UNIONS
NARROWLY AVERT GENERAL STRIKE IN B.C., CANADA
In the
week from April 25 to May 2, 2004, what began as a legal strike by 43,000
hospital workers in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada nearly developed into an illegal 'general
strike' by upwards of 200,000 workers against the provincial government (which
funds the hospitals and the health-care system generally), and potentially
involving perhaps another 100,000 to 150,000 unionized workers. This in a
province of approximately 4 million people: B.C., Canada’s western-most
province. In the Canadian ‘federal’
state system, the ten provinces have various powers and responsibilities that
would be held by the central national government in a non-federal state system.
Responsibility for the provision of health-care is one of the most important of
these functions.
Since the
right-wing Liberal Party government’s accession to power three years
previously, one of its apparent goals has been to wreak havoc on an already
crisis-ridden, publicly funded, universally accessible health-care system.
Another, more widely known goal of this government has been to brutally attack
the share of social wealth in the province held by the working class and the
marginalized, and at the same time to attack the power of the trade unions
(which had been supported by the previous New Democratic Party government). One
of the first things the new government did was to tear up previously
negotiated, binding contracts between both nurses (actually, the B.C. Nurses
Union) and hospital and other health-care workers (actually, the Hospital
Employees Union (HEU)) and their government-funded employers. These were
replaced by new, government-dictated contracts, which contained significant
concessions for those employees concerned, concessions especially in the area
of job security. This proved telling of the government’s plans: to permanently
eliminate thousands of health-care workers’ jobs in B.C. In fact, the real plan
was to radically lower the labour costs of the health-care system generally and
to bring in private delivery of various ‘peripheral’ services in the
health-care system, such as ‘housekeeping’ or cleaning, landscaping, and food
services in order to facilitate this reduction.
In the
process, in the guise of “fighting rising health-care costs” so as to prevent
taxes from rising further, the health-care system is being gutted, so much so
that in a few years it will be in such bad shape that there will undoubtedly be
widespread public demand for the option of private (i.e. corporate) provision
of health-care, right up to the establishment of fully private hospitals. The
result would be a two-tier system, the degraded public one for the unprivileged
masses, and a much superior one for the wealthy minority.
The
privatization of delivery of the above-mentioned ‘peripheral’ services to the
health-care system has involved the mass firing of thousands of workers, and
their replacement (in fewer numbers) by new workers earning between 55 and 60%
of those they are replacing, along with significantly reduced benefits. In
fact, the contract stipulating these severely reduced levels of remuneration
was agreed to by both the new employers and a different union from the one
which has until now represented the workers holding those jobs. (This ‘sweetheart’
deal between a well known, large union (IWA -- previously the International
Woodworkers of America, now the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers) has,
needless to say, thrown the ‘labour movement’ in B.C into turmoil.) The result
of this is thousands of workers working for new private employers and
represented by a new union earning $9+ an hour doing work that previously paid
$17+ an hour, and with significantly reduced benefits.
All of
this has been part of the Liberal government’s agenda since coming to power in
2001. While the hospital workers’ employers are officially known as the Health
Employers Association (HEA) of B.C., in reality, this organization is a puppet
of the provincial government, as the latter appoints all of the officials that
comprise it, and dictates to them their general strategy for “fighting
escalating expenses” as well as what the financial ‘bottom line’ is as far as
collective agreements with their employees is concerned. In the negotiations
between the HEA and the HEU preceding the strike, the HEA refused to retreat
from its demand for a general 15% wage reduction for all HEU members and for no
limit on the number of jobs to be privatized. Naturally, the HEU membership let
the union’s leadership know in no uncertain terms that they would have nothing
to do with any such contract. So, when the legally acceptable time for strike
action arose, there was no agreement in the offing, making strike action
inevitable. The union leadership knew that the membership were ready for an all-out
fight against the government, so the call was for a full-scale strike, with
only “essential” staffing levels (as agreed upon by the HEU and HEA)
maintained.
The
strike began on Sunday, April 25, and ran for four days legally, before the
provincial government passed legislation making it illegal. The legislation
also unilaterally imposed a contract on the hospital workers which was even
more draconian than the HEA’s ‘final offer’ to the HEU, as it not only forced
on them the same 15% across the board wage cut and no limits on outsourcing
jobs to private employers. This legislation – not the criminalizing of the
strike, but the terms of the contract – was widely condemned by the mass media
in B.C. as either a “serious miscalculation” or “sheer political stupidity”;
the reason being that it sent a bolt of anger through much of the working class
and certainly the whole of the ‘labour movement’ in the province. In effect,
the legislation galvanized large numbers of workers into a mood of not only
mass anger, but also into a mood to fight back, to engage in solidarity action
with the embattled health care workers. Suddenly ‘public opinion’ swung sharply
in favour of the workers, and against the government.
