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Northern Lights is a monthly ezine, as well as a column that appears in Socialist Action newspaper, from Socialist Action/Ligue pour L'Action Socialiste. For an archive of Northern Lights postings, and other articles and statements, check out our News & Views page.
CAW moving to the right ... of the NDP
Foolishly, the Ontario New Democratic Party suspended his membership on March 4. Foolishly, Canadian Auto Workers' Union President Buzz Hargrove refuses to fight the suspension and now urges his union to sever ties to the labour-based NDP.
About 9,100 teachers, counsellors and librarians, represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees' Union, who struck Ontario's colleges for 19 days in March succeeded in making their point, even if they have yet to win the argument.
Reminiscent of the gross sexist harassment suffered by women coal miners as depicted in the film "North Country", female fire fighters in Richmond, British Columbia lived through hell, and they're fighting back.
But was it really foolishness? Or, was it a cynically staged move, on both sides? Weren't NDP officials glad for an opportunity to remove a thorny union leadership that has long protested the NDP's rightward course, including the 1992 anti-labour Social Contract of the Ontario NDP government of Bob Rae (yes, the same Rae now seeking the federal Liberal Party leadership)? And isn't the Hargrove gang, increasingly tied into concession bargaining, lobbying governments for giant grants to auto giants, and favouring tactical voting for Liberals, looking for an opportunity to put union money and talent, hitherto devoted to the NDP, to different uses? Call it a mutual severance of convenience. But this is one separation that is highly detrimental to 260,000 CAW members and to the working class as a whole.
In late March, the CAW's National Executive Board unanimously adopted a resolution that calls for its members, local unions and staff across Canada to withdraw support for the New Democratic Party. NDP officials had to know this would be the union's reaction to the suspension of Hargrove. CAW delegates said as much to the Ontario NDP provincial council meeting on March 4. Instead of trying to reason with them, the NDP council slapped them in the face.
Hargrove told the media that his embrace of Paul Martin and the Liberals was the product of the CAW Council vote in December to back Liberals in ridings where the NDP candidate was unlikely to win. A bad move, yes, but the NDP response was just as bad, which is why federal NDP leader Jack Layton disassociated himself from it.
Coincidentally, the Ontario Public Service Employees� Union is in the process of affiliating to the NDP. During the federal election campaign OPSEU distributed a button that read: "Buzz off. I'm voting NDP." Union ships passing in the night.
The CAW resolution also claims the move to withdraw support for the NDP is part of a long-running strategy to engage in politics independently.
But Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove misleads more than a little when he says, "We can no longer have our political hopes and dreams symbolized in the fortunes of one political party."
This would be true if there was a mass, viable political party devoted to a working class agenda to the left of the NDP. Absent such an alternative in Canada, it is apparent that Hargrove is retreating, in practice, to the treacherous ground of "lesser-evil" politics which stunted and paralysed the labour movement in the United States. His endorsement of many of the Liberal candidates in the latest federal election (who personify the smiling face of the joint Liberal/Tory corporate agenda Hargrove rightly condemns) was a step backwards. It was presented falsely as asserting an "independent labour movement". Independent of what, we must ask. Not of the Liberals, the main party of corporate rule since Confederation.
Hopefully, CAW members and other workers will see the futility of "lesser-evilism". Hopefully they will step up to the challenge of holding the NDP accountable to the interests of its 2.6 million voters and its hundreds of thousands of affiliated labour unionists. More, not less, union involvement in the NDP is needed to heal the rift with sections of Labour aggravated by the party's ill-advised and untimely suspension of Hargrove, and to fashion a real alternative to the pro-business, pro-war Tory-Liberal agenda.
The latest tragic development is one part of the price workers will pay for the failure to build a substantial class struggle left wing in the unions (and the NDP) over the past twenty years. That remains the challenge, and a present task.
Ontario Colleges Strike Goes to Arbitration
The main issues in the strike relate to the quality of education, despite vehement denials by management. Now those issues will be settled by a mediation-arbitration process proposed by the union. Management�s refusal to accept the process, much less the union's demands, kept 150,000 students without classes and risked the loss of an academic year.
Why? Because the college presidents know that a mutually-agreed arbitrator will likely endorse many of OPSEU's demands. OPSEU wants to improve the quality of education by reducing class sizes through the hiring of more full-time teachers to lower the student-instructor ratio. It also wants class sizes, now averaging about 28, trimmed to 25, and the percentage of part-timers cut from one-third currently to 20 per cent over the term of the new contract. There is provincial funding to cover these goals.
"This isn't a strike for more money or less workload," Ted Montgomery, head of the union bargaining committee, said in an interview early in the strike. "It's about one issue - quality."
