Spartacist Canada No. 146	Fall 2005

Down With Telus Union-Busting!

Victory to the TWU!

VANCOUVER—On July 21, 13,700 members of the Telecommunications Workers Union (TWU) in B.C. and Alberta walked off the job when Telus arrogantly tried to impose a take-back contract. Telus then declared a lockout. The TWU has been without a contract for nearly five years. That’s five years of no pay increases, forced overtime and shredded union rights. Telus has axed 6,000 jobs since 2000. Now they want to gut the union in order to increase their already vast profits, which in the last three months doubled to $242 million.

This is a serious battle against a foe that is marshalling all its weapons against the union. A job in the phone industry used to be somewhat secure, but 20 years of deregulation, cutthroat competition and the growth of non-union outfits like Primus has resulted in huge job losses. Now Telus is demanding even greater “flexibility,” meaning untrammelled freedom to contract out union jobs and destroy working conditions.

TWU picket lines have been bolstered by CUPE public sector workers, Hospital Employees Union (HEU) members and many others. Hydro workers blocked scab trucks in northern B.C., while postal and other government workers have vowed to honour TWU pickets. On the picket lines in Vancouver, TWU members told Spartacist Canada salesmen that it would have been better if they had struck last year with the HEU. That’s for sure! In spring 2004, B.C. was on the brink of a general strike in solidarity with the HEU, who faced a union-busting, wage-slashing attack from the Campbell Liberals. The TWU had already voted massively for strike action in February; there was the basis for some hard class struggle that could have scored a win for the workers. Instead the TWU was chained to the job as the union tops pursued fruitless negotiations. In the end, the hospital workers were betrayed by their leaders, who called off the strike and pushed through a sellout deal while channelling workers’ anger into electing more NDP MLAs in the 2005 election.

Today, the main obstacle facing phone workers is a union leadership that pledges allegiance to the NDP “friends of labour” and puts its faith in supposedly “neutral” arbitrators and government boards. This political outlook has brought only defeats for the working class. B.C. NDP leader Carole James helped to knife the HEU strike last year. The NDP’s base may be in the unions, but when in power this pro-capitalist party necessarily rules in the interests of the bosses. In B.C., it has a long and ugly record of breaking strikes, fomenting anti-immigrant racism and unleashing massive police repression against Native protesters.

The Bosses’ Weapons Against the Workers

Telus’s chief weapon against the union is the capitalist state: the cops, courts, prisons, etc., whose purpose is to protect the filthy rich owners of industry and commerce against workers and the oppressed. On July 22 the company won a sweeping anti-union injunction that bans picketing if it “blocks, obstructs or impedes” access to company property and bars flying pickets from following unidentified vehicles, i.e., scabs. Pro-strike websites were even shut down! To supplement the long arm of the law, Telus hired AFI International, a “security” company of professional strikebreakers. AFI is scabherding and framing up TWU flying pickets for arrest.

After the 1999 merger of B.C. Tel and the Alberta-based Telus, phone workers voted to be represented by the TWU. Yet the courts ruled that the stronger B.C. contract would not apply in Alberta, where wages stayed low and contracting-out provisions were much weaker. Work once done by highly skilled unionized workers in B.C. was shipped to managers in Alberta. Today Telus is aggressively scabherding there, offering lower-paid Alberta workers inducements like free food, transport and $400 iPods. A core union demand is for wage parity at the higher B.C. level.

In response to Telus’s plan to establish call centers in the Philippines, the TWU leadership decried the “destruction of Canadian jobs and the economy of many communities” and “the movement of our work offshore to the Philippines and possibly India, China, Taiwan” (TWU Information Bulletin, 11 August). The utterly false underlying message is that Canadian workers have interests counterposed to workers in other countries. This in turn provoked a racist anti-Asian outburst on an online union bulletin board. The poison of racism and nationalist chauvinism, which sets workers against each other, will defeat a strike as surely as an army of scabs—it is in the interests of all labour to combat it. Nationalist protectionism doesn’t save jobs. The capitalists will always go where they will make the biggest profits, and they will always try to drive down wages and conditions. The answer is to fight for internationalist solidarity with workers abroad, and the unity of the multiracial working class at home.