In
response to the government’s “back-to-work” legislation and concomitant
imposition of an intolerable contract, the HEU leadership chose to defy the
legislation, risking both criminal charges for contempt of court and potential
fines (as have occurred in previous strikes legislated to an end). It can certainly
be argued, however, that the HEU leadership chose this ‘radical’ option only in
order to maintain its control over the strike, by maintaining its credibility
with the general membership of the union, who were obviously in no mood to end
the strike. The HEU chose to rename the strike a “protest” and the picket lines
became “protest lines”. HEU spokesman Chris Allnut, addressing a strikers’
rally at Vancouver General Hospital was quoted as saying “You are to respect
the protest lines until we decide that you should go back to work” (Vancouver Sun, April 30, 2004, p. A1); needless to say, the “we” here referred to
the HEU leadership.
It was in
this context that the B.C. Federation of Labour (the umbrella group comprising
most of the major trade unions in the province) came up with a plan to escalate
the hospital workers’ strike to a mass strike involving workers in a myriad of
different sectors of the economy. The day after the legislation, as many as
20,000 public sector workers belonging to the Canadian Union of Public
Employees (CUPE) walked off the job and picketed their workplaces, affecting a
range of public services, including municipal halls, libraries, schools,
recreation facilities, garbage services, airports, water treatment plants,
public works yards, and, in one city, bus service. As well, at least 800 B.C. Hydro (electricity) workers across the
province staged a wildcat strike in solidarity with the hospital workers; in
fact, the wildcat began on Thursday when a number of Hydro workers at dams in
northern B.C. got the ball rolling.
The B.C.
F.L.’s ‘action plan’, which was conveniently leaked to the media, described how
the escalation of job action would develop to most all public sector workers, as
well as significant numbers of workers in the wood and paper products
industries, and tourism (hotels and cruise ship facilities). The leaked
document outlining this plan of escalating strike action was published in the Vancouver
Sun newspaper on Saturday, May 1 – May
Day. Obviously the plan was to scare the government into backing off and
killing the legislation passed on Thursday. But the plan was a miscalculation,
as the government was hell bent on seeing its agenda through to its conclusion
come hell or high water. Instead, news of this plan of action for the ‘labour
movement’ emboldened thousands of rank and file workers, who genuinely believed
that their union leaders were going to lead a mass, ‘general’ strike in a
no-holds barred showdown with the provincial government, something many of them
had been looking forward to for a long time. Here was the perfect opportunity
for it, as ‘public opinion’ was solidly on ‘our’ side.
Saturday’s
May Day parade and rally in Vancouver was the largest in decades, as upwards of
10,000 people joined in, even though the BCFL steered the events clear of
focusing on the hospital workers strike or their own ‘action plan’ for mass
strike for the coming week. Rumours circulated at the rally amongst certain
militant union members that the BCFL leadership was looking to quash the strike
by setting up secret ‘closed door’ meetings with the government. The rumours
proved fatefully true, as late Sunday news began to appear that the HEU, with
the help of the BCFL leadership, had reached a deal with the government to end
the strike. And when workers woke up Monday morning looking forward to a week
(or more) of militant industrial action and political protest against the
government, there was shock and disgust felt just as widely and just as deeply
as their had been anger on Thursday and Friday. Only this time the object of
that disgust was not the government, but the union leadership, which had signed
a deal giving the government everything it had passed in its “back-to-work” legislation,
except for one small concession: the 15% wage cut would not be retroactive to
April 1, but would rather take effect May 1, the day before what came quickly
to be known as “Black Sunday”.
This
‘betrayal’ by the union bosses was so blatant that it probably did more to
disillusion workers about unions than anything else that has happened in B.C.
for a long, long time. (I use the word “betrayal” in “scare quotes” because
only someone who was once your ally in a fight can betray you, whereas the historical
evidence clearly establishes that, when the stakes are sufficiently high, the
unions and their functionaries – the ones who manage the unions – are not
allies of the rank and file membership.) Not only were hospital workers given a
deal by their union leaders virtually identical with the one the government
forced on them by way of legislation, but the union membership affected by the
deal were not even offered the opportunity to vote on this ‘agreement’. While
there apparently was sporadic unwillingness to return to work on Monday by some
HEU and CUPE members, this writer is unaware of any self-organized wildcat
actions. Apparently the shock workers felt was stronger than the anger, as
there was a surprising lack of resistance to the union-government screwing over
they had endured. However, a group of a few dozen HEU members did stage an
ongoing protest outside HEU headquarters for the following week. Further, a
grassroots-organized protest against the union’s ‘betrayal’ was held on the
following Saturday, where several hundred angry hospital workers and their
supporters marched and spoke out against their ‘leaders’ in the HEU and BCFL.
This writer attended that rally and distributed the following leaflet (slightly
modified).
