations in Oshawa in 2019 facilitated GM’s exiting almost an entire workforce which enjoyed relatively high wages, good employee benefits and pensions. This enabled GM to replace a relatively higher cost workforce with one with much lower wages, fewer benefits and inferior pensions costing GM only about half of what the pre-2019 workforce cost. The closure and reopening of assembly operations in Oshawa enabled GM to cut its labour costs by about in half all with the enthusiastic support of Unifor.

     This provides reason for skepticism. But there is even more reason to be skeptical about these events. Namely, this is not the first time GM has shut down operations at one of its plants only to start them up again with a drastically lower cost labour force. GM has done this before at a UAW organized plant in Michigan. In view of this, one cannot help but suspect that GM very strategically took a page out of its existing playbook and successfully executed the same tactic in Oshawa to slash its labour costs. By doing so GM showed what it can and will do to impose its will.

Bruce R. Allen   

 

Foundry Workers and Cancer

        For a long time, asbestos stood out as being the focal point, as a carcinogen (cancer causing agent), that Foundry workers were routinely exposed to. Quite a few WSIB claims for mesothelioma, lung cancer or asbestosis were allowed due to exposure to it. A week ago the WSIB allowed a lung cancer claim for a recently deceased worker who was employed at the Affinia/ITT Aimco Foundry that was located on Berryman Ave. in St. Catharines. However, it was not allowed on the basis of the worker's limited exposure to asbestos. It was allowed due to his decades of exposure to silica dust even though the worker had smoked for about half of his life. Silica crystals are a carcinogen. They not only can cause lung cancer. They elevate the risk of gastro-intestinal cancer as well.

 

       Thousands of workers were employed at the GM Foundry on Glendale Ave. which closed in 1995 after approximately 40 years of operation. To my knowledge not one worker in that Foundry who died of lung or gastro-intestinal cancer ever had a claim filed, let alone allowed, due to exposure to anything other than asbestos. Many of these ex-Foundry workers are still alive. Some are still working at GM. If you know any of them who have or have had lung or gastro-intestinal cancer I want to talk to them because the GM Foundry was filled with silica, including airborne silica, as well as a lesser amount of asbestos. GM must be made accountable to its Foundry workers who died or will die due to lung or gastro-intestinal cancer as a result of exposure to silica dust.

Commentary on Paul Demers’ Report on Occupational Cancer in Ontario

        Early this year Paul Demers issued his anticipated report Using Scientific Evidence and Principles to Help determine the Work-Relatedness of Cancer.   Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development commissioned the report.  It provides critically important insights into what Paul Demers says is “the extremely large gap between the estimated burden of occupational cancer and submitted claims” to Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).  These insights are damnable.  They highlight the fact that the seriousness of the problem of occupational cancer in Ontario is greatly underappreciated.

        A large portion of the blame for this extremely large gap cited by Demers lies with the Ontario’s servile medical profession.  Specifically, his report stresses that medical students in this country receive little training in occupational health.  The result is a serious lack of detection and reporting by medical professionals of patients having occupational or work-related diseases. 

       Demers correctly asserts that improvements in this training would increase the number of workers being compensated for occupational diseases.  Improvements in training would specifically end the current situation where the onus of recognition of when a patient’s disease is occupational in nature effectively falls on the patient meaning the afflicted worker.  In view of this, it is little wonder that on average in Ontario there are only about 170 allowed WSIB claims for cancer annually and a large majority are asbestos related, according to Demers.

       The WSIB shares a lot of the blame for this large gap between the estimated burden of occupational cancer and the number of claims filed at the WSIB for it.  The WSIB facilitated this gap over time by reducing its internal scientific capacity to address occupational disease issues.  Paul Demers points out that the WSIB has no research capacity in this regard making the WSIB incapable of investigating the problem of cancer in high risk industries.  The WSIB is likewise incapable of investigating occupational disease clusters like those exposed at a General Electric plant in Peterborough and in the rubber industry in Kitchener-Waterloo.   It also turned a blind eye to a cancer cluster in a closed GM plant in St. Catharines.

