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.

Rob Ford and the Efficacy of Mass Protest

Toronto's new mayor took the oath of office yesterday. I was originally going to attend some inaugural anti-Ford protests, but in the end decided not to. The main reason was likely going to bed too late the night before and opting to sleep in. But the deeper reason was that my reading of Death of the Liberal Class had left me feeling momentarily skeptical about the effectiveness of mass protest as a means of fighting bourgeois policies.

40-50 years ago, the protest as a form of mass resistance was still able to send a chill down the spine of the elite. They remembered the agitation of workers in the 1930s and feared the power of a mobilized working class. We saw the effect of mass protest in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the eventual American withdrawal from Vietnam. But the elites learned from their experience during the counterculture, and in the decades that followed, as media ownership was concentrated more and more in the hands of a few vast conglomerates, the corporate interests that owned the press learned that it was relatively easy to ignore or ridicule popular movements if they interfered with elite goals. The worldwide 2002 protests against the impending invasion of Iraq were the largest organized protest in human history, yet failed to prevent the Bush administration's rush to war. The election of Barack Obama largely neutralized the American anti-war movement, although as casualties continue to mount in Afghanistan a more concerted push from below may take shape again.

Chris Hedges' pessimistic take on protest should not be mistaken for a disinclination to use it. Rather, his glass half-empty view is predicated on a sober, honest assessment of working class strength today and is part of a larger argument advocating resistance for its own sake. Nevertheless, it was the more superficial version of this lesson that I used to justify my decision to sleep through Rob Ford's inauguration.

Ultimately, this protest in particular was a great example of protest for its own sake, because there was literally no chance it was going to affect anything on this day - other than, of course, further raising public awareness of Ford's reactionary nature. But it was never as if the new mayor was going to see people protesting what for him was the high point of his career and immediately decide to renounce the new office.

I'm all for new subway lines, and while critics of his idea to literally sweep the homeless off the street in winter have some merit in describing the tactic as "fascistic", preventing Toronto's homeless from freezing to death on sewer grates does have its merits, no? But in my view, the main danger from Ford has always been severe cuts to social services under the guise of Stopping The Gravy Train - that, and the assumption that as a right-wing faux-populist he would more ruthlessly execute the agenda of Big Business than any of his competitors. Right now Ford is still a lively, bubbling novelty, a living caricature as good for entertainment value as anything. Time will tell exactly how concerned we should be, but regardless of who holds the mayor's seat, our immediate task and central focus is organizing the workers, the poor and unemployed of Toronto to fight for their own interests.

In The Belly of the Beast: My G20 Experience

It had been, I felt, a productive day of protest. Thousands of people had defied the rain on this gray Saturday, June 26, 2010 to vent their rage against the global corporate elite as its leading representatives met in Toronto for the G20 summit. My friends and I took advantage of a free bus ride offered in Kingston by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) to make our way to the T-dot that weekend, and what I had seen so far had left me deeply moved. The sheer size of the turnout was impressive, especially given the poor weather, and seeing so many passionate activists engaged in that most basic and essential of democratic activities - grassroots protest - was a powerful rebuttal to any suspicions I might have had that the Canadian public was too lethargic to get out in the streets and make its voice heard.



True, there had been some worrying signs after the masses assembled in Queen's Park and peacefully marched down University Avenue. We had seen a young man with his hand over an eye, blood running down his face, as his comrades ushered him through the crowd and cried out for a medic. Maybe he got in a cop's face, we thought. Eventually the protesters found themselves blocked off by a line of police at Queen Street East. The 5-0, decked out from head to toe in their latest quasi-fascist militarized police togs, shields raised and batons ready, may have been an intimidating presence, were it not for a crowd that refused to let itself be intimidated. A drum circle directly in front of the line provided a defiant flow of tribal beats; animal rights activists defended the sanctity of all life on this planet while I got my picture taken with a girl dressed up as a giant gray seal (a moment recorded for a TV update on Global News). When the cops took a menacing step forward, a girl cried out, "Sit down! They can't move us back if we're sitting down!" I grabbed my friend's megaphone and further spurred the crowd on to a sit-down protest - "the easiest form of protest", I declared - and the police were stopped in their tracks.


