Union Tops' Ugly Campaign Against Foreign Workers in B.C.

International Workers Solidarity, Not Nationalist Protectionism!

Amid the worst capitalist economic crisis since the 1930s, the trade-union leaders are diverting the anger and discontent of working people into campaigns for nationalist protectionism. Rather than organize class struggle against the exploiters, the labour tops are telling the workers to ally with the Canadian rulers against foreign competition, claiming this is the way to save jobs. Such campaigns are poison. They serve only to pit Canadian working people against their class brothers and sisters abroad and, increasingly, against foreign-born workers at home. By undermining the unity and potential fighting strength of the working class, they open the floodgates for the bosses to further drive down wages and working conditions.

Much of today’s protectionist furor is directed against China, the strongest of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states. Union-backed protests in Vancouver and other West Coast cities against the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would transport bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the British Columbia coast for export to China and other Asian countries, have featured such slogans as “Defend our coast” and “Our coast is not for sale.” A recent Canadian Auto Workers statement opposing the proposed purchase of Nexen, a Calgary- based energy producer, by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) claimed it would mean “Selling Off Our Resources…And Giving Away Our Jobs.” NDP MP Pat Martin charged that the Tory government would commit “economic treason” if it approved the Nexen deal. In Ontario, the head of the OPSEU public service union railed that a proposed Ottawa-Beijing trade deal “will turn Canada into nothing more than a resource colony of China.”

The most grotesque instance of the labour tops’ China-bashing protectionism has been over the recruitment of at least 200 Chinese temporary foreign workers to work in a new coal mine in northern B.C. Denouncing this as “the sellout of our province,” a United Steelworkers (USW) leaflet demanded “B.C. jobs for B.C. workers.” The Bargaining Council of B.C. Building Trades Unions declared: “Importing owners, supervisors and workers from China means importing a workplace culture which has no place in the Canadian context.” And the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) issued a news release that began, “CLC wants work permits rescinded for offshore miners.” In plain English, the CLC bureaucrats are calling for the Chinese workers to be barred or expelled from Canada.

This is reactionary xenophobia of the first order. It can only fan the flames of anti-Chinese racism, including against the hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants and their descendents already in Canada, many of whom are themselves union members. There is an especially ugly history of such racism in B.C. stretching back more than a century. In 1907, the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council formed the “Asiatic Exclusion League,” which later that year led a march for a “White Canada” that triggered anti-Asian riots.

The Tory government has vastly expanded the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), under which immigrant workers are brought into the country as a pool of superexploited cheap labour. Their temporary status makes them especially vulnerable to abuse, as any assertion of their rights can mean not only the loss of employment but also deportation. A class-struggle labour leadership would fight to unionize these foreign-born workers, demanding equal pay for equal work. It would combat all forms of anti-immigrant racism, demanding an end to the TFWP and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. This is the only way to undercut attempts by the capitalists to bring down the wages and working conditions of all workers by playing off one nationality against the other.

Some unions have attempted to stand in defense of temporary foreign workers. In 2006, the Labourers Union in Vancouver organized some three dozen Latin American workers who had been brought in under the TFWP to help build an extension to Vancouver’s Skytrain transit system, but received only half the pay of others doing similar work. The union took the workers’ case to a government tribunal and managed to win a settlement of more than $2 million on their behalf. To this day, the companies involved, SNC-Lavalin and SELI Canada, have refused to pay up.

Down With Anti-Communist China-Bashing!

In a March 26 letter to B.C. premier Christy Clark, USW District 3 Director Stephen Hunt demanded “your clear assurances that there will be no Chinese-operated coal mines in this province,” citing a series of deadly accidents in coal mines in China. Chinese mines are certainly dangerous, but the idea that Canadian companies would uphold the workers’ interests, including on safety standards, is belied by the entire history of mining in this country. From the Nanaimo mine explosions that killed 150 Vancouver Island coal miners in 1887 up to the present day, Canadian mining companies have long been notorious for their callous disregard of workers’ lives. In 1992, for example, 26 coal miners died in an explosion at the Canadian-owned Westray mine in Nova Scotia. A government inquiry admitted that the company had ignored miners’ safety, leading directly to the disaster.

In railing against the possible acquisition of the Nexen oil company by China’s state-owned CNOOC, the NDP’s Pat Martin denounced China’s “communist dictatorship” and called the deal an “affront to our national security.” Siding with the Canadian rulers against China in the name of anti-Communism is flatly counterposed to the workers’ interests. The People’s Republic of China was created through the defeat of imperialist-backed rule in the 1949 Revolution. Thanks to its collectivized economy, it has brought hundreds of millions of workers and peasants out of dire poverty into social production and a vast advance in living standards. Unlike private companies under capitalism, China’s state-owned enterprises—which in addition to energy companies like CNOOC encompass industries from steel to non-ferrous metals, telecommunications and heavy machinery production, as well as the banking system—are not operated for the profit of a tiny handful of ultra-rich capitalists. As Marxists, we defend China’s right to acquire the resources and technology it needs to further develop its economy.

Despite profound deformations from the outset under the rule of a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, the workers state that emerged from the Chinese Revolution represents a tremendous gain for workers and the oppressed the world over. It must be defended unconditionally against imperialism and capitalist restoration. The imperialist powers will not rest until they have regained China for untrammelled exploitation. That is what lies behind U.S. imperialism’s military build-up in the Asia-Pacific region. The anti-China demagogy of the labour tops and social democrats dovetails with the counterrevolutionary aims of Washington and its allies.

China’s bureaucratic rulers have over the last two decades overseen a major expansion of private industry within the country, including some of the mining companies now active in B.C. To fully realize the potential of the collectivized economy, the bureaucracy must be swept away through a workers political revolution and replaced with a government based on workers democracy that will expropriate this growing class of private Chinese capitalists. Instead of the Stalinists’ program of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist-imperialist world, a revolutionary government of the workers and peasants would fight for a perspective of international socialist revolution.

Here in Canada, it will take a sharp political fight against the nationalist, anti-Communist labour bureaucrats to make the unions weapons of struggle for workers and the oppressed. As part of the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party, we Marxists fight to break the working class from the deadly illusion that there can be a “partnership” between labour and capital. Only an internationally planned, socialist economy can place the enormous wealth of society at the hands of those who labour, allowing the resources of every country to be shared equitably in the interest of all. Workers of the world, unite!