       The WSIB similarly deserves a failing grade because it almost always focuses on establishing whether a single carcinogen is the cause of a worker’s cancer disregarding the possible impact of exposures to multiple carcinogens.  Demers highlights this by correctly emphasizing that exposure to multiple carcinogens can have a synergistic effect.  This results in a greater effect on a worker than the sum of the solitary effects of the exposure to each carcinogen.  This is so important because, as he notes, workers are rarely exposed to just one workplace carcinogen.  The cluster at the General Electric plant in Peterborough made this very clear.

        The cumulative outcome of these failures by the medical profession and the WSIB is a self-induced blindness to reality about occupational cancer in Ontario.  Cancers that are occupational in nature are not being recognized as occupational in nature on a vast scale as a result.  Untold numbers of Ontario workers have died and continue to die from cancer that is occupational in nature without knowing it and being compensated for it.

       Yet, despite this, the Occupational Cancer Research Centre, which Paul Demers is associated with, estimates that approximately 3000 cancers are diagnosed per year in Ontario due to exposure to sixteen of the most well known carcinogens.  The number of claims for occupational cancer have dramatically increased since 2005.  The statistics now show that over twice as many Ontario workers die from occupational cancers as from traumatic injuries.

        These statistics might lead to a conclusion that the situation is in fact improving with respect to workers being compensated for occupational cancer.  But, to the contrary, this report’s revelations constitute abundant reason to believe the problem of workers dying due to occupational cancer is getting worse.  The likelihood of this alone indicates that the WSIB has abysmally failed workers in Ontario who have had and continue to have occupational cancer.  There should be outrage across Ontario in response.

       There is yet another big reason why there should be outrage.  This reason is not addressed in Demers’ report.  Namely, the huge failure to compensate the victims of occupational cancer in Ontario through the WSIB means that the enormous costs associated with their illnesses is wrongly being born by Ontario’s healthcare system.  In other words, Ontario’s taxpayers are bearing these costs not the corporations responsible for workers developing occupational cancer due to their exposure to workplace carcinogens.  These corporations have effectively been getting away with murder for decades with the taxpaying public picking up the tab.

        Paul Demers’ report on occupational cancer in Ontario should make it clear that this must be stopped and stopped in no uncertain terms.  The corporations who bear responsibility for the illnesses and deaths of countless workers due to occupational cancer in Ontario must be made to pay the costs for it.  The WSIB’s negligence must end by forcing it to do whatever is required to make this happen.

Bruce R. Allen is a paralegal based in St. Catharines, Ontario.

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.

A Reflection on Unifor Leaving the CLC      Several months ago the National Executive Board (NEB) of Unifor violated Unifor’s constitution by holding a conference call to debate and vote on a motion to withdraw from the Canadian Labour Congress. (CLC)  This action violated the union’s constitution which it makes it clear that such a decision can only be made by the union’s Canadian Council.

     Significant opposition erupted in response to the NEB’s action.   Opposition was particularly evident in Unifor locals based in southern Ontario comprised mostly of autoworkers and auto parts workers.  Out of this opposition came a challenge to the NEB action by way of the filing charges with Unifor’s Public Review Board.To the surprise of many the Public Review Board ruled that the NEB’s action in withdrawing the union from the CLC was in fact done in violation of the union’s constitution.  The NEB’s action stood exposed as illegitimate and illegal.  This was unprecedented.

     Unprecedented and illegitimate though the decision was the NEB did not respond by doing the right thing and reversing the decision.  The immediate response was deafening silence and not the slightest acknowledgement of any wrongdoing.  The national leadership's formal response was to have the issue of the withdrawal from the CLC dealt with at the Unifor Canadian Council meeting in Halifax in mid-August.  It was ratified there with relatively little opposition.

      The ratification of this arbitrary decision was entirely predictable.  It was entirely predictable because no recommendation from a National President has been voted down at a Unifor or CAW national council meeting since 1992.  This is because these councils are effectively rubber stamps designed to give whatever decision or course of action the national leadership wants an appearance of having the support of the entire union.  It shows that Unifor like the CAW before it effectively functions like an anti-democratic, one party state.

