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Terence Corcoran: Bigger troubles for Big Labour amid calls for internal revolution

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Terence Corcoran: Bigger troubles for Big Labour amid calls for internal revolution

In a desperate search for column fodder, I began scanning a favourite news site — the World Socialist Web Site, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the latest incarnation of a Trotskyist revolutionary movement founded in France in 1938 after Leon Trotsky and his Third International followers were expelled from the Soviet Union for their anti-Stalinist views.

Interesting story there, and still developing, apparently, what with the rise of some sort of modern-day socialist/Trotskyite movement in the United States. Just yesterday Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and socialist politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out strongly in favour of the downtrodden American music worker Taylor Swift in her multimillion-dollar copyright battle with a private equity firm.

Anyway, there on the World Socialist site was a hot news item on a Canadian union development that had not made headlines in Canada’s national Mainstream Media (MSM): “Unifor imposes concessions contracts on Saskatchewan Crown Corporation workers.”

After a 17-day strike by about 5,000 workers against SaskPower, SaskTel, SaskWater, SaskEnergy and a couple of other provincial crown corporations, a settlement was reached Oct. 20 and member ratification announced last weekend. But apparently the actual vote numbers were not released, leading the World Socialists site to declare that Unifor had “rammed through concessionary contracts” in a great “sell-out” of union members who received zero per cent wage increases for the first two years of five-year contracts and increases of only one and two per cent in the following three years.

Unifor had ended the Saskatchewan strikes before member ratification, and reportedly members were shocked to learn that they would be receiving zero wage increases for the first two years, wages being one of the initial stumbling blocks in negotiations with the government. But Unifor’s national leader, Jerry Dias, declared the strike a success for delivering a “superior” deal.

According to the socialist Sidestream Media (SSM) Jerry Dias is a flimflam man who has failed workers at hither and yon, at Bombardier in Thunder Bay, and in Oshawa where a high-profile autoworkers campaign failed to stop General Motors from shutting down a plant.

The assessment of Dias as a sell-out is likely unfair, however. He is, after all, one of the leaders of a union movement that is struggling in Canada and the United States. Union membership of employed men in Canada has been in a mega-decline for decades. Once as high as 42 per cent of the workforce in the 1980s, the male unionization rate is now down below 25 per cent. For all workers, Statistics Canada reports that the union decline trend that began in the 1990s continues today, with unionization down from 37.5 per cent in the 1980s to 30 per cent in 2000 and down to 28.1 per cent last year. The rate would be lower still were it not for increases in public sector union membership.

As this column is being written, Unifor is attempting to use strike action in a contract dispute between 5,000 of its members and Metro Vancouver’s bus operators. Also in Vancouver, 900 members of a CUPE government union who operate the city’s SkyTrain system are attempting to negotiate a contract.

Nationally, early Tuesday, 3,200 members of the Teamsters union marched out on strike against Canadian National Railway to replace a contract that expired in July. In Ontario, elementary school teachers have voted 98 per cent in favour of strike action in an environment the World Socialist Web Site says requires teachers and education workers to be aware of union “determination to isolate, weaken and ultimately strangle teachers and school support workers resistance to the Ford government’s attacks on education.”

That too seems a little extreme, although the idea that the unions are losing the battle for workers keeps gathering momentum. Similar concerns about the weakness of unions were voiced earlier this month by Sam Gindin, a former research director with the Canadian Auto Workers and now an adjunct professor at York University. In a commentary on the Socialist Project website, Gindin reviews the aftermath of the recent 46,000-worker strike against General Motors, the longest against GM in half a century. The worker anger, writes Gindin, was directed “not only at a corporation that had treated its workforce so shabbily, but also at the often-complicit role of their own union.”

In his review of the GM settlement, Gindin suggests the union failed to replace a two-tier compensation regime that paid different workers differently for the same job. Job security issues remain unresolved.

What the United Auto Workers need, claims Gindin, is an internal revolution: “The GM strike served as a reminder of two old lessons. Rank and file militancy is the foundation of working-class struggles, yet it is not enough. And unions too — even the best of unions — though absolutely fundamental to workers having a more secure and all-round richer life, are by themselves insufficient.”

In some ways, Gindin’s prescription for the auto workers unions points to a larger problem that exists across all unions, in the public and private sectors. To end the dominance of the union executive establishment, Gindin raises the possibility of ending what he calls “the monopoly of incumbents in the UAW.” He adds that “genuine prospects for an internal rebellion exist.”

At the end of his fascinating commentary, Gindin looks to the “radical possibilities” in the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America as the U.S. election season unfolds.

So we learn that maybe the times they are a-changing — and that reading Trotskyist websites for column fodder can sometimes pay off.

Financial Post

• Email: tcorcoran@nationalpost.com | Twitter: terencecorcoran

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