Ontario’s Progressive Conservative authorities tabled laws Monday that preemptively outlaws an impending strike by 55,000 training assistants, early childhood educators, faculty librarians, caretakers and administrative workers and imposes huge real-terms wage cuts on them.
The proposed legislation—which the federal government intends to ram by way of the provincial parliament earlier than a strike that was set to start Friday—is an assault on your entire working class and must be actively combatted by all private and non-private sector employees throughout Canada.
To defend the proposed legislation from a constitutional courtroom problem, the federal government is invoking the anti-democratic “however clause,” successfully admitting that it tramples on primary democratic rights. The hitherto hardly ever used however clause offers Canada’s federal and provincial governments the facility to undertake legal guidelines that violate primary democratic rights supposedly assured within the Canadian Structure’s Constitution of Rights and Freedoms.
Employees’ rights to strike and collectively cut price have lengthy been beneath systematic assault, with federal and provincial governments of all stripes utilizing back-to-work legal guidelines to interrupt strikes and impose concessionary contracts. On just a few events, as within the case of a 2012 Ontario Liberal authorities legislation suspending lecturers’ proper to strike, the courts have struck down such anti-worker legal guidelines, though this has by no means resulted in something approaching full restitution for the employees focused.
The Ford authorities’s use of the however clause to bolster its anti-strike legislation marks a big step within the evisceration of the democratic rights of working individuals and the entrenching of authoritarian types of rule in Canada. When Ontario Premier Doug Ford first invoked the however clause in June 2021 to ram by way of his authorities’s reform of election financing legal guidelines, Ontario turned solely the third jurisdiction to ever use this reactionary measure. Below situations of a dramatic upsurge of working class struggles, the Ford authorities’s normalization of the however clause is designed to ship a message to all employees that they may meet any problem to their hard-right, pro-corporate agenda with ruthless state repression.
The strikebreaking laws, which bears the Orwellian title the Retaining College students in Class Act, imposes extreme penalties for defiance. Particular person employees may be fined as much as $4,000 and unions $500,000 for each day they strike in defiance of the laws. This may doubtlessly translate right into a invoice of $250 million for each day of an training assist employees strike. At this fee, it could take simply one-and-a-half days of defiance to make use of up your entire normal fund of the 700,000-member Canadian Union of Public Staff (CUPE), the union to which the college assist employees belong.
The tabling of a preemptive strikebreaking legislation was the federal government’s aggressive response to Sunday’s submitting by the CUPE-affiliated Ontario College Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) of the required five-day discover of strike motion.
With its no-strike-law the federal government intends to impose by decree a four-year contact containing depressing 2.5 p.c per 12 months wage “will increase” for employees incomes lower than $43,000 per 12 months and 1.5 p.c for everybody else. That is beneath situations by which the official inflation fee is operating at 7 p.c and value rises for primary requirements are a lot greater. Groceries, for instance, are greater than 11 p.c costlier than a 12 months in the past.
At a press convention Monday, Lecce absurdly sought to current the federal government’s provide as beneficiant. He famous that it represented a rise from its authentic provide of two p.c per 12 months for employees incomes beneath $40,000 and 1.25 p.c for everybody else.
The federal government can be legislating a minimize in sick pay. Employees claiming short-term incapacity will obtain simply 25 p.c of their earnings for the primary 5 days of an absence, rising to 90 p.c for the rest of the 120-day most.
Outrageously, Lecce sought to justify these sweeping assaults as obligatory to take care of “stability” in colleges. After two-and-a-half years of the COVID-19 pandemic, he asserted, it was obligatory to make sure that youngsters might proceed to be taught and that youngsters from poor households might entry every day meals and social helps. Coming from a authorities that has slashed public training budgets and pursued a profits-before-lives-pandemic coverage that turned colleges into hotspots for COVID-19 an infection and resulted in seven waves of mass demise, this cynicism is difficult to beat.
The Training Minister additionally disingenuously sought to assert that the strikebreaking legislation doesn’t apply to lecturers and that the federal government would proceed to cut price in “good religion” with the trainer unions. An nameless authorities supply talking to World Information was far more blunt, declaring that the legislation despatched a “sign” to the trainer unions and including with respect to future talks, “Our intentions are clear.”
Ford and Lecce’s trashing of the collective bargaining course of underscores that employees don’t have anything to barter with them. The entire collective negotiation course of has been uncovered as an utter farce. The federal government has the flexibility to make up the principles because it goes alongside in order to implement its dictates, whereas the union management prevents employees from mobilizing their class power by scrupulously adhering to rigged bargaining rules that the federal government ignores at will.
In a single additional instance illustrating Ford and Lecce’s contempt for training employees, Lecce handed out vouchers price $250 to each dad or mum within the province final week for personal tutoring. The roughly $350 million spent on this gesture, which is a part of the federal government’s agenda to denationalise important public companies, was exactly the identical quantity the federal government would have needed to spend to accommodate the OSBCU’s demand for an 11.7 p.c annual wage improve for assist workers for a single 12 months.
All 55,000 training assist employees, and the 200,000 Ontario lecturers whose contracts additionally expired on August 31, ought to demand a direct halt to all additional contract negotiations with the federal government. To proceed “negotiating” with a authorities that has launched such a category battle assault can solely imply that one is negotiating phrases of give up.
As an alternative, employees should demand that CUPE and the 4 Ontario trainer unions arrange mass defiance of Ford’s no-strike legislation and battle to rally your entire working class throughout Canada in defence of the assist employees, together with in a province-wide normal strike.
There’s a highly effective foundation to develop such a working class counteroffensive. To take action, training assist employees should seize management of their battle from the union paperwork by way of the creation of rank-and-file committees to convey collectively all training employees and their supporters in a joint battle. Each employee has an curiosity in defending training and different important public companies, defeating the government-employer drive to impose inflation-induced wage cuts and smashing the battery of anti-strike legal guidelines governments have routinely used to impose austerity and contract concessions.
Nevertheless, OSBCU lead negotiator Laura Walton and CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn have refused to advance any technique to mobilize employees to defeat the federal government’s strikebreaking laws. Even now they refuse to name for employees to defy Ford’s anti-strike legislation whereas the trainer unions have dominated out strike motion till the winter.
On Monday afternoon, Hahn introduced that CUPE Ontario would arrange a province-wide “political protest” towards the federal government’s strikebreaking legislation this Friday. This initiative is geared toward evading a confrontation with Ford, not conducting a real battle towards his assaults. Training employees ought to recall that the “political protest” slogan was exactly the formulation utilized by the union paperwork in 1997 to suppress a province-wide lecturers’ strike and forestall it from creating right into a direct political problem to the Harris authorities’s “Frequent Sense Revolution.” This time round, CUPE’s objective is to keep away from confronting the Ford authorities’s draconian strikebreaking laws head on and try to stress the federal government to return to the “bargaining desk.”
Rank-and-file employees should not let this cowardly capitulation stand. They need to demand that CUPE battle to mobilize employees all through Ontario and throughout Canada to defend the proper to strike, safe inflation-busting pay will increase for all employees and oppose the dismantling of public companies. They need to insist that this mobilization not be confined to a pathetic day-long provincial “political protest,” however embody a solidarity strike till the federal government withdraws its illegitimate legislation.
To unify their battle with lecturers and all employees with an curiosity in defending public training and the proper to strike, assist workers ought to construct rank-and-file committees at each faculty. These committees will battle to position management over the battle within the palms of the rank and file and unite assist workers by way of the Ontario Training Employees Rank-and-File Committee with all training employees and their supporters to prepare mass defiance of the federal government’s strike ban and wage-cutting contract decree.