      The consequences of this withdrawal from the CLC are evident in labour councils and provincial federations of labour across Canada.  Unifor has been frozen out of these bodies and vilified.  This has been particularly evident at the Niagara Regional Labour Council.  Its absence has had a crippling effect on these organizations and has left Unifor marginalized except when the Liberal Party finds it expedient to grant it status as a “stakeholder” when it serves their purposes.

       In this context Unifor dubiously proclaims ad nauseum that the CLC needs to be fixed.  But its leadership is unwilling to try to fix it from the inside and will not acknowledge that it can never be “fixed” from the outside.  Furthermore, the actions which brought us to where we are now illustrate that there is lots to be fixed in Unifor.  Sadly, the prospects for fixing Unifor are bleak at best and arguably non-existent given that it is an intrinsically undemocratic organization ruled by an entrenched, privileged and self-perpetuating bureaucracy.  Contemplation of the need to build new labour organizations from the base up has consequently become a practical necessity.

Commuted Value:  Context and Implications

       In their 2012 contract negotiations Ford then GM convinced Unifor to give retiring workers the option of taking the commuted value or lump sum equivalent of their defined benefit pensions instead of receiving a monthly defined benefit pension for the rest of their and their spouses’ lifetimes.  Since then a growing proportion of the workforce at GM have decided to take that option.

        Many workers see no problem with this.  They welcome getting a choice between the immediate payment of a large lump sum of money and a defined monthly pension for the rest of their life and the life of a surviving spouse.  But little is being said about the many problems that develop when growing numbers of workers opt to take the commuted value of their defined benefit pensions.  The most readily obvious is the possibility that the lump sum will be quickly spent leaving a retired worker and his or her spouse with no retirement income beyond very inadequate government pensions.

        Other less obvious but very real problems that arise when growing numbers of workers opt to take the commuted value of their defined benefit pensions.  One is that choosing this option generates a big windfall for employers who get to unload the “legacy costs” associated with defined benefit pensions.  Indeed, Unifor facilitated this growing windfall for them evidently without getting anything in return and later reinforced what’s now a trend rejecting defined benefit pensions by agreeing to defined contribution “pensions” for new hires.

       A less obvious problem when growing numbers of retiring workers take the commuted value option is that choosing it typically goes together with another choice.  The other choice is to start working for a new employer in order to continue to earn a wage which very often is a minimum wage or little better. 

      What’s wrong with this?  What’s wrong is that autoworkers fought in 1950 to win defined benefit pensions so that they have an income for life sufficient to live on without having to work.  It means the commuted value option is facilitating a situation where a great many “retired” autoworkers see a financial need to work for years and years after leaving the auto industry.  Significantly, this compounds the effect of the Ontario legislation that ended mandatory retirement at age 65 because it is similarly conducive to workers working till they die greatly benefiting employers.

      The commuted value option is also having the unintended effect of severing large numbers of autoworkers’ relationship with the union that first negotiated defined benefit pensions in 1950.  Workers who take the commuted value of their defined benefit pensions rather than a monthly pension benefit have no option to have retired members’ union dues deducted from a monthly pension benefit.  Absent this very few workers opting to take the commuted value make the effort necessary to go to a union hall and pay union dues.   Consequently, they stop being members in good standing of their union. Thus, taking the commuted value option usually becomes synonymous with effectively ceasing to be part of the life of the union.

       This is a prescription for the eventual disappearance of viable retired workers chapters.  This is shown by the fact that in Unifor nearly every functioning retired workers chapter is comprised of autoworkers with defined benefit pensions.  Eliminate defined benefit pensions and retired workers chapters will vanish because defined benefit pensions are effectively the lifeblood of retired workers chapters.  Furthermore, insofar as retired workers chapters are invaluable reservoirs of history and experience within a union like Unifor that history and experience will stop being readily available to active workers who could benefit from it.