Wage
Slave X
Over the May Day weekend, many thousands of working class people around B.C. were confident that something truly wonderful, yet something also deadly serious, was going to flower in the coming week, beginning Monday, the 3rd. Behind it all, what it was all about was what has been sometimes called the ‘social question’. But what was at the forefront of this burgeoning movement was the question of the provincial government’s treatment of hospital workers particularly and of the public health care system in B.C. more generally. Yet these two issues, which combine the government’s ‘labour relations policy’ with its public health care policy, just so happen to be the two most important for the majority of working class people in B.C. today. So when the Campbell government made a huge miscalculation in both legislating the striking HEU workers back to work AND at the same time directly imposing a contract on those workers involving more concessions and reductions than the Health Employers Association had been demanding during previous negotiations with the HEU, there was a tremendous surge of both anger at the government and solidarity with the viciously attacked workers in the HEU across the province, a surge which I dare say surprised everyone in B.C. The anger was truly palpable from Thursday (April 29) on, but so was the sense of solidarity, especially from Friday on. The difference was that while the anger remained more or less constant, the sense of solidarity was growing rapidly throughout Friday, Saturday (May Day) and Sunday, until … that fateful moment when most involved learned that the planned escalating general strike was called off as the HEU with the help of the B.C. Federation of Labour had agreed to a deal with the government.
But that moment on what some are now calling Black Sunday was only fateful in that it spelled the death of the particular general strike planned to unfold this past week. The determination to fight the Campbell government must still be there in hundreds of thousands of working people and their families, and we now know that there exists within this sector of the population a sense of solidarity far stronger than anything the B.C. Fed. or any union leader in the province has led us to believe. It is true that an extremely favourable opportunity for launching an all-out class war against a viciously anti-working class government has been lost. And it is true that if only two or three days of the planned escalating mass strike had been allowed to develop, that a massive surge forward in class consciousness and in the political maturation of the entire working class in B.C. would have undoubtedly occurred. Fundamental social-political truths about this society and the forces that, confronting one another, comprise it, truths which have been well hidden for most working class people for 20 years now, would have been clearly exposed not only for the 200,000 to 300,000 workers who would have been directly involved in the strike, but also for the rest of the roughly 2 million working class people in B.C. Most important of these would have been the enormous power that the working class is capable of wielding when it is united in active, defiant class solidarity against the treachery of the ruling class. The new generation of workers which has arisen within the past 20 years has not had direct experience of that power, and thus, for the most part, is not convinced that it really exists. They would have been irreversibly convinced of the reality of that power had even just a couple of days of the expected general strike taken place. They would have learned quite well where the class lines are that separate the working class, the middle class, and the ruling capitalist class, and that the basic interests of the working class are not compatible with those of either the ruling class or the middle class. All of this was so close to being achieved, and it was lost, and that is truly unfortunate. But I for one don’t feel like mourning, and I think there many others who feel the same way.
I think there are many others who feel confident that just a few days of the general strike that had been planned to develop would have won the HEU workers far, far more than what the union leadership and the ‘help’ of B.C. Fed. got for them (really, forced on them, since they have no say in it). I think there are many who feel very emboldened as working class militants as a result of the experience of the surge of solidarity around the province. And the beyond palpable sense of disgust and rage at the betrayal of the struggle by the leadership of the HEU and the B.C. Fed., while negative in itself, can only confirm and strengthen that conviction that we really are all together in this, that the ongoing HEU workers’ struggle is OUR struggle, and that we need to now look forward to, to plan and organize for the general strike we were all hoping to bring about this past week.
There is one crucial lesson that we all need to draw from this latest defeat, and the way the events unfolded, it shouldn’t be too difficult to do so. What happened this time that we want to make sure we avoid next time? Clearly, it is the sell-out by the HEU and B.C. Fed. leaders. How can we make sure that doesn’t happen again? Why do we allow these leaderships to do this to us, to even be in a position to do this to us? Why don’t we, the rank and file, have any control over them at the most crucial of moments? It is the power structure and the mode of functioning of the trade unions as they are today that allows these betrayals by the leaderships to occur. So if we want to make sure that such betrayals can’t possibly occur again, we need to either change the power structure and mode of functioning of the trade unions we are in OR we need to simply bypass those structures, their rules and laws, to organize ourselves in our own general assemblies and committees, with directly elected, mandated, and revocable delegates, in other words, to take the struggle directly into our own (collective) hands. Dedicated union activists have tried for decades to reform the power structures and mode of functioning of their unions, all to little if any effect. The second alternative, which unfortunately didn’t take shape amongst the bulk of the HEU and CUPE membership on Monday (and when it has happened in other places at other times it has appeared spontaneously), is in reality the only way for rank and file unionized workers to take control of their workplace struggles away from the union bosses and bureaucrats. Class struggles around the world for decades have clearly shown this to be so. The unions everywhere stand in the way of workers’ self-determination. But this strategy requires a far greater level of involvement and commitment on the part of the membership, of those involved in the struggle, than working through the existing channels of reforming the unions. In any case, what occurred on Black Sunday should have put to rest all strategies for bringing about a general strike (or strikes) and beyond it a renewed militant working class movement based on pressuring the union leaderships from below. We all should be able to see now that that road is a dead end.
Wage Slave X
May 7, 2004
Contact me at: wageslavex@yahoo.ca