Labour Unions and "Community People"

 

At the Gazetteer, in a post about BC Liberal leader Kevin Falcon's fond memories of SoCred Premier Bill Bennett, commentor "e.a.f." expands upon the "Solidarity" protests of 1983 (where one of Falcon's fond memories took place):

Some Union people were not keen on the "community people". they wanted a "general strike", but the union people felt, they would be paying for it, while the "community people" had nothing to loose and weren't paying for any of it. As one person said to me at the time, the "community people" want a general strike, but most of them don't have jobs so they have nothing to loose. the Union members would loose to much money.

"Operation Solidarity" was not cheap to run and it was the Unions which were paying the freight. The one thing Unions understand is, when push comes to shove, when you're fighting with the government, they can send Union members to jail. The community people" didn't seem to grasp that concept.

More than one Union leader weent to jail. As I recall the head of the Postal Workers Union did time, Jean Claude Parrot, 1980. He was the guest speaker at our Union convention the following year. Pleasant man.

1981, Grace Hartman, President of CUPE was sent to jail for conselling members to go on strike, even though hospital workers were not permitted to strike.

I'd like to speak to these thoughts with regards to my own "People Power" to save public healthcare posts.

First of all, I'd like to find a happy medium between the fairly useless tactics of organized labour of holding one-off rallies and marches wherein union members chant and shout criticisms of the government, and the fairly useless tactics of radical activists ("community people") of holding smaller protests where they shout stuff like "Our power is in the streets!" before either being ignored or getting their asses kicked, and, yes, childish calls for "general strikes" that they have no capability whatsoever of implementing.

Thirty-two percent of the Canadian workforce is unionized.  This includes textile workers, restaurant workers, retail workers who often don't give a shit about their union, often correctly seeing them as almost a neglible contribution to their wages and working conditions.  It includes right-wing construction industry unions.  It includes more powerful unions that deliver genuine benefits to their members who, in return, happily pocket their earnings and take their vacations and other benefits and then turn around and vote conservative and invest in the stock-market and threaten anarchy if their capital gains are taxed.

But, unfortunately, this is a big part of what we have to work with.  (There are also left-wing Christian activists; sweet socially democratic middle-class people like the Council of Canadians, left-wing academics and writers outlining criticisms of the system and articulating semi-coherent plans for alternatives.)  

All that having been said, it remains the case that the labour movement can organize the structure needed for the start of a major mass movement.  And that the "community people" can provide the genuinely committed activists to distribute flyers, conduct occupations, and other in-the-streets activism, to any more organized, realistic campaign.  As well, retired people can use their free time to contribute the time (the free time that many of them wish could be filled with something) to these campaigns.

All of these people will be necessary to go out and organize the unorganized, the uninformed, the apolitical, the comfortable, the people who are generally sane and decent but whose brains are wired such that they tend to fixate only upon their own immediate lives and social circles. 

Because most sane, intelligent people recognize the value of Canada's single-payer health insurance system and the superiority of public management of healthcare in general.  And since it is easily proven how certain among our politicians are dedicated to slavishly serving private-health industry parasites who want to profit from our necessity and gouge and exploit and kill us, ... and we see how this works in the USA and how the same thinking has destroyed the UK's NHS even more than Canada's healthcare deteriorated, it will be possible to extract some sort of commitment out of normal people, if we can only reach them with a coherent strategy to attain a clearly-stated goal.  

Two of the biggest flaws of all activism: Undefined, uninspiring goals ("Resist!") and uselessly vague strategies for attaining these "goals."  [I'm reminded of my post with these two quotes from Yogi Berra: "If you don't know where you're going, you might not ever get there."  and "We're lost, but we're making good time."]