Editorial
Mobilizing Against the Anti-Social Offensive
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Victoria and other centers in British Columbia on February 23rd to protest the policies of the B.C. Liberal government. This is a promising start to the resistance of the people of that province against an anti-social offensive that makes Ontario Premier Mike Harris' "common sense revolution" look tame. However, Ontario's Days of Action during the mid-1990s also appeared to be a promising start to a people's counter-offensive, as did the 1983 Solidarity coalition against the B.C. Vander Zalm government. Yet both of those movements eventually fizzled and failed to block the advance of anti-social policies. If the people of British Columbia are to avoid history repeating itself, they will have to learn from the lessons of these past failures.
In 1983 a broad coalition of labour and social activist groups was forged in B.C. to fight back against the anti-labour, anti-people policies of the Social Credit government. However, that coalition was destroyed by the B.C. Federation of Labour, which signed an agreement with the Vander Zalm government which made some concessions to the trade unions, while maintaining massive cutbacks in social spending. The B.C. federation of Labour called off its mobilizations despite the fact that its social activist partners were not included in the agreement and none of their demands were met. The social activist groups quite rightly felt betrayed by the trade unions and the anti-social offensive against the people of B.C. continued, largely unopposed.
The Ontario Days of Action were also organized by a coalition of labour and community groups. The stated aims of the mobilizations were to bring down the Harris government and put an end to the cutbacks to social spending implemented by that government. Following historic mobilizations in Hamilton and Toronto of hundreds of thousands of people, the Ontario Federation of Labour withdrew its support for the campaign. Subsequent Days of Action were much smaller and eventually the campaign ground to a halt. The Mike Harris government remained in office and its anti-social policies continued unabated. In fact, in subsequent years it escalated its anti-worker, anti-union policies and met with almost no resistance from the trade union movement.
In the case of B.C. in 1983 and Ontario in the mid-1990s, the main aim of the provincial governments was to introduce neo-liberal policies of privatization and deregulation. Initially, the main target of their attacks were the poor, the disorganized and the marginalized sections of society, through cutbacks to spending on health, education and social spending. Because these social services are provided by workers who are predominantly members of public sector unions, those unions saw the cutbacks as a threat to their members, as well. This created the basis for a coalition of the public sector unions and various social activist community groups.
While the aim of trade unions and the social activist groups was to end the attacks on their respective members, this did not mean that their interests or their aims were identical. When the Vander Zalm government in B.C. offered a deal to protect the jobs of public sector workers, despite the cutbacks in social spending, the unions saw no need to continue the fight. Their immediate concerns were satisfied, so they abandoned both their allies and their long-term interests. As a result, when the Vander Zalm government later introduced anti-union measures that stripped many unions (especially in the construction trades) of their power, the trade unions were in no position to fight back.
In Ontario a similar scenario unfolded. The Ontario Federation of Labour had very limited aims in supporting the Days of Action, with the primary one being the re-election of a "union friendly" NDP government. It made it crystal clear that it was not interested in going beyond those narrow limits and the massive turnout of workers uninterested in the electoral fate of the NDP scared its leaders into abandoning the struggle against the Harris government altogether. As a result, it was incapable of mounting any sort of struggle when the Harris government later attacked the rights of workers to unionize.
There are already ominous signs that the trade unions in B.C. have failed to learn from their past defeats. The demands that the public sector unions have put forward in the current struggle fall short of complete rejection of the B.C. government's policies, going only as far as stating that the government has "gone too far". The unions have also done little to alleviate the concerns of their social activist allies that they will not once again betray the movement if they extract some minor concessions for labour from the government. In fact, attempts by various union leaders to decide on behalf of the rest of the movement all issues of strategy and tactics has served to reinforce those concerns.
One of the lessons that has been reinforced repeatedly over the past couple of decades is that trade unions, as institutions, have limited objectives that do not necessarily put them in opposition to the status quo. In fact, generally they are opposed to any attempt to upset the status quo, whether that attempt comes from governments or their own members. As a result, they have proved to be unreliable allies in any struggle which seeks to challenge the fundamental premises of the capitalist system and will continue to be so until such time that they recognize that a working class which does not defend the interests of all oppressed peoples will be incapable of defending its own interests, as well.. Any illusions in this regard are fraught with dangers for the struggles of the peoples.