55,000 schooling assist staff, together with caretakers, early childhood educators, administrative employees, and librarians, face a direct confrontation with Ontario’s hard-right Progressive Conservative authorities. Not solely have Premier Doug Ford and Training Minster Stephen Lecce made provocative, real-wage reducing contract “gives.” They’ve made it abundantly clear they intend to interrupt a strike that might begin as quickly as subsequent Thursday, November 3, by instantly adopting an anti-strike regulation.
The support-staff staff should not be left to struggle alone in opposition to the Ontario Tory authorities’s class warfare agenda of wage cuts, austerity, and the destruction of staff’ rights.
Contracts for all 255,000 Ontario schooling staff, together with 200,000 academics, expired on August 31. But the 5 Ontario schooling unions have conspired to divide us. They’re adamantly against answering an anti-democratic regulation criminalizing the assist staff’ strike with mass job motion on the a part of all schooling staff.
If the schooling assist staff’ wrestle stays remoted, their brave stand for inflation-busting wage will increase and an finish to austerity budgets for public schooling shall be defeated and the Ford authorities and the Bay Road monetary oligarchy that stands behind it strengthened.
This is the reason we shaped the Ontario Training Employees Rank-and-File Committee. It goals to unify all schooling staff in a typical struggle to defend public schooling, set up mass defiance of strikebreaking laws, and to make this the spearhead of a mass mobilization of working folks in opposition to austerity and in defence of staff’ rights.
The Ford authorities’s pitiful, most 2 p.c annual wage “improve” and its plans to chop billions extra from schooling budgets within the coming years don’t have any well-liked mandate. Ford and his Tories gained the assist of lower than 18 p.c of the citizens in final June’s provincial election.
The one purpose this illegitimate authorities can threaten us so aggressively is as a result of the bureaucrats who lead the schooling unions are doing every part of their energy to sabotage our wrestle. Regardless that our contracts all expired on the identical day, the Ontario Faculty Board Council of Unions (OSBCU), which represents assist employees, and the 4 trainer unions have insisted on bargaining individually. The academics’ union apparatuses have dominated out strike motion till the winter and haven’t even begun the method of organizing strike votes.
So nice was the anger amongst faculty assist employees after greater than 20 years of wage cuts which have decreased many to poverty pay, the OSBCU management was pressured to carry a poll on strike motion. It returned an amazing 96.5 p.c in favour of a strike. However OSBCU and its mother or father union, the Canadian Union of Public Workers (CUPE), are doing every part to make sure staff go into wrestle with each palms tied behind their backs.
Union representatives have admitted in membership conferences that the federal government is making ready to make use of draconian powers—together with the anti-democratic “however clause” to repress a strike. But they’ve made it clear they won’t name on academics, the greater than 650,000 different CUPE members, or different staff to stroll off the job or take some other significant motion to defend the assist employees staff.
How the union bureaucrats plan to promote us out
In current days, OSBCU President Laura Walton and different high OSBCU officers have appeared alongside Ontario CUPE President Fred Hahn at rallies and public occasions to proclaim CUPE’s “assist” for an schooling assist employees strike. This “assist” was reportedly determined at a gathering of CUPE’s nationwide government in late September. But for weeks, CUPE remained silent about what this “assist” would concretely imply—making clear within the course of that it might don’t have anything to do with mobilizing working-class assist for putting schooling staff. Now the CUPE/OSBCU high brass have introduced that this “assist” quantities to a union pledge to pay the fines levied on particular person staff who select to defy a strikebreaking regulation.
That is the type of assist {that a} rope provides to a dangling man. The OSBCU management has refused to advance any technique for the mobilization of the collective power of the working class to defeat Ford. Walton has mentioned the union will maintain regional mass conferences to “seek the advice of” the membership on what to do within the occasion of a strike ban. However she has did not commit the management to any sensible measures to strengthen the motion.
A real staff’ chief would clarify to the 55,000 assist employees that they’re within the frontline of a wrestle that has implications for the complete working class. They might say that if Ford so overtly violates our democratic rights, they’d instantly name for CUPE’s 700,000 members nationally and the 200,000 members of the 4 trainer unions in Ontario to affix assist staff in defying the federal government till it’s pressured to again down. Moreover, they’d stress that the lots of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in CUPE belongings hoarded by the paperwork can be deployed to ensure full pay for all staff collaborating within the strike.
A real staff’ chief would insist that situations might hardly be extra beneficial for mobilizing well-liked backing for his or her wrestle. Each employee has an curiosity in defending schooling and different very important public companies, defeating the government-employer drive to impose inflation-induced wage cuts, and smashing the battery of anti-strike legal guidelines governments of all stripes have used to impose austerity and contract concessions.
For all of the militant-sounding bluster of Walton and Hahn, what they’re in impact telling assist employees is that they need to resolve as people whether or not to defy a back-to-work regulation that the federal government will search to implement with all of the coercive strategies of state repression at its disposal.
Underneath these situations, it’s comprehensible, albeit mistaken, if some staff conclude they can’t resist Ford’s assaults. That is actually the result the union equipment hopes to realize. Because the OSBCU paperwork did in 2019, it intends responsible any defeat, whether or not imposed via a back-to-work regulation or a rotten sellout agreed to on the eleventh hour, on the “lack of organizational assist” to tackle Ford.
The union equipment is tied by a thousand threads to the anti-worker “collective bargaining” regime and the capitalist state, which collectively assure the bureaucrats’ fats salaries and shut partnership with provincial and federal governments and massive enterprise. These materials pursuits clarify why it’s hostile to mobilizing the social energy of the working class, and has for many years policed authorities anti-strike legal guidelines.
