Toronto library workers reach settlement after strike

This article originally appeared at Fightback.

Ending an 11-day strike, Toronto public library employees returned to work on Friday, March 30 after members of CUPE Local 4948 voted to accept a new contract.

Workers had walked off the job after contract negotiations with the Library Board broke down. City representatives desired greater “flexibility” in denying job security to permanent library employees, by making it easier to lay off workers in the event of outsourcing or technological changes.

Under the terms of the collective agreement that expired on Dec. 31, no permanent library workers could be laid off even if the city outsourced their jobs. Such job security provisions were the main target of the municipal government during negotiations.

Local 4948 represents 2,300 library workers, the majority of them women, including 440 librarians, 730 part-time pages (often students) who stock shelves, and hundreds of customer service assistants. More than half the workers are employed in part-time positions.

By going on strike, Toronto library workers illustrated that the only way to fight austerity is by challenging the bosses and their government lackeys head-on. Yet we must realize that the final agreement only softens the blow.

All library workers will receive a small wage increase that fails to keep pace with the current rate of inflation. The union managed to protect benefits, but sacrificed job security for younger workers – a major concession on the key issue.

The Toronto Star reported:

Under the new four-year collective agreement, full-time and part-time workers will be protected from layoffs after they earn 11 years of seniority.

[...]

The agreement includes a wage freeze this year, a lump-sum payment of 1.5 per cent at the beginning of 2013 (less for part-time workers), and increases of 0.225 per cent in 2013, 1.75 per cent in 2014, and 2.25 per cent in 2015. That is slightly less than the outdoor workers received from Ford.

Under the contract, no full-time jobs will be converted to part-time jobs and a “modest” number of full-time jobs will be created, [union president Maureen] O’Reilly said.

The dominant feeling expressed by union representatives after the final deal was that this was the best deal workers could get. Such sentiments indicate that labour remains on the defensive.

Despite trumpeting its victory over Mayor Rob Ford in the 2012 budget by preventing some of the more unpopular service cuts, Toronto City Council still voted in January to eliminate 107 full-time library service positions and shrink the collections budget. Even with the new agreement, the long-term trajectory of the city’s public library system remains dire.

Once the new layoffs are implemented, library staff will have decreased by 17% since amalgamation even as circulation increased 23%. Dwindling job security, including the proliferation of part-time employment, has developed alongside a heavier workload as budget cuts put greater pressure on remaining workers at the library’s 98 branches.

In its document “The New Threat”, OurPublicLibrary.to, a network sponsored by the Toronto Public Library Workers Union, argued that the offensive on workers is part of an attempt by the Ford administration to hollow out the public library system from within.“Lowering the quality of public services and increasing public dissatisfaction,” it notes, “is a tried and true strategy for privatization.”

Introduction of the profit motive through privatization would inevitably result in the closure of branches, higher user fees, fewer books, and reduced accessibility of information and services. It would also accelerate the process of layoffs and attacks on job security for library workers.

Despite the limited nature of their gains, the library workers’ strike – the first of Rob Ford’s 15-month administration – underscores a growing shift in consciousness. Workers increasingly realize they can trust no one but themselves. Experiences on the picket line are creating a new sense of solidarity and recognition of their own power.

Members of the Toronto Young New Democrats repeatedly intervened at picket lines during the strike to show solidarity with union members. The workers and youth sang traditional labour songs together, including “Which Side Are You On?” and “Solidarity Forever”.

“I was tremendously appreciative of TYND showing up to support us in our efforts to gain a fair deal with the employer,” said Alan Harnum, Senior Applications Specialist in E-Services and picket captain at the Toronto Reference Library, in an e-mail. “One of the biggest morale-boosters while on strike is being supported by those without an apparent direct personal stake in the dispute with the employer.

“Speaking personally,” he wrote, “the strike experience has been an extensive practical lesson for me in the value of solidarity: with my co-workers on the line, with the members of other unions who showed up to support us, with groups like the Toronto Young New Democrats, and with citizens from all walks of life who walked the picket line with us for a time or otherwise offered support.

“If the union ‘won’ the strike, it was because we successfully persuaded people that we were not engaged in protectionism, but [were] conscious participants on one side of a struggle against institutional forces seeking the diminishment and destruction of valued public services.

“I emerged from the strike with a greater sense of connection to many of my fellow workers at Toronto Public Library.”

The workers united will never be defeated is no mere slogan, but the only way forward in the face of a vicious onslaught by the capitalist elite against working people. The NDP must take a firm stance against these attacks. Only a militant labour movement, with solidarity actions to unite workers and youth, can fight austerity and win.

