Canada's workers movement: uneven developments

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2007 by Michael Goldfield, Bryan D. Palmer

The Ontario Days of Action were initiated by a Canadian Automobile Workers/public sector unions/social movements coalition, which prodded the Ontario Federation of Labour [OFL] to act. Workers and a broad array of groups representing women, welfare recipients, anti-poverty activists, minorities, students, and environmentalists were brought together. The goal was to protest the policies of the Harris government by holding one-day general strikes in conjunction with another day of mass political protests and demonstrations. Focusing on one city at a time, the ostensible purpose came to be to build towards a province-wide General Strike. Beginning in London, Ontario, in December 1995, and spreading to ten other cities, including Hamilton, St. Catharines, North Bay, Peterborough, Toronto, and Kingston, the Days of Action eventually encompassed hundreds of thousands of people. Unfolding over two and a half years, the last strike-protest gathering was organized in June 1998. The mobilization grew more and more spirited, sustaining radical critiques of the provincial government, creating an increasingly rebellious atmosphere. Toronto's massive work stoppage and anti-Harris demos saw the city's inner core of government-related institutions and businesses brought to a standstill on a Friday. A day later, as many as 250,000 protesters were in the streets. This much-publicized success was followed by an unprecedented educational strike at the end of October 1997. The province-wide teacher walkout, involving 125,000 members of five separate unions/federations, closed elementary and secondary schools, forcing the state to petition the courts unsuccessfully for an injunction to end the conflict. (51)

The teacher job action, rare in its coordinated bringing together of historically divided federations of classroom educators organized by gender, religion, and level of schooling, was widely perceived as an illegal work stoppage. For a week it had the province open-mouthed in awe. Yet it signalled the beginning of the end. The embattled teachers went down to defeat, not because the rank-and-file strikers, the students, or even parents and their associations and local boards of education, faltered in the face of the Harris government attacks. Rather, three of the teacher federation leaders capitulated and broke the strike, declaring the struggle over without so much as meeting with their striking memberships and explaining what had been gained and what could be lost. It was a demoralizing denouement to an exhilarating battle. (52)

As went the teachers, so went the province's workers as a whole. The impressive accomplishment of trade unionists and their allies challenging the state by the hundreds of thousands, rallying to the standard of protest, defying laws in the insistence that their economic power be used to create and maintain a better society was, in the final instance, undermined by labour's leaders. There had always been problems inherent in the Days of Action strategy, the most pronounced of which was that there really was no agreement within the labour movement about how to best fight the onslaught of the 'Common Sense Revolution'. A fundamental divide split the labour hierarchy. Adherents of an early 'pink paper' manifesto authored by the Steelworker officialdom (closely aligned with the Lewis family lock on the provincial NDP) and other union heads reluctant to mobilize generalized strike and protest activity, opposed extra-parliamentary mobilizations and, most emphatically, turned their noses up at 'illegal' political strike action. Instead, they opted to place the political eggs of trade union discontent in the conventional New Democratic Party electoral basket. The 'pink paper' group was opposed by Buzz Hargrove's Canadian Automobile Workers and a number of public sector unions. These unions championed the more militant move that came to be known as the Days of Action, defiant in their resistance to the backtracking of their conservative counterparts in the mainstream of the Ontario Federation of Labour, seemingly willing to share the protest limelight with a diverse coalition of social movements. But they lacked any decisive organizational commitment that could translate, concretely, into a strategy to win, let alone lead to a province-wide General Strike. While they undoubtedly pursued a path determined to develop initial impressive protest showings, they also eventually abdicated, and at a critical juncture downloaded all responsibility for the ultimate organization of a General Strike on to the somewhat wobbly table of OFL officialdom. There it soon dispersed into inaction and worse. Amidst the militancy and success of the October 1997 Toronto strike-protest, OFL President Gord Wilson grew astonishingly mild mannered, going so far as sound apologetic about the 'disruptions' of job actions. Smaller and more isolated cities were targeted, in the hopes that the mobilization would fizzle. When the possible election of an NDP candidate in a Windsor by-election seemed to caution against rocking the autoworking centre with widespread plant shutdowns and mass protest, the plug was quietly pulled on the scheduled walkouts and demonstrations. After the Kingston Day of Action was a resounding success, drawing not only a huge local contingent, but militants from across the province, and, indeed from the us and Quebec, newly elected OFL head Wayne Samuelson scotched the notion that a General Strike was in the offing. What had gone up with a bang, came down, ultimately, with a whimper. The Days of Action were unobtrusively terminated.