Editorial
The CLC
Convention and the Crisis of the Trade Union Movement
The Canadian Labour
Congress (CLC) held its 25th Constitutional Convention from May 26
to 30 in Toronto. The CLC is the largest trade union central in Canada, with
approximately 3.2 million members.
Among the issues discussed at the
convention was the steady decline in trade union density over the past two
decades. Between 1988 and 2007 the overall percentage of the working class
organized into trade unions in Canada fell from 39.5 percent to 31.5 percent.
In the private sector, union density declined from 21.3 percent to 18.7 percent
between 1997 and 2007. While the decline in Canada is not as drastic as that in
the U.S., where union membership is hovering around 12 percent, many Canadian
unions, particularly those with large memberships in the industrial centres of Ontario and Quebec, are suffering huge declines
in membership.
The policy papers presented to the
convention delegates for discussion addressed the issue of declining union
density and the loss of industrial jobs by calling for various measures. First,
it is urging its member unions to take up the task of organizing the
unorganized, but this has been a constant refrain of the CLC for decades and
little has been done to put it into effect. Instead, most unions have contented
themselves with merging with or raiding other unions, which is much easier and
cheaper than actually organizing the unorganized. The CLC is also calling for government
intervention to stop the decline in the manufacturing sector, an end to free
trade deals and so on. These have also been perennial demands of the CLC, but
its voice has been largely ignored by governments at all levels for many years,
especially since the smashing of the “social contract”
in the late-1990s, first by the Harris government of Ontario and subsequently
by virtually every other provincial government across Canada.
The so-called “social contract” is a
polite term for the Liberal-Labour alliance which
emerged during the immediate post-war period in Canada. The Liberal-Labour alliance began with a truce between the Communist
Party of Canada (CPC) and the Liberal government of Mackenzie King during and
immediately after the Second World War, which saw the CPC drop its revolutionary
program in exchange for legal recognition. However, despite this truce, in the
late 1940s the Canadian state adopted McCarthyite
Cold War policies and forged an alliance with the social democrats of the
Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to destroy the influence of the
Communist Party amongst Canadian workers. The Communist Party had been
instrumental in organizing some of the most powerful industrial unions in
Canada, including the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the International
Woodworkers of America (IWA) and played a major role in leading the Canadian
Congress of Labour (CCL). With the support of the CCF
and its activists within the labour movement, the
Canadian state was able to purge the communists from all leading positions
within the CCL by 1950. Those unions which refused to purge the communists,
such as United Electrical and Mine Mill, were expelled from the CCL. The CCL
merged with the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) in
1956 to form the Canadian Labour Congress, whose
constitution specifically forbade the election of any communist to any level of
leadership in any member trade union.
The elimination of the communists from
the leadership of most of the trade unions and the de facto elimination of a revolutionary alternative within the
broader working class movement with the adoption by the Communist Party
(renamed the Labour Progressive Party) of its program
of “the peaceful and parliamentary road to socialism” paved the way for what
has become known as the “social contract” between the Canadian state and the
trade union movement. In exchange for legal recognition by the Canadian state
and certain reforms like collective bargaining and an automatic dues check-off,
the main trade unions in Canada swore allegiance to the capitalist system and the
capitalist state.
Apologists for the social-democratic
trade union leaders refer to this “social contract” in glowing terms, as a
great victory of the working class, the result of the bloodshed and heroic
sacrifices of the working class and its allies to defeat fascism and build the
trade union movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. The “social
contract” represented the subjugation of the mission of the working class to
the agenda of monopoly capital and the tying of the trade union movement to the
coattails of monopoly capitalism and U.S. imperialism.
The current crisis of the trade union
movement in Canada is a direct result of the anti-communist, pro-capitalist
“social contract” forged between the main trade union leadership and the
Canadian state in the 1940s and 1950s. It is a crisis which cannot be overcome
either through organizing the unorganized or by convincing governments to
subsidize various sectors of the Canadian economy to “save jobs”. The proof of
this is that a virtually identical crisis exists in many countries with much
higher union densities and government subsidies for manufacturing, such as most
European countries. This is because the crisis of the trade union movement, in
essence, has nothing to do with the declining number of members. This is a
symptom of the crisis and not the cause.
The real crisis of the trade union
movement is a crisis of confidence and a crisis of credibility. For decades the
trade unions promised the working class that the unions could tame capitalism and
make it serve both the owners and workers. Since the economic
crisis of the early 1990s, that promise has been proven to be patently false.
Furthermore, because the social-democratic trade unions quite adamantly reject
any alternative to capitalism, they are now totally unable to offer any way out
for workers. In fact, they are not even looking for a way out, but rather for a
way back in for the trade union leaders and the labour
aristocracy, for a new “social contract” based on an even deeper integration of
the trade unions into the Canadian state. The CAW-Magna deal is a blueprint for
that new arrangement, in which the workers have no rights and the role of the
union is to openly co-manage labour with the
capitalists.
Those who insist on creating illusions
about the real anti-worker content of the post-war “social contract” and about
the willingness and/or ability of the social-democratic trade unions to
establish a new “social contract” which favours the
working class are doing a huge disservice to the working class movement in
Canada. There can be no “social contract” between monopoly capital
and labour which serves the interests of the working
class; such a “social contract” can only serve the interests of monopoly
capital. The only “social contract” that serves the interests of the working
class is one between the working class and all other classes and sections of
society which are negated by monopoly capital. Such a social contract would, of
necessity, be based on the common interest to overthrow monopoly capital and
usher in a democratic and socialist Canada. The CLC will never agree to such a
social contract.
It will be many weeks or months before
the CLC publishes the results of its deliberations from May 26 to 30. However,
it is not necessary to read those documents to predict with confidence that
this CLC convention will do nothing to alleviate the crisis of the Canadian
trade union movement. On the contrary, that crisis will only deepen and broaden
in the coming years, because it can only be overcome through the rejection of
social democracy and its insistence on tying the working class hand and foot to
monopoly capital. This crisis will only be resolved on the basis of the
Canadian working class rejecting the CLC and building a new trade union
movement based on class struggle against the capitalist system.