We experienced one unsettling moment when the police were ordered to don their gas masks. "Put on your bandanas!" yelled people in the crowd. As one officer perched high and aimed his riot gun menacingly at the protesters, we saw signs of tear gas in the air behind us. Yet for this afternoon, on this particular street, the crowd seemed safe for the time being. After a while, my friends and I decided to grab a bite at a Vietnamese restaurant and eventually found our way to Kensington Market, where we rented a room at a backpackers' hostel. Taking a breather, we switched on the TV for an update on how the Canadian media was reporting what we had just seen.

There was zero resemblance between the two narratives. What the CBC News Network, like the others, aired over and over was a single shot of a police car burning, sandwiched in-between footage of black-clad protesters smashing in the windows of banks and a Starbucks. There was no reporting whatsoever on what the protesters had actually been saying - i.e. what they were protesting against, or the myriad progressive solutions they put forth. Rather, there was a generic focus on "violent protesters", alarmism over the "anarchists" that had apparently swarmed the city, and an overall narrative that purported to offer all the necessary justification for Stephen Harper's $1.3 billion in security costs.


From this moment on, the dominant voices of the Canadian establishment completely submerged the voices of the protesters and drowned them in a sea of media-inspired agitation over the anarchist mob. I had seen members of the so-called Black Bloc as we filed out of Queen's Park: a wave of young people clad completely in black walking past me with bandanas covering their faces. It quickly became apparent that these people represented the outer boundaries of protest tactics - willing to go where the larger mass of people did not. The majority of the marchers I saw wielded a more subtly effective weapon: words. Chants of "peaceful protest" and "this is what democracy looks like" interspersed with "this is what a police state looks like" made clear the protesters' essentially Gandhian approach while maintaining a full-blooded stance of anger at the corporate elites who have plundered and poisoned our planet, destroyed the Canadian manufacturing base, pushed for bloody wars of imperial conquest all while relentlessly punishing the poor for the crimes of the wealthy bankers who crashed the world economy.



The most telling quote I heard the whole weekend came from an older gentleman beside me who faced down the line of police at University and Queen and asked a question as simple as it was profound: "What are you afraid of?" he demanded to know.

The answer, if you want it, is right here. But to summarize: the massive turnout of the police and tightening of the security apparatus was not simply about protecting the delicate ears of the G20 leaders. Rather, it was a dress rehearsal for the suppression of working class revolt by the Canadian capitalist elite, which fears the legitimate rage of a population facing long-term unemployment, endless war and looming ecological disaster. In this powder keg atmosphere, the corporate-financial elite is determined to hang on to its remaining privileges and power by any means necessary, including (as that formulation inevitably does) naked physical force.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to find something very fishy in Black Bloc protesters managing to set multiple police cars on fire and break store windows in a city virtually under martial law, with over 5000 police officers patrolling downtown Toronto alone. I walked those city streets myself and you could not walk more than 25 metres without passing a cop. The idea that police would leave squad cars alone in this environment is difficult to believe, and leaves open the possibility that the Black Bloc was infiltrated by police provocateurs who incited and/or led the destruction of property in order to justify a brutal crackdown on the protesters. Such a suggestion is not fantasy; there is well-documented precedent for just such infiltration. After the images of the burning cars and broken windows were broadcast ad nauseum to a clueless Canadian TV audience, with newscasters squeezing the word "violence" as frequently as possible within allotted time frames, the picture of the protest as anarchist war zone was complete, and for the rest of the weekend police had a convenient excuse for any repressive measures they wished to enact.

My friends and I would learn that firsthand the next day.

We largely stayed out of the protest scene on Saturday night; with intermittent rain and a general cluelessness as to where the main action was, we caught the patron saint of independent media, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, at Trinity St. Paul's United Church. She was promoting her new book, Breaking The Sound Barrier, but also reporting on the G20 protests for the show. As a matter of fact, we passed her on University Avenue during the afternoon march; she seemed in a rush, but asked if we would attend her lecture that night. Full of wit and stories of her reporting adventures, Goodman eloquently put forward the case for a media that does not merely kowtow to the powerful, but performs the heavy investigative lifting that makes the Fourth Estate such a crucial pillar of democracy in popular lore.