Caterpillar Closes Electro-Motive Plant

One of the big labor issues here in Canada is the U.S.-based Caterpillar corporation locking out workers at its Electro-Motive plant in London, Ontario, and threatening to move the factory unless workers took a 50% pay cut.

There was a massive demonstration in London a couple weeks ago. Some of my comrades from Toronto went in solidarity, along with masses of union workers from all over North America. But apparently, it was all for naught: the company just voted to close down the plant.

From the Toronto Star:

The timing of Caterpillar Inc.’s decision to close its locked-out London locomotive plant was no accident.

On Wednesday, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels signed into law a so-called right-to-work bill making his state the first in the U.S. industrial north to directly take on private-sector unions.

Two days later, Caterpillar — which is based in next-door Illinois — closed its unionized London plant.

Since it locked out 460 Canadian workers in January, the giant U.S. firm had made little secret of its intent to move their jobs to Muncie, Indiana.

All it was waiting for, apparently, was a signal that the state government there was serious about crippling trade unions.

The London plant closing is not an isolated event. It is part of a coordinated attack across North America on unions and wages.

So now Indiana is a "right-to-work" state? Bad news for unions in the northern states.

Workers everywhere need to stand firm together against the aggression of the bosses and their servants in government. I agree with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP): the government "should seize the Caterpillar assets in London and ensure that all community and worker obligations are fully met."

Of course, that'll never happen under the Harper regime. But it's still a good sign that the union is advocating such measures.

On Clarity

The worse things get, the clearer the solution becomes.

I can't remember the last time I read the news and did not become actively pissed off at what I was hearing. Regardless of whether I learn something on corporate news networks or a Marxist blog, the facts themselves are almost always enraging. Despite the brief rays of hope we saw during the Arab Spring, and the events around the world inspired by the heroic struggles of the Middle East (e.g. Wisconsin), the powers-that-be are still to strong to allow events to spiral out of their control for too long. When the Arabs finally rose up in revolt against the brutal Western-backed dictators that had held them down for decades, the corporate elite was taken totally by surprise. Yet they clawed their way back to relevance through the most blunt expression of their power: brute military force.

NATO's Libya adventure has now lasted for months and is probably the most visible expression of the increasing lawlessness of the Western bourgeoisie. Barack Obama's autocratic decision to commit the United States to another Middle Eastern war was helped along by a Congress seemingly more eager than ever to demonstrate its own irrelevance. The Obamabots - those Democratic loyalists who will cheer whatever Obama does, despite criticizing the same conduct when Bush did it - fell for the ruse of a "humanitarian war" hook, line and sinker. The accompanying propaganda has been excruciating, as another designated official enemy - in this case, Libyan strongman Col. Qaddafi - becomes the latest Hitler.

Most mornings on the way to work, I read the free newspaper Metro that they hand out at the TTC train stations. It contains recut articles from the Associated Press and so you get the most blandly uninformative, "objective" (i.e. corporate-friendly) account of the news possible. Ever since the Libya war began, Western reporters have dutifully fallen in line, accepting any and all propaganda their governments feed them while playing the part of adversarial, hardcore journalists when it comes to reporting on the Libyan side. There's plenty of reason to doubt the allegations of Qaddafi equipping his troops with Viagra and condoms and ordering them to engage in mass rapes, but our "free press" are the best stenographers around when it comes to swallowing government claims wholesale.

Oh, today Obama dramatically escalated his other undeclared illegal war in Yemen, giving the CIA carte blanche to intensify its drone strikes. During all of this, of course, the overriding concern of the crusading journalists in the U.S. media was Anthony Wiener's wiener - naturally overlooking the fact that nothing illegal happened and this was a purely personal matter between the Representative and his wife. It makes me sick to see them question a humiliated, powerless figure like Wiener (despite the fact that I'm no fan of his slavish pandering to Israel and AIPAC) and pretend that they're the heroic checks on power they apparently still think they are. As always, Glenn Greenwald said it best.

Why do I mention all these disparate subjects? I guess because they illustrate the rapid decline of our media, politics, and socio-economic system over the last few decades, but especially the American one. All the way up to a few years ago, I would read blogs like Crooks and Liars to hear the latest inanities uttered by some Republican politician and get annoyed that anybody could be stupid enough to believe their lies. Now, of course, things are so exponentially worse that I don't even notice things like that anymore. I almost have more respect for the deluded Republican base than the Obamabots, because at least they're opposed to Obama, despite it being for completely fictitious and nonsensical reasons cooked up at False News and right-wing talk radio. I certainly have more "respect" (not the right word, but the best I could think of) for Republicans than Democrats, because at least they're basically honest about screwing working people and fellating the rich, while the Democrats lie their asses off pretending to care about ordinary people.

