A number of recent high-profile labour disputes have seen rapid government intervention to curtail workers’ right to strike. Such was the case for workers at CN, CPKC Rail, and the ports in Montreal and Vancouver, and there have been multiple calls action against the strike by postal workers.
The excuse provided for this intervention against workers’ right to strike is “maintaining labour peace” or “protecting the public interest.” The following article, excerpted from a Communist Party pamphlet written by George Harris in 1972, critiques this excuse.
A powerful campaign has been unleashed by monopoly and its governments to limit and even take away labor’s indispensable right to strike. The main aim of this campaign is to cripple labour’s ability to defend and improve its conditions of life. The big business drive for maximum profits requires a shackled, docile labour movement. It masks this selfish, sinister aim by hiding behind the cry of “defending the public interest.” Capitalism always parades under false slogans. It always seeks to make it appear as if its greedy profit interests are synonymous with public interests.
Almost invariably when working people are forced to take strike action it means that they have reached the end of a long process during which they have attempted to extract from their employer a particular price for their labour, or to achieve specific conditions of work; and the employer has refused to meet what is asked. In almost every case, based on severe restrictions imposed under federal and provincial labour legislation, a strike takes place only after months of frustrating and often fruitless negotiations, and weeks of equally fruitless mediation. It is not unusual for collective agreements to have expired for two or more months before the workers are in a position to exercise the legal right to strike.
Legal restriction on the right to strike favours employers exclusively. It means that the workers’ right is restricted, while the employer is free to take whatever measures they consider necessary to negate the effectiveness of the strike when that right is finally asserted. Labour laws in capitalist society mirror the antagonistic relation of the working class and the capitalist class, and also reflect the role of the state as an instrument of the domination of the capitalist class.
Right to strike won in battles
The limited right to strike which we have today was not readily given to the working class by the employers, or by the state, but was wrested from them over more than two centuries of trade union organization and struggle. The right to strike was resisted every inch of the way, and from the moment it was won it has been under constant attack.
In capitalist society the worker must sell their labour power in order to live; or, in the absence of being able to find a buyer for their labour power, must depend on social assistance, which is far below the level necessary to provide the essentials of life. Labour power is only bought when the buyer expects to make a profit, and the lower the price paid, the greater the profit. There is not, and cannot be, any sentiment involved in this relationship. There is only hard-headed bargaining as to the price, and unless the working class has the ability to deny the buyers of labour power the profit which they extract from that labor, then the deck is at all times stacked against worker.
With limitations on the right to strike, the working class is hard-pressed to defend itself against the aims of this rapacious minority. Without the right to strike the workers would be bound, gagged, and rendered virtually helpless.
Working people fight back
Using the right to strike, even under the severe restrictions that exist in Canada today, large sections of the working class have been reasonably successful in defending their economic position, have struck and won wage increases to offset the price gouging of the profiteers, and have to some extent modified the degree of exploitation affecting the working class as a whole.
As the working people use the right to strike to defend themselves, and to fight for their economic needs, so do the employers intensify their attacks on the right to strike, using their control of the news media to foster anti-strike reaction wherever they can, and their power over government to legislate against labour’s rights.
Needless to say, every new advance made by labour has been fiercely resisted by the employers, and always the right to strike has been the focal point of their attack. The anti-labour, anti-strike conspiracy has never been so operative as in this current period of new economic crisis, as the capitalist class once again seeks to make the working class shoulder the burdens of the crisis. In conjunction with the governments it controls, big business keeps hammering the big lie, namely, that constantly escalating prices of commodities and services arise from the wage demands of labour, and labour’s use of the strike weapon. Rather the opposite is true. Labour responds to monopoly price-fixing and acts to defend its living standards.
Public interest myth
Some time ago the top executive brass of a number of blue-ribbon industrial empires, including Stelco, Gulf Oil, Noranda, Dupont, and Kimberly-Clark, made known their views to all federal members of Parliament through a mailed pamphlet titled “Collective Bargaining and the Economy. A Time to Face Facts.” The boss of the Noranda group, Alfred Powis, summed up for the corporations, charging that “unions have grown too powerful” and demanding that unions “must be curbed by tough new laws.”
Not long afterwards, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came out flat-footed and blamed the union movement for encouraging inflation by demanding wage increases greater than the production of wealth. It was at this point that he launched his fiscal attack to slow down the economy, and to create large-scale unemployment. This was the weapon he chose to instil fear of job-loss and curb the strike movement. The government and state, as an instrument of monopoly, was rarely more clearly exposed than when this broadside was aimed at the working people, with not a single shot being fired at corporate profits and their unconscionable price-fixing, which are the main components of the economic crisis.
To the employers the cry for eliminating strikes in essential services is but the means to an end; for them all strikes threaten an essential service – that of the workers providing the service of making profits for the owners. To give any ground whatsoever on the right of service workers to strike is to give ground on all fronts. This also applies with equal force to the increasing demand that the strike weapon be taken away from the construction workers, a demand which pictures the construction trades’ “high” hourly rates as “greed” at the expense of the community, but which carefully says nothing of the fact that unemployment is highest in construction, and that annual take-home earnings of many workers are below those of manufacturing and other industries.