On Sunday, after a brief lunch at vegan restaurant Urban Herbivore, we headed to Queen's Park in expectation of a protest similar in size to yesterday's. However, we found that the crowds had thinned out considerably. We first came across the anti-Zionist Jews fiercely denouncing the state of Israel; amusingly, other protesters soon set up a sign directly next to them admonishing passers-by to "support the state of Israel against Hamas".


But that was part of the protest's charm as we saw it; divergent groups (albeit with a broader progressive unity than apparent in this example) coming together to protest the corporatist policies of the G20 and the Canadian state. It seemed like democracy at its finest. While there were no large protests at Queen's Park this day, we did sit down with members of the Zeitgeist Movement sitting on the grass next to the Earthians. Like most of the protesters I talked to, they were well-read, passionate yet friendly and laidback individuals. I interviewed Lawrence, a member of the Zeitgeist Movement (far right in picture below).


The Zeitgeist Movement, he explained, is a non-political social movement advocating technological salvation for humanity by building on the foundational similarities between cultures to develop a more sustainable economic model. He held that the technology already exists to create a higher standard of living for all, but is held captive by our current monetary system which subordinates such visions to a more base pursuit of profit and raw materials.

We have the means to make sure that wars don’t happen. What are the barriers to that? A lot of it is because of resource scarcity. So you see wars happen over areas that are very resource-rich. What needs to happen is that all the resources of the planet need to be declared the common heritage of all the world’s people. The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of something called the Venus Project, and the Venus Project is what’s putting forward these standards. It is the total redesign of the culture, talking about technologically unifying the globe. If we just update our thinking, and update the knowledge of the population as to the potential of our present-day technology to free us from boring and monotonous, socially offensive labour that you’re required to perform in order to feed and house yourself...we live in a society now where we’re wage slaves, essentially economic slaves. You know, a slave, you’re required to feed and house a slave. But an economic slave is required to feed and house themselves.

Impressed by his summary of the evils of capitalism, I told him that we had a lot in common and went into my usual argument about how socialism was the answer to humanity's problems. While he agreed with some of what I said, he intriguingly explained his opposition to my ideas by declaring that socialism didn't go far enough:

The one thing about socialism that is the same as capitalism, that’s the same as anything - free enterprise system, the same as fascism - is that they all operate within a monetary system [...] Money is really a root to a lot of large-scale problems. If you cannot get paid to do a job...I mean, 70% of non-violent crime is either drug-related or monetary-related, or related to money in some way.

We’re looking at unifying everyone. The problem with socialism is that it’s not radical enough. It’s radical, but it’s not radical enough. And when I say radical enough, I mean, when we’re talking about means of production or workers’ government, there doesn’t need to be that. The technology exists today to free everyone from food production, to free everyone from fabrication of homes and things like that. The technology today is incredible, and we’re able to do this.

So I understand where a socialist is coming from, where they’re like, “we want the people in power, we want a government of the people.” People not profits, that’s totally admirable. But is that possible in a monetary system? Greed and corruption are inherent in any sort of...when money is involved, when money is the reason for acquisition, incentive and exchange, especially incentive, especially incentive, when your incentive is to make money, then that comes first before [the] common good of [the] people.

After our chat with these interesting folks, my friends and I decided to head on down to where the action was. I made the decision to turn left onto a crosswalk, and didn't really perceive the danger of the cops on the traffic island until they said, "we're searching your bags." Note that was not a request. Anxious to avoid any legal trouble since I started a new job that requires a security clearance, I submitted to the search along with my two friends, one of whom had walked right into the lion's den. When the cops searched his bag, they found Ziploc bags filled with flour and paint that he had intended to pass out to protesters (telling them to add water) as a non-violent means of countering repressive crowd control by splashing the cops and making them look silly - in his words, "street theatre".


