| Workers' Solidarity & Union Democracy Coalition Basis of Unity Statement |
Urgently Needed: Workers' Solidarity
To Resist Concessions and Win Union Democracy
A very disturbing pattern of union concessions to the bosses' agenda is taking hold of the labour movement across Canada. Even unions with a 'progressive' reputation have recently reached contract settlements that erode or utterly abandon job security, wage protection, health benefits, and severance pay, while sacrificing equal rights for new hires. Increasingly union officials are teaming up with management. Both in the public and private sectors, they are working together to impose bad deals on workers, and to cripple or crush workers' resistance to the corporate agenda by curtailing union democracy and local autonomy.
When union leaders refuse to advance legitimate grievances, when they turn a blind eye to employer discrimination and unsafe working conditions, when they seize control of local bargaining units to remove democratically-elected local leaders and then give away decades of hard-won union gains, they show which side they have chosen.
Workers know that it is we who built our unions, and it is the rank and file which must reclaim the unions to fight for all workers' needs -- for the unionized and non-union, employed and unemployed. In 1991 over twenty labour and community organizations joined together to launch a Workers' Solidarity Coalition in Toronto. Its initial purpose was to organize support for key public sector strikes involving postal workers and federal public service employees. These were strikes which challenged a major Tory initiative to attack labour and public services. We were relatively successful in that fight. Now the stakes are higher. The global neo-liberal agenda is more extensive, more intensive, and it is relentless. And increasingly, union officials are caving in to it, and turning their fire on union members who resist concessions. That is why we need Workers' Solidarity more than ever.
We have taken the initiative to launch a militant cross-union movement, in alliance with community-based groups and local activists. Our aim is to:
 1. Resist labour concessions and social cutbacks.
2. Support struggles for union democracy, to make unions more accessible, accountable, transparent and partipatory.
3. Take back our unions and turn them into fighting organizations.
4. Rely on our own strength, and renew or create our own organizations, from the bottom up, to fight for the interests of working people and against corporate profit and power.
To endorse and/or join the Workers’ Solidarity and Union Democracy Coalition the please contact us at 416 - 588-9090 and/or e-mail to: barryaw@look.ca
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