Submitted on Wed, 11/02/2005 - 5:40am
CBC workers should take over production facilities and lock themselves in.
By Yves Engler, Straight Goods - Industrial Worker, October 2005.
All progressive Canadians should support workers who are currently "locked out" by CBC management. They are fighting an important struggle over the future of public service broadcasting in an era when powerful political and economic forces would be pleased by CBC's demise. Private broadcasters would love to have the airwaves all to themselves.
But lost in the fog of advertising-driven media obfuscation is the reality that this battle is fundamentally about workers' power and independence.
CBC is trying to introduce an extreme top-down model in which a select few managers get to pick and choose whose contract will be renewed. Workers will have no right to their jobs. In the name of "flexibility" the CBC will become the modern equivalent of the scene in many films where Depression-era longshoremen crowd at the gate waiting to be chosen for a shift by all-powerful overseers. (Camera pans across a sea of hungry faces - a finger points at the lucky few. "You, you and you; the rest go home, that's it for today.") Everyone who has seen one of these waterfront movies knows how this system breeds corruption and concentration of power.
Submitted on Wed, 11/02/2005 - 5:32am
By Friends of NEFAC, MONTREAL - Industrial Worker, October 2005
The Confederation des Syndicats Nationaux has reached agreements at 18 Montreal hotels, and is now negotiating for similar agreements at other CSN-represented hotels across the province.
The first weeks of July were a time of intense mobilisation for some 4,000 hotel workers in Montreal. Contracts ended June 30 and workers responded with a week of disruption that began with informational picket lines during extended lunch breaks and culminated July 8 with a 24-hour strike. Sheraton settled with the union an hour before its 400 workers joined the strike; the Hilton reached an identical agreement the next day, while the Omni responded by locking out its 200 workers for nine weeks.
On July 12 a mass meeting set July 15 as the deadline to reach agreements with the remaining hotels. In the end, only the workers at the Plaza Metro Center had to go on strike to force an agreement matching the agreements with the Sheraton and Hilton.
The agreement involves wage increases of 11 percent over three years and abolishes the "wage ladder." After 30 days, everyone working the same job gets the same pay, promoting equality among workers. Instead, workers with more seniority will get more vacation time. Workers will now be entitled to 4 weeks' holiday after seven years on the job, and older workers can choose a three- or four-day work week. Health and pension benefits were also improved.
Submitted on Fri, 10/28/2005 - 4:02pm
Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.
Wade Rathke, ACORN CEO and union buster is up to his old tricks again. Recall that ACORN engaged in union busting against the IWW four years ago. Now he's attacking a New Orleans based grassroots union Community Labor United. The IWW is publishing this letter in solidarity with CLU:
An Open Letter to the Labor Movement Regarding Katrina: October 19, 2005
Brothers and Sisters,
The crisis for the working class (whether employed or not, waged or not) continues to grow. Even as the nation, and especially the poor and Black working class of the Gulf states and New Orleans in particular, tries to pick up the pieces after Katrina's (and Rita's) devastation, the assault by capital and their partners in the government grows more intense - the suspension of Davis Bacon and OHSA safeguards, plans to defund the safety net to finance business interests in the reconstruction of the region, little thought to how those left behind will find a home in the reconstruction process and its outcome. The Democrats have failed to articulate a credible alternative to this plan or address this crisis in any significant way.
Submitted on Fri, 10/28/2005 - 3:44pm
From http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/ - Eugene Plawiuk, October 23, 2005.
Teachers' union backs mediator's report
A few hours later, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Brenda Brown levied a $500,000 fine on the teachers' union for waging an illegal strike. Earlier, Ms. Justice Brown had frozen the union's assets making it impossible for striking teachers to receive their $50-a-day strike pay. It's the largest fine in Canadian history for civil contempt.
