UNIFOR Leaving the Canadian Labour Congress
Organized labour is suffering a terrible case of collective amnesia……………… By George Hewison
There is no time to assign blame for this state of affairs, but suffice to say when the past is forgotten, we tend to repeat the same tragic mistakes. Now the blame game on all sides over the UNIFOR decision to withdraw from the Canadian Labour Congress is only just starting; and for some of us, there is a sickening feeling of déjà vu.
This time around, however, the consequences are likely to be even more tragic than in other past cases of secession in our working class and socialist history. It wasn’t a successful strategy in the past and it won’t be successful now with the main difference being we are now dealing with potentially deadly consequences, not just for the working class, but all of humanity.
The corporate world is obviously delighted, and anyone who insists on driving the split harder needs to bear that in mind. Choosing sides is not the hallmark of leadership; nor is fanning the flames of division or casting aspersions on motives, or reliance on the narrowest constitutional talking points. What is called for is a sober estimation of what faces organized labour caught at an existential crossroads.
The fight for labour unity in Canada has never been easy. But in 2018, that unity is required more than ever in confronting global capitalism and a billionaire class headed by a megalomaniac occupying the White House and an economic agenda increasingly dictated by a couple of billionaire brothers who presumably have figured out a way to take their fortunes with them when they croak.
That is why I felt like the working class of our country was punched in the gut when I learned that UNIFOR, for WHATEVER supposedly legitimate reason, was pulling the plug on its membership in the Canadian Labour Congress. In a statement on its website, it said it was an new beginning.
I respectfully differ. It is an old and failed refrain, and the history of organized labour is littered with examples of the failure. More on that in a moment, but first a respectful word to all those second guessers or would-be labour movement messiahs who question the motives of Jerry Dias, Hassan Yusseff and other labour leaders because the hand that we’ve all been dealt is possibly the most complex ever faced by the global working class, including in Canada.
The secessionist movement in Canada is not new. The struggle at Winnipeg in 1919 was lost, first because the influence of the Gomperist American Federation of Labour within Canada who, playing the game of the corporate state, proved stronger than the secessionist One Big Union (based mainly in western Canada). Many of the socialist leaders of the strike and their supporters believed the socialist revolution was on the immediate workers’ horizon. They were inspired by the Russian Revolution and hated what capitalism was doing to workers. But inspiration and hatred wasn’t enough and the corporate state was able to defeat the leaders’ strategy, split off the reformers in labour (who were rewarded) from the socialist “revolutionaries” (who were arrested, blacklisted, deported and in some cases murdered) and rest, as they say, is history.
The strike was smashed, and in its immediate aftermath, thousands of militant workers were fired, blacklisted and/or deported, a new criminal code (especially Section 98) was introduced criminalizing economic activity to pursue political objectives. A new police force (the RCMP) was formed with powers to spy on and disrupt workers organizing efforts and to keep files on unionists and their activities. In addition, those Canadian workers all across Canada, who managed to get their jobs back after their sympathetic actions in support of the Winnipeg strikers had to swear loyalty oaths to their employers. The blacklist against militant workers proved powerful anti-organizing tool in the arsenal of employers. That was one of the prices of secession.
Another price was the decades-long ideological split in the Canadian working-class movement. The revolutionary forces found expression in the Communist Party who drew different conclusions from the Winnipeg and the Russian Revolution experience from the reformers who were content with the struggle for reforms of capitalism.
While Conservatives openly practice the mailed fist towards labour from 1919 onwards, the Liberals, under Mackenzie King through to today, always use the seduction of modest reforms, combined with a mailed fist towards socialists, to keep labour off guard and any hint of a militant trajectory, or even forming an independent political expression.
For a number of years, the Communists, offering a revolutionary perspective, practiced their own form of “secession”, outside the “corrupt” unions under the influence of the American Federation of Labour. They had their own narrow organizational vehicle, the Workers Unity League. The WUL scored a number of victories during the darkest days of the repression and the early years of the Great Depression, but couldn’t move the great mass of the working class in the direction of organization until the secession strategy ended in 1935. The WUL entered the mainstream of the trade union movement and fought out strategic questions with brothers and sisters in the broader movement. This resulted in the greatest gains for Canadian workers, the organization of the unorganized, especially as the new Canadian Congress of Labour (industrial unions) came into being and WUL organizers brought their organizational expertise to bear. Again, the lessons on “pure” unionism and secession were borne out by history.
My own personal history with secession started in 1953 when the dark forces of anti-communism descended on organized labour and my union in particular. Our union had been formed eight years earlier, by workers in all sectors of our industry fed up with the poverty inflicted by fish company barons. Industry working people merged their tiny unions into one powerful industrial union and flush from the global victory over fascism, working people all over Canada and our industry thought all things were possible.
The fishing companies, the corporate state and the Liberal Party all had other ideas. Within the House of Labour, in the environment of Cold War and a hot war in Korea, labour unity shattered, and the Left and in particular unions led by Communists were targeted. No fewer than 12 major unions led by Communists and rank and file-controlled, were smashed or weakened.
In early 1953, Hal Banks’ organization, the Seafarers International Union (SIU), having finished smashing the Canadian Seamens’ Union (CSU) on behalf of the Canadian corporate state, the shipowners and the Liberal Party, put the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union in its gunsights. They secretly ran candidates, financed by BC Packers, against the leadership of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. The plotters ran on a platform of ousting the communists from the union. They made their fatal error. The union shop who printed their election leaflets sent their invoice for payment to their corporate paymaster, British Columbia Packers Ltd. The invoice became public information and an election issue inside our union. Needless to say, the SIU candidates were rebuked by the membership, but that was not the end of the story of secession.
