Traditional collective bargaining has been brushed aside not only at the federal level but also in Ontario where Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government, with Tory support, is struggling to tame the deficit by forcing teachers to take a two-year wage freeze, three unpaid days off, and benefit cuts.
There are roll backs municipally, with Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford bent on privatizing services to trim costs, while forcing public service unions to accept less job security.
Private-sector employers have been on the attack too, notably with Caterpillar Inc. shutting a London locomotive plant earlier this year after its 465 workers refused to work for half their pay. The jobs went to the United States.
Trade union membership has dwindled from close to 40 per cent of the workforce in the 1970s to about 30 per cent now. That’s partly because of plant closings, but also the changing nature of work and eroding labour laws. Among private-sector employees the rate has fallen to just 17 per cent.
Ontario’s rate is second-lowest in the country; only Alberta has been more barren ground for labour organizers. And things here could get worse with Opposition Leader Tim Hudak saying that a Conservative government would copy American-style union-busting “right-to-work” laws.
Hudak says he would halt mandatory union membership in places where there’s a trade union, and would make payment of dues voluntary. It’s an approach designed to starve unions of members and money. And it’s telling that even former premier Mike Harris, an aggressive opponent of labour rights, never ventured such an attack.
No wonder the workers’ movement feels besieged. It is not only smaller but weaker too. In a sign of labour’s growing insecurity, strike frequency in Canada has dropped by more than 90 per cent since the 1970s.
Two big organizations, the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers, are responding to such pressures by merging to create the largest private-sector union in Canada’s history. Indeed, this year’s Labour Day parade — Toronto’s 140th — will likely be the last time CAW and CEP members march under separate banners.
A 45-page report released last month, reviewing the new super union’s principles and objectives, was blunt on the challenges facing labour. A key worry is the attitude of non-union workers, “many of whom see unions as a special ‘vested interest,’ rather than a way for them to better their own lives,” wrote the joint union committee behind the report. Of all the factors weighing against labour, this perception “may be the most dangerous for unions in the long term.”
In an effort to address that, the new 320,000-member union is branding itself a herald of social change. Apart from engaging in collective bargaining and other traditional functions it will reach out to organize temporary workers, the self-employed and unemployed, people on contract and freelance workers. It’s not clear exactly how this will work, and what such members would receive in exchange for dues. But “the organizing of new members (is) a central priority,” the report concludes.
To that end the CAW and CEP are prepared to invest $10 million a year for five years to organize new members. The auto workers have already unanimously backed the merger. The question now goes to a CEP gathering in October. If it wins approval the unions will hold a founding convention next year.
Given the challenges ahead, and all the ground that’s been lost so far, it remains to be seen if the new union will succeed in building “a powerful social movement fighting for all working people.” But the takeaway is that on this Labour Day, unions still have the vision to imagine a better life for working people, and the will to try to bring it about. The long march continues.
Original Article
Source: the star
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