While the success of mass pickets by the BC FEd of Labour and CUPE led to the government buckling under and calling for a mediator...the final acceptance of the mediators report was made by the union...mass picketing worked...but as I predicted there would be no General Strike. Rather the labour movement, which does not consider itself a militant workers movement, but rather an intergral part of the capitalist system, accepts contracts as sacred. It accepts the give and take of labour relations as all there is, There is No Alternative (TINA).
And so the BC Teachers Federation accepted the mediators report which did justify the unions concern that class sizes were too big. But it said nothing about their other demands, whether about working conditions, wages or even an amnesty.
That being said the state of course has not assured the workers that they will accept the mediators report, and they allowed the courts to fine the union hours after the union capitualted.
"While the government accepted Mr. Ready's report, the teachers' union wanted a commitment from the province on a cap on class sizes.But B.C. Labour Minister Mike de Jong has refused to make any such guarantee."
Vengenace is in the mind of the Campbell government after being embarassed by the teachers walkout, the mass pickets and the overwhelming support of the people of B.C. for the teachers. This fight is not over, as the courts and Campbell government will use the Teachers as their whipping boy for daring to challenge them...the writing is on the wall. The teachers were fined hours after accepting the mediators report.
The teachers had no choice but to compromise, given the weight of the State and its Courts against them...this is a lesson for the whole labour movement, that workers rights are not given by contracts or the State, they are taken when we walk out and take the streets or when we seize our work places and put them under direct worker and community control. Such situations not only challenge the government but the very nature of capitalism.
Unfortunately the short sightedness of the labour movements vision has left the teachers in B.C. facing fines, and further charges, which of course they will bemoan but do little to affect. The Teachers should not go back to work until they are assured of a general amnesty. The public pickets and mass demonstration should continue until the Teachers are assured of this.
Unfortunately the labour movement has no intentions of doing anything of the sort. Not being a revolutionary workers movement, let alone a socialist one, they cannot concieve of doing anything other than going back to work.
Should they ever envision a workers movement to overthrow capitalism, they will of course shake their heads in disbelief as if arising from a bad dream. Not possible they will say. Foolish workers who believe in socialism, they will say. Like the foolishness of believing in the General Strike.
It is only a minority in the workers movement, they will say, the vast majority of our members don't want socialism or to create a classless society, they want to merely survive within capitalism.
The best we can expect from the labour movement is capitulation to contract law and the injunction that we should vote NDP to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism.
ONCE AGAIN THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN CANADA HAS SHOWN THAT IT IS THE HAND MAIDEN OF CAPITALISM AND NOT A WORKERS MOVEMENT.
But that should come as no surprize to anyone, well except the small sects on the Left who insist that unions can be radicalized. Not likely, as they are part and parcel of the capitalist game of labour relations, they lack vision beyond the mundane bread and butter issues of the daily grind under capitalism.
That they mobilized mass picketing is the least they could do, given the fact that the workers in B.C. have faced over four years of neo-liberal attacks by the Campbel neo-liberal Government. But they failed again, as they did with the nurses strike last summer, to go all the way to a General Strike. At the eleventh hour they once again capitualted to the State.
This should not surprise anyone since the workers movement exists beyond the reach of the unions, who speak for no one but their well heeled carrerists in the bueracracy.
Submitted on Wed, 10/26/2005 - 12:33am
The following letter is by IWW Member "x337969". They are directly involved in the struggle described below and they have direct experience working with the International Socialist Organization members and chapter described in this letter.
Many party groups on the left in the US are seen at political allies, and often they have something interesting to say about global and domestic US policy. It is unfortunate that some of them do not organize as well as they speak.
The Socialist Worker, the weekly lefty tabloid heartily distributed by members of the International Socialist Organization (US) published an article about the contract negotiations at Madison Market Coop in Seattle, with UFCW local 21. Based upon their track record for the past 10 years in activist circles, it is not surprising that the ISO would go out of their way to take credit for the work of others, but in this case, they are talking about things that didn't happen at all. The reason this issue is of concern to us is because the IWW has a shop with the same employer.