Management offered a 12.6 per cent wage increase over four years, but came to the bargaining table on the eve of the strike with a provocative proposal to remove provisions limiting faculty workloads.
It took a strike to prove that management's line wouldn't fly. In the absence of political action by the broader labour movement in support of the teachers, OPSEU moved to its mediation/arbitration model, and imposed it on management.
Tragically, John Stammers, 62, a professor of Accounting at Centennial College in Scarborough, was critically injured after being struck by a car while on picket duty on March 20 and died six days later.
"On behalf of my local, and all college faculty across the province, and all members of the union, I want to extend our condolences and our deepest sympathy to John's family," said Eileen Burrows, president of OPSEU Local 558.
Women Fire Fighters Fight for Dignity
Four women firefighters at a suburban fire station near Vancouver quit their jobs due to sexual harassment. Two took sick leave. A third filed a complaint at the province's human rights tribunal and left on unpaid leave a year ago. And a fourth, Jeanette Moznik, has not worked since 2001 and filed a lawsuit in the B.C. Supreme Court last August.
The situation had been brewing since the 1995 integration of the fire department at Vancouver International Airport into the all-male Richmond Fire Department. Moznik alleges that she and another female firefighter were sent into a live fire but co-workers refused to turn on the water in their hoses; that human feces were put into her boots; that her helmet was smashed; and that a condom filled with some liquid was put in her locker. Although not yet proven in court, the lawsuit and sick leaves have forced the authorities to acknowledge the problem. Gender-sensitivity training, renovations to fire halls to include women's washrooms, and a code of conduct have been ordered.
But why should working women have to resort to lawsuits or human rights tribunals to stop harassment? What is wrong with the firefighters� union, the labour movement, and especially the male workers directly involved in the situation? "An injury to one is an injury to all" includes women workers. There can be no genuine solidarity until the cancer of sexist harassment and degradation is stamped out in the work place and in the union hall. Leaders that fail to act on that challenge deserve to be ousted.
Railways are a "Time Bomb"
The number of rail accidents in Canada has risen every year since 2002, hitting 1,246 last year. Transportation Safety Board accident records show that there were 11,147 accidents between 1996 and 2005. Almost all involved freight trains on either CN or CP lines.
The TSB investigated only 1.3 per cent of those accidents. Between 1999 and 2005, Transport Canada, the federal regulator of the rail industry, prosecuted the railways seven times under the Railway Safety Act, earning five convictions.
Poor maintenance, human error, an over reliance on technology and staff cuts were contributing factors for the most serious accidents.
Critics say the government agencies are too cozy with the railways.
Is it possible that the railways put speed (and profits) ahead of safety, leading to some disasters, such as a couple last August?
* Spilling half a million litres of heating oil and tens of thousands of litres of a toxic chemical known to cause cancer at a resort near Edmonton.
* Leaking caustic soda into the Cheakamus River in B.C., killing most of the fish stock.
Peter Julian, the federal NDP transport critic, has called for a public inquiry into the "ticking time bomb" of rail safety. Public ownership and democratic workers� control in the rail industry might be a swifter and more effective way to de-fuse this bomb.
Canada's new Billionaires
The Canadian billionaires list is dotted with familiar names: Charles Bronfman, Jean Coutu, Paul Desmarais, Wallace McCain, Ted Rogers, Jim Pattison and Galen Weston. At the top of the list is publishing magnate Kenneth Thomson and his family; they come in ninth-richest in the world, with $19.6 billion (US).
But that's only a fraction of the $50 billion (US) fortune of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is ranked the world's richest man for the twelfth straight year. (By the way, Gates owns a huge white private yacht called the Octopus, which I spotted from my vacation apartment balcony as it dropped anchor at Montego Bay harbour, Jamaica, on January 8. The ship has a crew of over 100, and a pair of gold-coloured helicopters on board to ferry the famously rich to and fro.)
So, who are the new Canadian billionaires (and are there any bets as to which political parties they supported in the recent federal election)?
* Robert Miller, 60, of Montreal, president and CEO of Future Electronics. He's looking into cryonic suspension, so he can enjoy his money after he dies .... and after he's revived, or so he hopes.
* Murray Edwards, 46, a Calgary oilman and founder of Canadian Natural Resources. He plans to harvest and process Alberta tar sands, and tries not to worry about global warming.
* David Cheritan, a 54-year-old Stanford University professor and computer networks expert, who provided seed money to a group of students who launched the search engine Google.
Collectively, Forbes magazine says, there are 793 billionaires in the world, up from 691 a year ago. Together they are worth $2.6 trillion (US), up 18 per cent from a year ago. Almost half of them, 371, live in the U.S., and more live in New York (40) than any other city.
Now, it doesn't take a Marxist to know from where all that wealth came, and where it ought to go.