     These things define the context and implications of the commuted value option in auto.  They show that its widespread acceptance in Canada’s auto industry is consistent with and conducive to the ongoing retreat of Unifor as a social and economic force drawing its strength from both active and retired members and which should be focused on building on past gains like defined benefit pensions not helping them to disappear.   

Unifor Embracing the Ontario NDP?

         At last year’s Ontario Federation of Labour Convention Unifor found itself at odds with almost all the other unions present in not favouring unequivocal support of the New Democratic Party (NDP).  Yet, barely more than half a year later, Unifor finds itself effectively in line with those other unions in Ontario because its friends leading Ontario’s governing Liberal Party are tanking in the polls just three weeks before the June 7 provincial election.  Unifor is consequently being forced to come to terms with the fact that presently the Ontario NDP alone can stop the election of a majority government in Ontario led by Tory leader Doug Ford.

         That said a meaningful embrace of the Ontario NDP by Unifor would, in any case, effectively require that a lot of recent history be flushed down an Orwellian memory hole.  Indeed, there is nearly 20 years of this history starting with the CAW’s initial embrace of strategic voting at the end of the 1990s. 

        Some of this history would be very hard to forget such as when CAW President Buzz Hargrove gave a beaming Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin a CAW jacket in front of loudly applauding delegates to a CAW Council meeting.  Less well remembered was the time shortly afterwards when Buzz Hargrove introduced his good friend and then Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty to another loudly cheering crowd at a CAW Council meeting in Port Elgin.  On that occasion Hargrove declared that Dalton McGunity was “doing a great job of giving good government to the people of Ontario.”  Much less well remembered was how the next CAW President Ken Lewenza openly supported right-wing Liberal Sandra Pupatelo in her unsuccessful campaign to succeed Dalton McGunity as Ontario Premier.

        During that long, sordid history of embracing strategic voting and leaders and would be leaders of the Liberal Party the union’s relationship with the New Democratic Party, which had once seemed unbreakable, was strained at best and hostile at worst.  Relations with unions which remained steadfastly loyal to the NDP were similarly problematic largely owing to the warming relationship between the CAW and then Unifor with the Liberal Party.

                                       What Now?

      The question immediately posed by the situation Unifor now faces in Ontario is whether these inconvenient truths about the past two decades can or will disappear down an Orwellian memory hole, particularly within Unifor, and be conveniently forgotten as if they had never existed?  The answer to that question is almost certainly no.

       The legacy of this history is certain to endure because this alignment with the NDP is limited to Ontario, momentary and specific to a situation which will cease to exist after the provincial election on June 7.  The hard truth of the matter is that although Unifor is ditching its Liberal friends in Ontario it is not about to ditch the Liberal Party elsewhere let alone renew the type of close relationship it had with the NDP before the late 1990s.  This is principally because the ongoing love affair between the national leadership of Unifor and the national leadership of the Liberal Party is evidently not being affected by the current, unique political moment in Ontario

       Faced with a politically weak, almost marginalized NDP federally together with the prospect of a 2019 federal contest for power between Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Andrew Scheer`s Tories Unifor is consequently certain to shun the federal NDP just as Unifor shunned the Ontario NDP until just weeks ago.  The politics of convenience will trump focused political consistency.  Likewise, nary a thought will be given to abandoned ideas about fundamentally changing society that were implicit in the forgotten CAW commitment to what it referred to as social movement unionism and which were never seriously promoted by the union within the NDP.

        That mask is not just off.  It has been cynically discarded.  Opportunism prevails.   Unifor’s objective now is not to fundamentally change society.  Its objective is to be embedded in the corridors of power alongside the representatives of Capital as a “stakeholder``, as it has been in the current, doomed NAFTA negotiations.  That objective was first clearly set out when Unifor was founded.  Achieving it remains the order of the day.  

        Analyzing, exposing and challenging the agenda accompanying that objective will be a monumental task.  But analyzing, exposing and challenging it at every turn is imperative and must be consciously carried out as part of a much larger effort to forge a fighting labour movement in this country.