Later that year, the Vancouver Outside Workers, now CUPE 1004, were unceremoniously expelled from the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) because the local refused to dump its duly-elected “communist” leadership. The Fisherman, our union’s weekly newspaper wrote an editorial criticizing the Congress leadership’s high-handed tactics and in August of 1953, our union was rewarded by being suspended from the TLC. A couple of weeks later, the SIU started its raid. This was secession in reverse. We wanted in and they wanted us out or gone. For 20 years, we remained outside the House of Labour and that period outside might be instructive in the current situation.
Those twenty years were both amongst the most difficult not just for the UFAWU, but also all of organized labour. We had many battles with the fish companies. The rest of organized labour had a rough time as well. It wasn’t only UFAW leaders in jail cells in the struggle against ex parte injunctions in labour disputes. Members of the now-merged Canadian Labour Congress and our union members walked every significant picket line in BC together. For the entire 20-year hiatus, our friends, who had disagreed with us most strenuously on our strategies, were our staunch defenders for our right to be part of the House of Labour. Our friendships and solidarity had been forged on picket lines and other forms of struggle.
It is unthinkable today, but in 1967 in Prince Rupert and in 1970 in Canso Strait, Nova Scotia, we had two epic struggles in which CLC staff, on orders from the leadership, organized scabs to go through our picket lines. In the case of the Canso strike, the international union, the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workmen (now the UFCW) under Pat Gorman, was solicited by east coast employers to sign a sweetheart agreement to undermine a first collective agreement by the United Fishermen in Canso since the smashing of unionism in the fishing industry in 1946. Under the Meatcutters agreement, members who had been in struggle for unionism for 18 months were forced to renounce their UFAW membership and sign Meatcutter cards or lose their jobs (Many leaders of that epic struggle refused and ended up fishing on the Pacific coast under UFAW agreements). Many of our members thought we were crazy to be insisting on joining the CLC and paying dues to an organization that could act like that.
Anti-communism, though waning, had still played a virulent role. Secession imposed on us by American-dominated unions did a grave disservice, not just to us, but all workers in Canada. But we still retained a faith in Canadian workers and our fellow unionists.
That faith paid off as the demand to re-admit the Fishermen and the UE kept building and became overwhelming within the House of Labour.
Eventually, in 1973, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union and the United Electrical Workers Union were re-admitted to the Councils of the Congress, but not before one last ditch attempt was made to control the terms under which the two unions could re-enlist in the Congress. The Congress leadership, under immense pressure to re-admit us, had told us initially that we had to come back into the Congress through an existing affiliate and it was suggested that the two best unions for us to pick was the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway and Transport Workers (CBRT an all-Canadian union) a union that had raided us after our successful organizing drive in Lunenburg; or the aforementioned Meatcutters that had just raided us after our epic strike at Booth and Acadia Fisheries.
We met with Don Nicholson of the CBRT who came from Ottawa, and Pat Gorman who flew in from Chicago both of whom were wooing us in the CLC leadership’s shotgun marriage proposal. We also met with long-time trade unionist and old friend, Kent Rowley, leader of the Canadian Confederation of Unions (CCU) who tried to convince us to leave the antics of the Congress and AFL leaderships and join them. While we admired Rowley and CCU spirit for rank and file democratic unionism, we couldn’t agree with secession that separated us from the vast majority of unionized Canadian workers who would eventually reclaim their movement.
I believe we were correct then and I believe that strategy is correct now.
Since the early 1920s a powerful slogan guided many socialist trade unionists: “For a United, Sovereign and Independent Trade Union Movement”. What did that slogan mean? Trade union progress is impossible without “unity”. How that comes about is the trick, hence the other two aspects of the slogan must always intersect and influence unity. “Sovereign” meant the autonomy or right of Canadian workers to make decisions in their best interests based on the conditions in Canada, free of interference from US head offices. And the last leg of the stool making up the slogan was “Independence”, meaning independence from the influence of the boss, whether Canadian or American employers.
We couldn’t accept a trade unionism that separated out any one of those three elements that embodies so much more, including inner union democracy. Each of these is a process, and they are all connected. We have made enormous progress on the Canadian autonomy issue. Many industrial unions have now separated from their US brothers and sisters, but it has not been without hiccups.
Three decades back, American building trades leaders tried to insulate their Canadian members from the desire to be masters in their own unions and pulled out of the CLC and formed the CFL with support of the federal government.
Another hiccup was the decision of the CAW to “liberate” east coast fisheries workers from the UFCW. Much as I had developed personal animus to Gorman’s raid of our members by that union, I wrote at the time of the CAW raid on the East Coast that the decision was a mistake.
It short-circuited the very same process going on inside the UFCW (they were between conventions at the time discussing and winning the internal battle for autonomy and that decision by the CAW set back the struggle for autonomy inside a big food sectoral union) as had happened in Auto and the pulp, energy and communication workers unions and had consequences for labour well beyond the east coast. So, the issue of autonomy, whether more recently with the Toronto ATU or HERE is really not just an issue for UNIFOR, but for all of Canadian labour. In that struggle we are in a better situation as opposed to a generation ago. Today, most Canadian unionists dwell inside all-Canadian unions.
Yes, union democracy still suffers from the ideological hangovers of the period from 1919 through the Cold War. Caucuses often still frustrate the democratic instincts of workers to be masters of their unions’ destiny, but this too, like autonomy, is a process that must be worked through in the course of struggle against our new masters, the billionaire class.
That brings us to the third leg of the slogan’s stool. While pursuing autonomy, class independence and democracy, labour must always guard its unity as the apple of our eye. We’ll either swim together or we’ll sink separately.
On the unity front, we must do everything to bring this terrible situation to an end. There is no room for egos or name-calling on this one. It is a time for lifting our sights. Else, history can be pretty unforgiving.
