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.

2001: I Absolutely Refuse To Support This War! 

U.S. Military Veterans Supporting Occupy Oakland 2011 General Strike *********************************************************************************** 

       At the outset of my presentation I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not a pacifist and never have been. And yet I absolutely refuse to support this war. There are many reasons why I refuse to support this war.

       To start with I cannot and will not join in unity, national or otherwise, with those who are waging this war and the financial elite who stand behind them. They do not represent my interests as a worker and never have and never will. They are not protecting my interests or the interests of workers in general while waging this war and there is no reason whatsoever to believe they ever will.

        One only needs to consider this fact in relation to the mass layoffs and the surging growth of unemployment that is happening as this war unfolds and ask what will they do in response? More specifically, will they tell the corporations implementing these mass layoffs not to lay workers off for the sake of achieving unity in support of the war effort? No. Will they ensure that these same corporations do not take advantage of the worsening economic crisis by permanently downsizing their workforces. Of course they will not.

       What they are willing to do is to use this war to promote their own agenda and attack civil liberties ostensibly to fight terrorism. One need only consider that while the bombs are raining down on Afghanistan, the Bush administration is ready to try to take advantage of the situation and his stronger political position due to it. He intends to do this by ramming through the U.S. Congress the passage of Fast Track trade legislation that will expedite the negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). And both the U.S. and Canadian governments are enacting measures that will sharply curtail civil liberties. Specifically, the Chretien government is determined to pass Bill C-36 into law. That legislation will give police powers of “preventive arrest” even in the absence of legal charges. It will also compel individuals to give self-incriminating evidence against suspected associates at a secret “investigative hearing”.

       George W. Bush’s exploitation of the war to secure legislation to facilitate the negotiation of the FTAA is especially significant and reflects a connection between this war and efforts to globalize free trade. This is particularly indicative of the fact that Corporate America’s interests guide U.S. foreign policy and the interests of Corporate America extend into Central Asia, including Afghanistan. This is in fact the objective, overriding reality within which this war must be situated if its full significance is to be fully grasped. And if one does this one inevitably comes up against the question of the massive and rich oil and natural gas reserves in Central Asia. These reserves can only be most cost effectively accessed, according to major oil lobbyists who publicly appeared before the U.S. Congress a couple of years ago, by way of a pipeline through Afghanistan to the coast of neighboring Pakistan.

      Just consider these facts taken directly from the same oil lobbyists’ testimony. They stated that Central Asia has 236 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves and over 60 billion barrels of known oil reserves. In view of this can anyone imagine this not looming large in the thinking of U.S. foreign policymaking circles with respect to the future of Central Asia and Afghanistan in particular? I certainly cannot. Furthermore, taking this into consideration makes even more sense if one considers that such a pipeline is viewed as critical to supplying Asia’s expanding oil and natural gas markets. And given that bringing such large quantities of oil and natural gas onto the market will inevitably increase global supplies and put downward pressure on oil and natural gas prices with obvious and far reaching macroeconomic effects, it follows that not accessing these large energy reserves will have the exact opposite effects on oil and natural gas prices, especially considering there is a well documented decline in the world’s oil supplies underway.

       Of course such considerations go completely unmentioned in the mass media in relation to this war. And the conclusion is never drawn that installing a U.S. and investor friendly government in Afghanistan would be the best way to secure cost effective access to these energy reserves. Instead we are being fed a carefully crafted and uncomplicated interpretation of what the reasons for this war are. And it is one that is not subject to serious, critical scrutiny. Serious, critical scrutiny would, for example, question why the U.S. and, even more so Russia, are backing the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. It would ask why anyone would back an organization that has a worldview essentially the same as the Taliban’s, particularly with respect to issues such as the severely oppressed position of women in Afghan society, and with a long track record of heavy involvement in Afghanistan’s heroin trade.

       Questions like this compel one to ask what the point of this war really is if the end result will be an Afghan government wholly, or in large part, led by another gang of Islamic reactionaries? I ask you, does this justify a war? And will putting the Northern Alliance in power constitute in any way just retribution for what took place on September 11? I certainly do not think so. Furthermore, I would argue that if we really want to effectively rid the world of the likes of the Taliban and the likeminded Islamic reactionaries who rule Iran, we should be doing everything possible to support the secular opposition in those countries. Incidentally, such opposition is especially strong in Iran and includes a potent labor movement. We will not rid the world of such reactionaries by supporting a war waged by those who do the bidding of Corporate America and who are drawn from the ranks of Corporate America like George W. Bush.

        To wrap up, there is one other issue that must be addressed. This is the matter of bringing the Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden and his accomplices to justice and whether a war is necessary to rid us of these people who, for many years, were directly allied to the U.S. To answer this question I simply want to note the fate that befell the person who was the world’s most wanted terrorist before Osama bin Laden. Namely, I am referring to Carlos the Jackal. Today he is locked up in a French maximum security prison serving a life sentence. And a protracted war did not have to be waged to capture him. I would also argue that the underlying issues that have been generating terrorist acts must, more than ever, be seriously and conclusively addressed. Most notably, the Palestinian question and the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. If the Palestinian question is effectively resolved in a way satisfactory to the Palestinians there is certain to be a dramatic and sharp decline in the incidence of terrorism. This is certain to occur because terrorism is fueled by a combination of both oppression and desperation and, arguably, no other nationality, with the possible exception of the Kurds, continues to experience circumstances as adverse and as desperate as the Palestinians.

Occupy Niagara: December 6, 2011 Speech on the Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre

On this tragic anniversary it is entirely appropriate for the Occupy movement to consider the events of 22 years ago in a more profound way than has been customarily the case. Marc Lepin's murderous actions were a response to the presence of women training to become engineers.

This begs the questions of what its larger meaning is and why we would gather outside a Federal Tory MP's office. The larger meaning of his actions is that they were directed against women who by their career choices were striving to challenge gender inequality and were therefore challenging male domination meaning patriarchy. This means that these women were not content to be consigned to a position of economic subordination due to their gender and exemplified by gender based job ghettos. Insofar as they were challenging patriarchy these women were also challenging the principal source of violence against women. That being a patriarchal society in which violence against women is for all intents and purposed a logical if not inevitable outcome. Violence against women is intrinsic to the patriarchal society we live in.

So how does this relate to the Harper government. Quite simply its policies with respect to women and efforts to achieve gender equality are anything but conducive to realizing gender equality and challenging the underlying source of violence against women.

The Harper government has obstructed the struggle for pay equity and in doing so has reinforced the existence of lower wage gender based job ghettos and the subordinate position of women in our economic system. Consistent with this the Harper government stopped funding court challenges which enabled women to bring equity cases before the court system. In addition and consistent with this it cancelled child care agreements with the provinces effectively undercutting a woman's ability to equally participate in the workforce again reinforcing male domination within it.

And it is no secret that the Harper government does not support reproductive choice for women and has only held back restricting it because of a preponderance of public support for reproductive choice. In short it follows that when it comes to the problem of violence against women this government comprises an integral part of the problem and addressing the problem of violence against women is synonymous with standing up against the Harper government's policies and standing with women in their struggle for gender equality as a prerequisite for eradicating violence against women and manifestations of misogyny such as that which occurred 22 years ago in Montreal.