Unifor Holds First Townhall on Trade

       Close to one hundred people attended the first of a series of People’s Trade Agenda Town Halls sponsored by Unifor.  The event was held in Hamilton, Ontario on April 20, 2018.  The Council of Canadians co-sponsored the townhall.  The event featured speeches by Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians and Angelo DiCaro of Unifor’s Research Department.

       Maude Barlow was the main attraction.  This was reflected in the composition of the participants.  About three quarters of those in attendance appeared to be members and supporters of the Council of Canadians who had shown up in large measure to see Maude Barlow speak.  The turnout by Unifor members was small. 

      The most notable thing with respect to the participation in the townhall was who was not present.  Representatives of other unions were nowhere to be seen.  Both the Hamilton and District Labour Council and the Canadian Labour Congress were conspicuous in their absence.  So were representatives of the United Steelworkers.  This brutally demonstrated the consequences of Unifor’s departure from the Canadian Labour Congress.

        Unifor deserves credit for taking up the trade issue and seeking to engage as many people as possible about it particularly at this critical juncture when a revived Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is about to be implemented, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being renegotiated and Trump is erecting trade barriers.  Nonetheless, the impact of Unifor’s effort to address trade agreements is doomed to be negligible if the rest of the labour movement is going to deliberately stay away it did in Hamilton.  This, in turn, highlights the compelling need to end the split between Unifor and the rest of the labour movement in Canada. 

       This split must end.  It must end if for no other reason than to make it possible to build a movement capable of blocking trade agreements like the TPP and NAFTA insofar as these trade agreements are consciously designed to meet the needs of Capital via provisions synonymous with their being corporate bills of rights. 

      What is more, a powerful movement against these trade agreements must not only be built in this country.  It must be built together and simultaneously with efforts to build movements that resist these trade agreements in the U. S. and Mexico.  In short, there is a compelling need to forge what amounts to a powerful, multinational movement to stop these trade agreements and the agenda they are designed to facilitate.

        Discussion of the need for such a multinational movement and how to build it was lacking at the townhall in Hamilton.  It is imperative that the need for such a movement be seriously discussed at future Unifor townhalls and that the rest of the labour movement both participate in those events and support such movement building efforts regardless of Unifor’s relationship with the CLC.  The glaring need for such unity in action both within Canada and across North America demands nothing less.  In this context rank and file labour activists, local union leaders and community-based activists must boldly take the initiative by being at the forefront of efforts to forge this unity in action whenever possible and on the largest scale possible.

Injured Workers and the Austerity Agenda in Ontario

Speech to the Ontario Common Front in Niagara on January 12, 2013


Injured workers, their plight and their issues are rarely if ever
considered in relationship to the global austerity agenda and the
ongoing fight against it. Yet what is happening in Ontario
reveals there is compelling reason why they should be.

An analysis of what is happening at the Workplace Safety and
Insurance Board (WSIB) in Ontario lays bare the obvious fact that the
trajectory of the changes being made at the WSIB to the overwhelming
disadvantage of injured workers parallel the trajectory of the
austerity agenda involving a process in which wealth is
systematically, brazenly being redistributed away from labour and
into the pockets of those who own and control capital.

So how is this evident in Ontario’s workers compensation
system? It is personified in a former bank executive named
David Marshall who was hired by Ontario’s Liberal government
to eradicate the WSIB’s so called unfunded liability; the
projected gap between revenue going into the WSIB from
employer premiums paid into the system and the projected
benefits to be paid out to injured workers by the WSIB.
Significantly this gap was caused by major cuts to the
premiums employers pay into the system. Yet Marshall’s
mandate is not to eliminate the gap by adjusting employer
premiums upward but by instituting a multitude of measures
slashing the various benefits paid out to injured workers. In
effect injured workers are being made to bear the burden of a
crisis created by concerted government efforts over the past two
decades to line employers’ pockets by slashing the WSIB
premiums they pay. This exemplifies wealth redistribution in
line with the austerity agenda.

The logical result is a more lucrative business climate
for employers causing declining living standards for
injured workers and more widespread poverty among them
as well as cuts in WSIB costs via intensified efforts to get injured
workers off of benefits and back to work with less and less
regard for injured workers’ physical wellbeing particularly by
employers.