A wrestle in opposition to Ford’s push for wage cuts, the gutting of public schooling budgets, and the efficient abolition of the proper to strike should subsequently come from beneath. It should come from rank-and-file staff seizing management of the wrestle via the development of a community of rank-and-file committees. These organizations, led by essentially the most militant and self-sacrificing staff and democratically managed by the rank-and-file, would give schooling staff the organizational energy and political management to defy Ford’s assaults, and any and all makes an attempt by Walton and the CUPE management to sabotage their wrestle.
Why the union equipment opposes our wrestle
The coverage pursued by the OSBCU paperwork is just not the results of errors or unhealthy leaders. The bureaucrats are a part of a privileged center class layer that’s hostile to our pursuits. Their predominant concern is to not safe higher wages and situations for us, however to protect the authority of the “collective bargaining” system that they’ve used to suppress working-class struggles for the previous 4 a long time. Over the previous three years alone, schooling assist staff have suffered huge real-terms pay cuts attributable to OSBCU’s settlement to implement Ford’s Invoice 124, which imposed a 1 p.c annual pay cap on over 1 million Ontario public sector staff. Citing the sanctity of collective agreements, OSBCU and the trainer unions additionally blocked all makes an attempt by us to prepare collective motion to withstand the ruling elite’s coverage of mass an infection throughout the pandemic.
As Canada’s largest union, CUPE has performed an important function within the commerce unions’ assist for the pro-austerity, pro-war federal Liberal authorities since 2015. When the New Democrats concluded a proper governmental alliance with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in March, the Canadian Labour Congress cheered on the deal. The settlement ensures that the federal government has a parliamentary majority to spend tens of billions of {dollars} on warfare and reduce billions in home spending in a brand new “age of austerity” lately outlined by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Help for spending billions on weaponry so Canadian imperialism can wage warfare world wide and billions extra in handouts to the companies and super-rich via tax cuts and COVID “emergency bailouts” is incompatible with assist for improved wages and situations for staff. To make sure that Trudeau and NDP chief Jagmeet Singh reach serving the pursuits of Canadian massive enterprise, the unions should make sure that social spending and the price of public sector wages decline repeatedly.
What should schooling staff do now?
The quick job posed to caretakers, administrative employees, early childhood educators, and librarians is to take management of their contract wrestle out of the palms of the union equipment and switch decision-making powers to the rank-and-file. Solely on this approach can assist employees make a direct attraction to academics for a typical wrestle. They need to conduct a decided struggle to make their resistance to strikebreaking laws the catalyst for a mass mobilization of the working class in defence of public schooling. That is the precondition for efficiently defying anti-strike laws, not an remoted wrestle that may expose staff to victimization and reprisals.
The need of rank-and-file committees is among the key classes from the bitter experiences of 4 a long time of the suppression of the category wrestle by the commerce union paperwork. Twenty-five years in the past this month, to quote however one instance, Ontario academics started a brave two-week strike in opposition to the Tory authorities of Mike Harris and its cuts to schooling and assaults on staff’ rights. The strike quickly galvanized mass assist from working folks outraged by Harris’ “Frequent Sense Revolution,” which slashed social spending throughout the board. Circumstances had been rising for a common strike to convey down the hated Harris authorities. However that was exactly what the academics unions and Ontario Federation of Labour wouldn’t countenance. Having affirmed they didn’t need to problem Harris’ “proper to manipulate,” they referred to as off the strike after the federal government did not safe a courtroom injunction in opposition to the putting academics. Anger was widespread amongst academics to the unions’ outrageous betrayal of their wrestle. However the lack of an organized political different to guide this opposition enabled the paperwork to prevail. Exploiting the following confusion and demoralization, Harris secured re-election little greater than a yr later.
Training staff should draw the teachings of the 1997 strike and mount a wrestle for rank-and-file committees. To this finish, we urge schooling staff throughout Ontario to take the next quick steps:
1. All schooling staff working with out a contract, together with the 200,000 academics, ought to demand a direct strike vote. This demand must be made the place to begin for mobilizing all schooling staff in a unified wrestle in opposition to Ford.
2. Training staff ought to convene conferences at faculties, excluding union bureaucrats, to determine rank-and-file committees. These committees ought to undertake resolutions outlining the calls for staff need to struggle for, declare their affiliation with the OEWRFC, and demand the proper of the rank-and-file to look at and, via their elected representatives, take part in all future bargaining periods.
3. The rank-and-file committees ought to start a scientific marketing campaign to construct assist for schooling staff amongst mother and father, college students, and different sections of staff in manufacturing, transportation, well being care, and logistics. Visits must be organized to auto crops, factories, places of work, and work websites to elucidate how all staff have an curiosity in a well-funded public schooling system and resisting the ruling elite’s drive to outlaw strikes and slash staff’ incomes.
4. The rank-and-file committees ought to set up data pickets and different initiatives to elucidate to all schooling staff and their supporters all through the working class that they’re concerned in a political struggle. Reaching the simply calls for of schooling assist staff for inflation-busting pay will increase and a well-funded public schooling system is unthinkable with out a frontal assault in opposition to the monetary oligarchy that stands behind the Ford authorities. Training staff can emerge victorious by unifying their wrestle with their co-workers throughout Canada and world wide via the Worldwide Employees Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
We strongly attraction to all schooling staff able to take up this struggle to contact us at [email protected] or be part of our personal Fb dialogue group