With the total bankruptcy of the two-party system - and that includes both Democrats/Republicans in the U.S. and the Liberals/Conservatives in Canada - the necessity for a socialist alternative has never been greater. In Canada the NDP is coming off strong from the recent federal election, when it finally became the Official Opposition. Down south, the need for a Labor Party is increasingly obvious even to the reformists; witness AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka finally getting the message and beginning the process of jettisoning labour from the Democratic Party. Most people in North America are far from having any kind of socialist ideology, but I've learned so much in the past several months from Fightback and the International Marxist Tendency that I have a far better grasp of theory than ever. The class struggle is an objective reality and most workers are beginning to realize that.

That's why the struggle in the years ahead, despite its difficulties, paints a clear picture of objective class relations that will become more and more obvious to everyone the worse the global economy gets and the more they push these austerity policies on us. I started writing again today because I've been reading for so long and it's time for me to start speaking out once more using the power of the pen. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Air Canada employees have both begun strike actions recently, which will set the tone for the years of struggle to come. It's time to get down to business - meaning it's time to fight business.

ONDY Stands With Hamilton Steelworkers

Members of the Ontario New Democratic Youth (ONDY) showed their solidarity with Hamilton steelworkers Sunday evening when they joined picket lines outside a local U.S. Steel plant that had locked out hundreds of its employees after their union refused company-ordered pension cuts.


Youth delegates came straight from the 2010 ONDY Convention, which had seen a marked policy shift to the left as attendees embraced the street-level organizing of the Toronto Young New Democrats. Almost immediately, the new ONDY executive team illustrated their activist approach by dispatching representatives to the Wilcox Street steel mill in support of the United Steelworkers.

With white banner in tow proclaiming their group’s dedication to “socialism and freedom”, ONDY activists arrived on the scene in high spirits, singing “Solidarity Forever” and joining the crowd of 400 workers and their supporters. Company security struggled in vain to close the gates while police looked on, as a dozen ONDY representatives mingled with the workers in a sea of union flags and homemade signs.

Tension had been steadily rising in the days and weeks beforehand as U.S. Steel pressured Local 1005 USW into accepting changes to its pension system.

Management had two key demands: an end to the indexing of pension payments for the plant’s 9000 retired workers, and cancelling the existing pension plan for all new employees by replacing it with a defined contribution retirement savings plan. U.S. Steel claims its austerity measures are necessary to keep the Hamilton plant competitive, but union leaders accuse the company of sowing discord between younger and older workers in a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy.

“They’re trying to incite the younger workers,” said Local 1005 president Rolf Gerstenberger, “to get them to attack the pensioners and to say, ‘we don’t care what happens to the pensioners, nothing to do with us, we’re just worried about our jobs.’ So this is very deliberate on their part.

“They want to see if the younger workers will grovel, if they’ll submit, if they’ll be scared. They’ll do the Chicken Little routine and then they figure they’ll have control of the plant for the next generation. We’re calling on the younger workers, especially, to step up and to take their position and to fight like we did 30 years ago,” he said, referring to the 1981 Stelco strike.

Gerstenberger’s emphasis on young workers was a perfect fit for the ONDY delegation. Picketing workers expressed appreciation for the presence of dedicated young activists in their fight against corporate greed.

Elected representatives of the New Democratic Party were also out in full force, including NDP MPs Dave Christopherson (Hamilton Centre), Chris Charlton (Hamilton Mountain), Wayne Marston (Hamilton East – Stoney Creek) and MPP Paul Miller (Hamilton East – Stoney Creek).

“You cannot be a Hamiltonian working person and not be outraged by what’s going on here,” said Christopherson, a former president of CAW Local 525, in an impassioned speech to assembled workers.

“What happens to a retiree that enters into a period [of high inflation] with no protection whatsoever?” he demanded. “What’s the purchasing power of that pension? What’s the quality of their life? Why is that an issue here, when we’ve got so many people who’ve already worked a lifetime and they deserve that damn pension!”

The ONDY delegation remained at the gates for hours until the crowd finally began to disperse, leaving picketing to volunteers who signed up for 4-hour shifts.

As the lockout drags on into the indefinite future, those workers will form the front line of Local 1005’s defence, but they will not be alone. In this difficult struggle, Hamilton steelworkers and their families can count on the loyal and active support of the new ONDY – an energetic and growing organization.

The Relevance of Labour Unions Today

Originally published at Kingstonist.