One could go on at length with examples of how this is
unfolding. It is sufficient to limit onself to touching on one
pivotal example. Namely the dwindling compensation paid to
injured workers for permanent injuries.

Workers have gone from having a pre-1990 system of
pensions for life to compensate for injuries for life to a very
inferior system of Non Economic Loss (NEL) awards worth only
a fraction of what the pre-1990 pensions were worth and from
there to WSIB Operational Policy changes making it harder to
get NEL awards and now to policies making it much harder to
get increases in those awards to compensate for significant
deterioration in the condition of permanent injuries and finally
to unprecedented efforts to reduce the size and cost of NEL
awards ostensibly by taking into account non-occupational age
related changes in our bodies regardless of whether they were a
health problem prior to an injury or not.

Simply stated these changes slash the costs of compensating
workers’ for permanent injuries in order to help resolve the
fraudulent funding crisis of the compensation system caused by
government efforts to cut employer WSIB premiums.

To sum up the obvious implication of this one example of
wealth redistribution towards Capital is that the fight for just
compensation for injured workers must be more than integral to
the fight against the austerity agenda. It must be front and
centre in that fight. In waging it we clearly must fight to win.

Camaro Blues

GM’s mid-December announcement that the next generation Camaro will be produced in Lansing, Michigan not in Oshawa is cause for serious reflection among Canadian autoworkers. This relocation of production is simply a corporate restructuring event with GM is consolidating its rear wheel car production in one location with the exception of the Corvette.

Such restructuring events are hardly new. Recognizing this is a prerequisite for grasping its significance.

In 1995 GM engaged in the same kind of restructuring in St. Catharines by closing its foundry operation employing 1800 workers and consolidating foundry operations in Defiance, Ohio. Such downsizing decisions yield big cost savings and put the boot to the CAW by massively eliminating jobs. GM can easily do this because the free trade agreements which gutted the 1965 Auto Pact’s domestic production requirements were designed to facilitate unimpeded corporate restructuring and capital mobility.

Corporate restructuring is intrinsic to global capitalism. It defines the context for this event and reveals the theatrical nature of the CAW leadership’s anger and indignation in response to it never mind their protests at being shown a lack of respect. GM similarly blindsided the CAW by suddenly announcing the St. Catharines foundry closure decision.

The similarities don’t end there. That decision raised serious questions about the long term viability of the GM St. Catharines operations setting in motion their dramatic downsizing and continuing vulnerability. Likewise, ending Oshawa’s Camaro production means losing nearly a third of vehicle production and endangers the remaining operations by making them more costly. This underlies the CAW demand that GM compensate for the lost Camaro production with new equivalent work.

But this CAW demand is problematic. GM has repeatedly said it has no plans for new investments in Canada. These statements coupled with the Camaro decision call into question GM’s commitment to its Oshawa operations. Even if GM becomes receptive and allocates new work to Oshawa experience consistently shows new work will be more capital intensive employing far fewer workers. Furthermore, experience shows GM will exact a heavy price for new replacement work. Since the mid-1990s GM has successfully demanded sweeping CAW contract concessions particularly at the local level in return for new investment.

This practice of tying new investment to contract concessions has decimated the union’s strength and gutted decades of historic collective bargaining gains. The concessionary 2012 GM – CAW collective agreements heightened that regression and were not even tied to new investments.

In effect, the Camaro decision shows the CAW’s endless contract concessions have hardly secured a future for GM workers here and raises the specter of future concessions. Consequently, the immediate question facing GM workers in Canada is whether we will give more.

A larger political question is posed by the use of the public funds GM got in 2009 to avoid bankruptcy, and by the prospect of the Canadian government eventually selling its GM stock at a loss entirely at taxpayers’ expense. Should workers not see this as reason for taking control of the means of production in order to meet human need?

The CAW - CEP Merger: A Political Relection

The approaching merger between the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) will create the largest private sector union in Canada with over 300,000 members employed in 22 sectors of the economy. As such it has the potential to profoundly affect the political direction of both the labour movement in this country and ultimately the political future of Canada.

