B.C.: Victory to CUPE, Woodworkers Strikes!

AUGUST 31—Nearly 6,000 Vancouver civic workers are into their sixth week on strike against take-back demands and union-busting maneuvers by the city bosses. Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 1004, representing outside workers, began an all-out strike on July 20. It was soon followed by the inside workers of Local 15, library workers of Local 391 and North Vancouver workers of Local 389 (who have since returned to work with a new contract). The strikers are fighting for job security against anti-union “hiring flexibility” schemes as well as modest wage and benefit gains.

At the same time, some 7,000 coastal woodworkers in the United Steel Workers (USW) have been on strike for over a month against contracting out and other attacks by the forestry bosses. A key issue in this notoriously dangerous industry is safety and hours of work. Since 2004 the companies, backed by a government-imposed collective agreement, have forced workdays of 12-16 hours, when hours on the job and travel time are factored together. At least 65 B.C. forestry workers have been killed since 2005.

The capitalist media boasts of an economic boom in Western Canada, sometimes contrasting this to the massive loss of industrial jobs in Ontario and other eastern provinces. Soaring commodity prices and a pre-Olympic construction boom have lined the pockets of Alberta oil barons and B.C. construction tycoons. But workers drawn to jobs in the oil industry find themselves living in tent cities in Edmonton or paying a fortune in rent for a trailer in Fort McMurray. In B.C., corporate profits have gone up 76 percent since 2003, three-and-a-half times the rate of wage increases. And the mill and forestry towns of the coast and interior, once the core of the B.C. economy, have seen huge job losses. Since the 1980s, more than two thirds of all coastal forestry industry jobs have been axed, including 5,000 in the last three years.

In Vancouver, workers are struggling to keep up with soaring housing costs, while areas like the heavily Native Downtown Eastside remain in abject poverty. Striking CUPE members told SC salesmen that they are determined to hold out and win their strike. One picketer told the Vancouver Sun (24 July), “times are good in British Columbia right now. For us to ask for a little bit more is perfectly reasonable.” The Vancouver city administration has arrogantly refused to negotiate, even when the unions dropped some of their original demands.

The Local 391 library workers are striking for the first time in the union’s 77-year history. A central demand is for pay equity. As a union statement notes, “The library is a predominantly female workplace and, as a result, library workers have been underpaid for decades.” The disparity of wages between men and women is a reflection of the oppression of women that is rooted in capitalist society. The whole labour movement must take up the fight for equal pay for equal work, and equal access to all job categories for women and minorities. In 1993, CUPE Local 391 was one of the unions that came out for a Partisan Defense Committee-initiated mobilization to stop a fascist provocation in Vancouver, giving a taste of how the power of organized labour can be mobilized to defend the oppressed.

City workers’ pickets have stopped several local businesses from undermining the strike by taking residential trash for fees.But garbage transfer stations in the suburbs, where CUPE locals have agreed to separate contracts, are open for business. Meanwhile, city managers are being allowed through the picket lines and are doing the jobs of striking workers. Combined with the impact of privatization of some services, this has weakened the strike.

What is needed is mass pickets that no one crosses as well as union solidarity actions—for example, to stop the use of suburban garbage depots to break the strike. The unions should be appealing to other workers in the Lower Mainland as well as the poor and unemployed to join the picket lines. But the B.C. Federation of Labour bureaucrats are meekly calling on the public to appeal to mayor Sullivan to negotiate with the city unions. As for the forestry strike, the USW tops’ main campaign is for a consumer boycott of lumber products from the struck companies. The working class has social power precisely because it can bring the capitalist profit system to a halt through collective action at the point of production. Looking to toothless consumer boycotts, playing by the bosses’ rigged laws, pleading for “fairness,” keeping picket lines porous and tame—this is a road to defeat.

The interests of the working class and the bosses backed by the forces of the capitalist state (the government, courts and cops) are counterposed and irreconcilable. The unions provide a crucial first line of defense against capitalist austerity and attacks on jobs and working conditions. But the existing union leadership pushes dead-end reliance on the capitalist state, while looking to the pro-capitalist social democrats of the NDP as a political alternative.

It was the B.C. NDP governments of the 1990s that began the austerity onslaught that has been heightened under Gordon Campbell’s provincial Liberal regime. While B.C. NDP leader Carole James has been silent on the CUPE strike, she denounced the province-wide teachers strike two years ago. Even as workers throughout B.C. rallied to the side of the teachers, who faced sweeping fines and government back-to-work orders, James railed that teachers “should follow the law…. People accept consequences when they don’t follow the law” (Vancouver Sun, 18 October 2005).

Mirroring the politics of the union bureaucracy is the reformist Vancouver left group known as Fire This Time (FTT). A two-page spread on the CUPE strike in their press (Fire This Time, Vol. 4, Issue 8) provides a platform for the electoral ambitions of the social-democratic Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE). In a fawning interview with former COPE city councilor Tim Louis, FTT asks, “What would you do if you were on city council—or Mayor of Vancouver—in this situation?” When COPE’s Larry Campbell was mayor, he hired more cops and sent them to terrorize the Downtown Eastside. Campaigning for a more “progressive” capitalist administration furthers the deadly illusion that the capitalist state can serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed.

Relying on labour’s own power, forging a fighting leadership that won’t bow to the bosses’ state and isn’t beholden to the capitalist system—this is the road to victory. The Trotskyist League fights for a revolutionary workers party that will unite labour and all of the oppressed in struggle. The only way to guarantee good living conditions, jobs for all and an end to grinding exploitation and oppression is by expropriating the capitalist class through socialist revolution.