In spite of national peculiarities the labor movement has overleaped national boundaries. Economic conditions are swiftly becoming the same the world over…As trade becomes international and the market a world market, the labor leaders in the several countries tend to draw together to exchange ideas, work out programs for common action, and protect the workers of each country against the competition of other countries.

- Mary Beard, A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1921)

The Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts, a weeklong event designed to encourage social change by bridging the gap between artists and workers, hit Kingston last week. In addition to the Mayday Festival in Skeleton Park, tours of the working class Swamp Ward, screenings of labour-oriented films such as coalmining epic Matewan, and art exhibitions at the Artel and Modern Fuel, the celebration also featured lectures on issues like sexual harassment in the workplace and the social stigma faced by sex workers.

Of these lectures, perhaps the most pertinent to the broader future of the labour movement was last Tuesday’s discussion panel on “The Relevance of Labour Unions Today” at the downtown public library. Upstairs in the Wilson Room, an audience of around 20 people gathered to hear a trio of speakers talk about the role of unions locally and internationally. If there were broad themes to be found, they were the importance of organizing, tying labour to local communities through social justice, and creating an international movement of workers to combat the influence of transnational capital.

Each of the speakers was either active in the labour movement or had researched it extensively. The panel included Debi Wells, president of the Kingston and District Labour Council; Shell Sweeney, regional organizer for the Public Service Alliance of Canada; and Andrew Stevens, a PhD candidate in sociology at Queen’s University.

Wells spoke first. Besides her work with the KDLC, which represents 40 local unions in the Kingston region with a membership of over 10,000 workers, Wells is first vice president of elementary teachers at the Limestone District School Board and sits on the Board of Directors as treasurer for the Kingston Economic Development Corporation. She began by relating the experience of Hamilton during the “economic heyday” of the 1950s through to the 1970s. During this time, non-union workers at the Dofasco steel plant received relatively high wages and benefits – mainly due to the fact that unionized workers at rival Stelco had raised the bar by exerting pressure on their employers.

Kingston, said Wells, had a similar experience.

DuPont [chemical company] never had an independent union, and they always got paid a little more than Alcan [aluminium company]. I’m talking pennies an hour more than Alcan, which was always well-organized, and they too benefitted from having unions.

Wells explained how unions began as a form of workers’ protection in the early industrial era, when workers were seen as expendable resources (a trend she warned was making a disturbing comeback via the term “human resources”). Labourers pooled their money together to ensure compensation in the case of death or injury: thus, she said, “if you lost an arm in Ottawa at the lumber mills, your family would get some money.” Wells went on to say:

I think that what sometimes we forget to appreciate is that the standards that many of us enjoy for wages and safety and benefits in our workplaces comes from unions and comes from people who’ve fought for them and negotiated them. Not just wages, but benefits and also rights – the right to not be fired for no reason at all, the right to not be discriminated against for an ever-lengthening list of things, the right to have seniority respected, the rights to return to a job after maternity leave.

Today, globalization has led to dangerous backslides in workers’ rights, as transnational corporations have embraced outsourcing as a means of shifting production to countries that employ dirt-cheap labour at slave wages. With domestic workers increasingly facing part-time, temporary employment, Wells admitted that the past decade had not been a progressive one from labour’s perspective.

Outsourcing is a way to lower wages. It’s a way to save money, and to sidestep the need for safety standards, to not have to deal with benefits. It’s really quite lovely – just send the work elsewhere. There are many instances in industrialized countries now of unions working with the employers trying to get around that, because the employers find that they can’t do all of the work in other countries.

One of the questions about the relevancy of the union movement is that they’re not keeping up with the whole globalization movement – they’ve not being globalized. I disagree. I think the union movement is trying, and I think that we’re going to get there. I know that in Canada and in the States and in Europe, the union movement…[is] fighting, for example, in Colombia, where union organizers are being killed. We’re fighting for fair trade agreements, we’re fighting for fair trade goods. We’re fighting against child labour in other countries, and I think that’s the direction we have to go.

People have to be organized for their own protection. And not just in third world countries – here. People have to be organized, for their own protection, whether you’re migrant workers or whether you’re in an industry or a sector that’s not well-regulated. We have to fight for that. The robber barons in the 19^th century – they didn’t just decide to be nice and share. We took it from them. And there were some big fights about that. But now they seem to want it back, and I think that we have seen a lot of very smart attacks against unions.

She pointed to recent attacks on pensions. Governments around the world (including Ontario’s) are currently pushing austerity measures to make workers pay for the global economic crisis, which has helped fuel the ongoing riots in Greece.