Accordingly these things pose the immediate and unanswered question of what the political direction of the new union will be. This in turn brings into focus the deafening silence within the CAW concerning this question and precisely how it will be answered.

The only thing that is known for certain is that the question will be answered by the delegates to the founding convention of the new union expected next summer. That said there are a number of related and as yet unanswered questions. Will the delegates be presented with a political policy paper formulated in advance by staff representatives which sets out the political direction of the new mega union and then be expected to rubber stamp it? We just do not know. Or will there be a genuinely democratic and wide open debate where different political positions will be presented and chosen from. Again we just do not know and quite reprehensibly no one is giving the membership of both organizations any clue.

From a historical perspective both the silence surrounding the question of the political direction of the new union and the question of how it will be answered should really come as no surprise. The silence must be viewed as symptomatic of the lack of democracy intrinsic to the CAW at national level in particular and to the fact that the first question is very awkward for both unions within the context of the upcoming merger. This is the case precisely because the current political directions of the CAW and the CEP are irreconcilably at odds particularly with respect to the New Democratic Party (NDP). Indeed in that respect they are like oil and water. One position will prevail and the other is going to be discarded meaning that the political legacy of the union whose political direction does not prevail will disappear into an Orwellian like memory hole.

History again makes all of this abundantly clear and predictable. For the past two decades the CEP has been formally affiliated to the NDP. Consistent with this the CEP has actively participated in the life of the NDP including in its most recent contest to elect a federal leader. It supported the unsuccessful leadership bid of Brian Topp revealing that it has no inclination to shift the political direction of the NDP to the left.

The CEP's loyalty to the NDP and its leadership has in fact been unequivocal over the years regardless of the policies of the NDP leadership. This was most vividly on display in Ontario in the mid-1990s. Back then the CEP was one of the “Pink Paper” unions in the Ontario Federation of Labour which objectively sided with Ontario NDP Premier Bob Rae's government during the fight against its anti-union Social Contract.

In stark contrast to the CEP the CAW has been anything but politically consistent particularly with respect to its relationship to the NDP. At the time of the fight against the Bob Rae government's Social Contract waged principally by Ontario's public sector unions the CAW commendably positioned itself clearly to the left of the Ontario NDP by strongly supporting the public sector unions. But that positioning to the left of the NDP proved to be relatively short lived. As the 1990s drew to a close the CAW made a sharp turn to the right by embracing strategic voting and warming up to the Liberal Party and subsequently to Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty in particular. This orientation towards the Liberals particularly but not exclusively in Ontario has continued to this day effectively making a mockery of its past criticism of the NDP from the left. Indeed CAW National President Ken Lewenza has gone so far as to openly campaign with McGuinty in the last provincial election and responded to McGuinty's decision to step down as Premier and Ontario Liberal leader by praising McGuinty's government as one which ostensibly improved the lives of many Ontarians. Such praise came in the immediate wake of the McGuinty government's launch of a brutal assault on public sector unions and austerity measures clearly worse than those pursued by the Ontario NDP government of Bob Rae. It is also noteworthy that in the course of this evolution of the CAW's politics the union's formal affiliation with the NDP was terminated.

But now in the context of the upcoming merger the CAW appears likely to find itself affiliated with the NDP once again. Indeed developments within the context of the merger point in that direction. The CEP clearly appears to be fully intent on continuing to be affiliated with the NDP as the appearance of Federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair at its just concluded convention in Quebec City vividly demonstrated. CEP leaders and activists evidently want no part of the kind of relationship the CAW has had with the Liberals in recent years.
By contrast no one in the CAW appears to be working to maintain its defacto relationship with the Liberal Party and a policy of strategic voting in elections. All of this means that it will be CAW leaders and activists who have adhered to the CAW recent political positions who will be the ones depositing their politics in memory hole and be strongly encouraged to become born again NDP supporters if not members.