As for the public service workers, hundreds of thousands receive scandalously low wages for their labour. This fact was recently highlighted in the great united struggle of the government workers in Quebec, where the central union demand is for a minimum salary of $100 a week, a demand that is only equivalent to the level of unemployment insurance benefits a worker who makes the maximum contributions receives. What hope would the Quebec public workers have to achieve even this miserable minimum if they were denied the right to strike?
Unemployment causes great losses
Bosses, the press and business politicians never tire of bemoaning the losses resulting from strikes: lost production, lost wages, lost earnings and the overall loss to the economy. The fact is, of course, that the struggles of the working people produce far greater overall gains than the so-called losses incurred. Through bargaining, struggle and strikes, the working people add tens of millions of dollars to their pay packets and the purchasing power of the mass of the people; tens of millions of dollars which otherwise would fatten the profits of the corporations and the wealth of the non-producing owners. The right to strike is good for the community, the country and the people.
A vital statistic hidden in the back pages of the press, while strike struggles are given the headlines, is that of the real and irretrievable loss to the economy, people and country. Compared to the production loss through strikes, the loss through direct boss action in plant closures and layoffs is massive and almost beyond belief. One statistic will suffice to illustrate the comparison: In 1971, person-days of work lost through strikes was 2,910,580, while unemployment accounted for 12.5 million lost person-days of work in one month alone, or, extended to 12 months, a loss of 150 million person-days.
There is no emphasis by government on this stupendous economic loss, no demand on the private owners of industry to curb layoffs. All the emphasis is on curbing strikes and the wage demands of labour. The role of government in capitalist society is best seen in its antagonism toward the working people, and its favoured treatment of the business community, in the laws which favour the rich over the poor, and in the never-ending concessions made to the corporations.
“Soak the poor and reward the rich”
When government tips its hat even slightly toward labour’s needs, the full pressure of big business is exerted to straighten it out. The limited change in federal labour laws proposed by Labour Minister Bryce Mackasey, making possible a very restricted right to strike on disputes over technological changes, met with the full fury of business opposition. Bryce Mackasey is no longer minister of labour, and all the red corpuscles have been drained from the little blood contained in his proposal. Likewise, Edgar Benson and Ron Basford, former finance minister and consumer affairs minister respectively, whose Taxation Act and Competition Act were not completely pleasing to business. Both were shifted around the cabinet table to less sensitive areas.
Not that business had anything in particular to fear from the new federal Taxation Act. While it gave very minor relief to the very bottom income levels, it continues to extract taxes from those with incomes below the poverty level defined by Canada’s Economic Council. It imposes additional taxes on the middle-income group and the top-paid workers, while providing hefty tax advantages to the wealthy. Even more blatant in its “soak the poor and reward the rich” composition, the most recent Ontario budget effectively places the new tax burden on the middle- and lower-income population.
Federal and provincial governments have developed a thriving business of handing out tax money to the corporations in loans and outright gifts. Plant closures take place in some communities, and are re-opened in others, with the new plant and equipment largely financed by government. Tax dollars are put at the disposal of US- and Canadian-owned companies, although the lion’s share has gone to the foreign-owned, to move from higher to lower wage areas, from unionized to non-unionized sectors. Tax remissions are handed out as in the case of the Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (96.1 percent owned by Sun Oil of the US) which received a rebate of $6 million because the company had had the “hard luck” to purchase machinery when a particular tax was in effect. The rebate was arranged by federal Treasury Board President C. M. Drury, the same Mr. Drury who leaves civil servants no alternative other than to strike by his refusal to agree to salary adjustments over six percent.
All this is happening when corporation profits are on a rapid upward climb, with industrial corporation profits for the last quarter of 1971 registering a whopping 30 percent increase over the same period a year earlier. As for Drury’s $6 million handout to Great Canadian Oil Sands, the parent company, Sun Oil, made a cool profit of $152 million in 1971.
Governments which grease the palms of big business are the same governments which take punitive action against the workers, to “cool” the wage demands. They are busy whipping up an anti-labour froth behind which they are ready to launch further legislative attacks on the right to strike. The business-controlled news media hammer away at the “evil” of strikes, calling for “other means” to settle industrial disputes.
The real “sabre-toothed tigers” which stalk abroad in this society are the exploiters of labour, those who amass wealth and power from the labour of others. The “living fossils” are not strikes and the working class, but the private corporations which limit the economy to the profit they make, holding in check the productive forces which could satisfy all human needs, and causing mass unemployment and poverty in the midst of plenty.
Until the working class and its allies sweep away the outmoded and fossilized capitalist system, freeing the productive forces to serve human beings under socialism, the right to strike will remain essential and indispensable to the interests of all those who toil in this society. Without the right to strike, “all other means” would be meaningless.
[Photo: Teamsters Canada Rail Conference members protest the government’s decision to force them back to work]
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