The idea that you could have an economic crisis caused basically by banks blamed on the union movement, because people make too much money and they’ve put too much aside in their pensions, is actually sort of stunning. Unions in good faith negotiated those pensions…[management is] reneging on deals here.

I think that the right to grow old in dignity is not too much to ask for. I think that safe working conditions are not too much to ask for. I think that unions will be relevant as long as business interests put profit ahead of human interests.

Next up was Sweeney, representative of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. The PSAC is one of the country’s largest unions, with more than 172,000 members from coast to coast working in the federal government, its agencies, and the broader public sector (including universities and women’s shelters). Sweeney explained her union philosophy thusly: “it really is no more complicated than having fairness and respect in the workplace, and then connecting to the community.”

She detailed how she got her start as a union organizer while a grad student at the University of Western Ontario. Involved in student politics, Sweeney volunteered to be union steward and attended a local labour council, where she talked about homelessness and international solidarity to a stony response from the local – essentially, “what does that have to do with us?”

Those who wish to affect large-scale social change, she argued, need to prevent lines from being drawn between labour and community organizing. Having previously worked with Burmese human rights organizations, Sweeney knows that unions must fight a perpetual battle against corporate media and big business, which tend to characterize strikes as money-grabs by greedy workers.

It’s nothing new. Now the rhetoric has shifted to ‘in these economic times…’, that there’s no longer a role for unions and we all have to get along and everybody has to give up their bit. We all know it’s bullshit…I don’t pretend to be the expert. All I know is why workers are choosing to organize, and it’s because of the fear of contracting out, the fear of privatization.

She criticized the prevalence of so-called “public-private partnerships” (PPPs), more often than not a euphemism for contracting out government functions to the private sector. Yet Sweeney was not completely opposed to the idea in principle.

I think we need to keep working really hard to build bridges between the public and private sectors as well, and we’ve seen some nice examples of that with respect to the Vale-Inco strike up north…in Sudbury. Again, big business, big company overseas…comes in, total disrespect for Canadian labour laws, and they know that it’s a challenge for us to stick together and figure it out. Hence the importance for international solidarity, which is why, again, it always comes down to building community.

Rounding out the speakers was Andrew Stevens, who drew on his research into outsourcing to offer a more international scope on the state of unions. That research began in 2003 when the campaign to unionize teaching assistants at Queen’s got off the ground. Stevens quickly found that attempts to unionize TAs here encountered similar problems as efforts to unionize call centre workers in India – namely, a widespread perception that self-declared “professionals” did not require unions.

The usual question that comes up is, ‘what is the relevance of unions?’. They don’t see it. ‘We don’t need unions, we’ve got laws, we’ve got an apparatus that protects workers’ rights.’ And I said, ‘well, who do you turn to in the event of unjust dismissals and grievances without a union?’ Call a labour board and they’ll tell you that there are really few recourses for action unless you have the capital to actually hire a lawyer and take on the case yourself. And so, what I think has actually happened is there’s this removal of the culture or tradition of unionism in certain sectors.

In describing the need for an international workers’ movement, Stevens dug up the quote from American historian and campaigner for women’s suffrage Mary Beard shown at the top of this article. Internationalism, he said, did not mean the abandonment of national orientations, but rather recognized a working class solidarity that transcended those borders. He urged the creation of global union federations (GUFs) as a means of combating transnational corporations, enforcing an international law for the implementation of labour codes, and creating a commonwealth for labour initiatives.

"I guess the best analogy I would use is thinking about the global union movements as the body," said Stevens. "The local or the regional campaigning and the organizing is certainly the backbone, and the international federations I think operate in many respects like the nerve centre, coordinating different parts of the body and communicating limbs with the brain, etc. So this isn’t yet a structure in which we can say there’s a massive international union, but it’s slowly coalescing into something more concrete compared to what has existed in the past."

He emphasized that workers must be seen as a united force in order to build a movement from the ground up with GUFs. The ongoing strike of Vale-Inco workers in Sudbury could be seen as a model; workers might also build support across different demographics by addressing social issues. Finally, the labour movement must recognize the transitory, often temporary nature of modern employment and adjust its perspective accordingly.

For union network internationals, it has actually been about looking for ways of regulating markets and regulating labour markets, providing a union that goes with you from workplace to workplace given the very flexible and very footloose nature of employment in certain sectors, from graphic designers to engineers. This whole idea of lifelong employment is really receding in certain sectors…what the union movement has said is that we need to create flexible unions that actually carry services and benefits and the capacity to resist throughout certain regions.

Following these three presentations, an hour-long question and answer period rounded out the evening.