These things, in turn, pose additional unanswered questions. If the new union does affiliate with the NDP the next question becomes one of the nature of its relationship to the NDP. Will the new union continue the political legacy of the CEP which amounts to all but unconditional support to the NDP leadership and its policies and making little if any effort to compel the NDP to turn to the left? Significantly if it does this will also mean that the new union will be continuing the legacy of the CAW within the NDP prior to the crisis in their relationship prompted by the Social Contract and since. That legacy being one of essentially accepting the direction set out by the NDP leadership and making little if any effort to push the NDP to the left and even assisting the NDP leadership in marginalizing those who would have the NDP make a turn to the left.

These things pose real challenges for the few people truly on the left within both the CAW and the CEP. Faced with the growing prospect of a new mega union affiliated to the NDP that is supportive of its current leadership and political direction it is imperative not to block affiliation with the NDP because it will mean burying the CAW's embrace of the Liberal Party. But it will also be imperative to simultaneously do two other quite different things. One is to initiate a no holes barred assessment of and debate about the current and future political engagement by the new union. The other will be to wage a political struggle within the new union. This would challenge any perpetuation of the CEP's unwavering support of the NDP establishment and the inevitable efforts of the leadership of both unions to suppress agitation to get the new union to make a decisive political turn to the left involving a meaningful embrace of the struggle against capitalist austerity and for the fundamental transformation of society.

Two Tier Healthcare in Canadian Auto

Well attended meetings of GM of Canada (GMC) retired workers were held in early August to inform them about the proposed settlement between them and GM of Canada regarding the future of retiree healthcare benefits. The settlement will put in place the Healthcare Trust (HCT) agreed to in the 2009 contract negotiations. The administrators of the HCT will oversee and allocate these retired workers' healthcare benefits.

The retirees listened with concern as they were told that with the funding GM is providing to the HCT benefits would be cut to between 77% and 84% of their current level if the fund is to be sustained indefinitely. Failing that the fund will eventually run out of money meaning all healthcare benefits will end. At the time of this writing it remains to be seen what benefits will be cut and to what extent.

A principal justification cited for establishing the HCT is that it will sustain healthcare benefits if GM goes bankrupt. But the creation of the HCT makes it even more unlikely that will ever happen. GM of Canada President Kevin Williams made this rather obvious earlier this year when he stated that the HCT will reduce Canadian labour costs by over $16.00 an hour. This revelation explains why GM has repeatedly told the CAW that future investments in Canada are contingent upon the HCT being finalized. It also showed once again how GM has successfully used its control over investment decisions to extract endless contract concessions from an acquiescent CAW.

The immediate effects of the finalization of the HCT will not just involve big new cuts to retiree healthcare benefits. The most significant effect will be the establishment of two tier healthcare benefits at GM of Canada. Active workers will not endure the cuts that will come with the HCT meaning their healthcare benefits will remain as they are while retiree healthcare benefits get sharply reduced. This two tier arrangement is especially devastating for retirees because they need their healthcare benefits more than active workers. It is also morally indefensible because GM retirees fought the contract battles that got the healthcare benefits all GM workers enjoy.

The consequences do not end there. Retired GMC workers will be hit by these new cuts just as they are experiencing steadily declining real incomes due to the loss of cost of living adjustments on their pensions and due to the healthcare benefit concessions negotiated in 2008 and 2009. Increasing financial hardship will go hand in hand with the indignity of having healthcare benefits very inferior to those active workers get.

The finalization of the HCT is also bad news for the continually shrinking active workforce at GM. With the HCT they have another reason to put off retirement for as long as they can because retirement will mean living with less than it did before. GM workers who ``retire`` will become even more inclined than they already are to get a new job to compensate for their steadily declining retirement incomes.

Another thing must be understood. Two tier healthcare benefits at GMC mark yet another break from pattern agreements in the Canadian auto industry. There will be no two tier healthcare benefits at Chrysler of Canada because the HCT there is much better funded. Nor will there be two tier healthcare benefits at Ford of Canada because there is no HCT there. So GM of Canada retirees are on their own in this regard. They need mobilize around the 2012 contract negotiations to compel their leadership to negotiate gains elsewhere sufficient to make up for the big cuts they are about to endure. Active workers at GMC must be in full support of them.