The recent Vancouver port truckers strike showed the strategic weight of immigrant labour in B.C., and demonstrated that even a small number of workers can have a huge impact when they act collectively. Some 1,200 mainly Punjabi truck drivers—“independent” owner-operators gouged by the big trucking companies—set up pickets and shut down much of the port. With 25,000 containers piled up on the docks, their strike cost the capitalists $75 million a day. Just a third of the drivers are union members, mainly organized by the Teamsters. Organizing all the port truckers into the labour movement would strengthen all the waterfront unions and undercut divisions between immigrant and Canadian-born workers.

The chief strength of the unions lies in their numbers, organization, discipline and militancy and their relation to the decisive means of production in capitalist society. It is the exploitation of workers’ labour that produces the capitalists’ profits. American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon wrote at the time of a huge California maritime strike in 1936:

“…when you get down to cases this strike, like any other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.”

—“The Maritime Strike,” November 1936, Notebook of an Agitator (1958)

To wage the kind of hard fight needed to win against Telus means knowing where your power lies and identifying the obstacles to using it. Telecommunications are central to the capitalist economy, from the banks to the stock exchanges. If the financiers can’t get their stock quotations or use their phones and computers, the howls of capitalist anguish will be heard the length of the country. Highly technologically advanced, the phone system can be run for weeks, perhaps months, by supervisors. Telus has an army of those—a bit more than half of its workforce—and they are all scabbing.

Mass picket lines backed by the entire labour movement can keep out the scabs. In 1981—the last time the TWU struck—the union went further, holding the bosses’ sacred private property hostage for five days by occupying major B.C. Tel centers. The union leadership, under pressure from the B.C. Federation of Labour tops, eventually called off the occupation and accepted a rotten deal. Today many of the TWU’s flying picket squad leaders are veterans of 1981. By occupying property of Telus—hated for its lousy, price-gouging service—the union could cut the flow of profits to the bosses by preventing them from routing the billing system to a remote location. From inside, the TWU would win millions of allies among working people by making the technical adjustments required to provide free phone service.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!

Strike strategy is inseparable from political program and leadership. The union leaders look to the bosses’ state to act in the interests of the workers, and invoke its power as an excuse for limiting workers’ struggles to what is acceptable to the capitalists. TWU leaders have already bowed to the court’s strikebreaking orders, as union president Bruce Bell made clear: “You can still hold people up, you can’t blockade. It’s like waiting for a train to go by.” Instead of mounting mass pickets to keep out scabs, TWU picketers are reduced to traffic cops.

The reformist left promotes the politics of the union bureaucracy, politically identifying the workers with their misleaders. With the TWU in a pitched battle for its existence, Fire This Time (July 2005) published, without comment, a long interview with TWU president Bell in which he retailed the union tops’ perspective of relying on negotiations and arbitration. Touting the labour bureaucrats is consistent with Fire This Time’s sub-reformist goal, “to build a broad based movement to defeat the BC Liberal Government.” By definition this means pimping for the social-democratic traitors of the NDP.

For its part, the Fightback group calls to “Nationalize Telus!,” fatuously declaring: “Without the hindrance of the profit motive, a nationalized telecommunications company would be able to put quality first. It would be completely illogical to make decisions that hurt the workers or the customers” (Fightback, August 2005). Try telling that to CUPW unionists at Canada Post, or for that matter the HEU, whose members work in public-sector hospitals. The idea that nationalized industry under capitalism can be free of the “profit motive” and friendly to the workers (and consumers) is a demented social-democratic fantasy. Fightback claims to be a “Marxist Voice of Labour and Youth,” but they are in reality hard-core reformists, as shown by their perennial call to elect NDP governments, which they claim against all evidence can enact a “socialist program.”

In bringing our revolutionary program to TWU strikers in 1981, we wrote in SC No. 46 (January/February 1981): “We need a class-struggle workers party that fights for a workers government. We need a party that would be in the forefront of the battle against union busting, a beacon for labor militants throughout North America.” That requires a political break from the pro-capitalist labour tops and their NDP political partners. Only in this way can working people go forward to their own class rule, ripping the means of production from the exploiters and placing them in the hands of those whose labour makes this society run. Defeat Telus union-busting—Victory to the TWU!