Barely seconds after the cops opened his bag, my friend was under arrest, in handcuffs and soon led into the back of a police van. The entire story of his imprisonment at "Torontanamo" is viewable here, but the gist is that his experience was rife with subtle forms of psychological torture. Those arrested were kept cuffed even when they were locked in a cage; they were denied food and water for long periods of time; forced to sleep on a cold concrete floor; he told of a couple 17/18-year-old girls who had been in lock-up for thirty hours without being allowed to call for legal aid. He was eventually processed, and the end charges were unbelievable. While the arresting officers had talked of a mischief charge, my friend is now accused of carrying dangerous weapons and looking at a six-month jail sentence. In a blatant violation of his Charter rights, he is banned from attending any future protests due to the bail conditions he agreed to in order to get released. No matter what you think of my friend's plan (and even he seems to think it was pretty stupid now), the threatened punishment in this case is grossly disproportional to the alleged crime. Although job considerations prevented me from acting in solidarity at his moment of arrest - although the only likely scenario would be my getting arrested too - I am fully supportive of him as he prepares to battle these outrageous charges.

Understandably, he describes his weekend as "cataclysmic", and it's hard to argue with that assessment. The weekend was full of innocent (and not-so-innocent) bystanders being arrested, harassed, or beaten by cops. The McGuinty government's cynical use of the 1939 Public Works Protection Act to radically expand police powers, which they attempted to slip past the media before it turned up on the e-laws website, is a useful gauge of this government's contempt for the people it claims to represent, as well as the intent of the police to go as far as they cared to go in harassing people. Although the law claimed people could be searched or arrested for not having ID within 5 metres of the perimeter fences, my experience on Sunday confirmed that in fact the police were exercising this power indiscriminately throughout the entire city. Following my friend's arrest, my remaining companion and I were searched on at least three more occasions that afternoon. On the initial search, police confiscated our ear plugs and bandanas - i.e., the only things we had to protect ourselves against crowd control devices like the LRAD sonic weapons and tear gas. No self-defense against the Canadian police state could be countenanced, it seemed.


Despite all the police violence and harassment, there remains one word I use to describe my experience of the G20: inspiring. Being stuck in small-town Kingston, it's hard to get across my excitement upon seeing thousands and thousands of committed activists all around me, whether labour groups like the PSAC, environmentalists such as Greenpeace ("There is no planet B" being one of my favourite signs), peaceniks, communists - in essence, all the groups that the media and mainstream discourse works hard to erase from the picture. They were all there in full force, daring to face down the militarized might of the capitalist state in order to reclaim democracy for the people (a sadly relevant distinction). I was inspired by the heartfelt dedication of the masses. Although I happened to see, believe it or not, a couple of Tea Party activists with an American flag - not to mention an old lady carrying a sign "Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged" - this was not that twisted parody of a popular uprising. Rather, it was from people smart enough to know who there real enemies were, and that higher level of awareness brought hope to me when I was beginning to drown in hopelessness for the future of humanity.

Along with the representatives of labour, environmentalists and youth - including the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Canadian Labour Congress and Greenpeace - I was stunned by the level of class consciousness and organized socialist resistance. Red banners and pictures of Karl Marx abounded, along with signs that said "Down with capitalism - long live socialism!" I marched with the Marxists, the Trotskyists, the Maoists and sampled party literature that was handed out to me on the street. For me, the novelty of seeing committed Marxists around me was enough, as I had grown used to the near-solitude of spreading that secular gospel in a small town like Kingston.


At one point early on, I talked to Adil Ahmed, representative of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq in Canada. He discussed the work of Iranian communist Mansoor Hekmat, and his reasons for being in Toronto reflected the heart of the anti-capitalist movement. "We came here to protest this summit, of course," he said, "this summit for the capitalist system. They came here to save the capitalist system, of course. And we are here to protect the people, that is, the worker class. This summit is against workers and poor people around the world, and we came here to say no to your policy, no to your system [...] Socialism is the only solution for humanity."


As I heard the union groups around me singing "Solidarity Forever", I drank in the populism. Adil came from an older tradition than I, but his doctrine of socialist internationalism was precisely my ideological cup of tea. Where before I had despaired of the future for organized political action by the working class in Canada, now I knew there were millions of people out there willing to fight for justice in the face of corporate enslavement. The overwhelming task that now faces us is the unity of the working class as it enters this new era of unadulterated class struggle. With his description of the solidarity of workers across national borders, Adil brought out my inner optimist.

We are here. It doesn't matter what kind of peoples, what languages they speak. We're all together here to say no to capitalism. We are stronger [than the elites], of course. We are 90% of the people, they are 5% of the people of the world. If we unite, we can do everything we want - if we do. If we unite, we can do anything. That's why we are here.

All photos by Andréa Prins.