The Dominion - strike

Red Square Roots

dawn — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:11:45 +0000

How austerity underpins social crisis and repression in Quebec and beyond

MONTREAL—Across Montreal little red squares, sprayed on sidewalk corners, drawn into bus stop walls, or pinned to shirts, speak to the historic nature of Quebec's ongoing political crisis sparked by a massive student strike.

 Every evening in Montreal red flags continue to fly, as people armed with a carré rouge, the red felt square symbolizing Quebec's student uprising, join nightly protest starting at place Émilie-Gamelin.

From the cold of winter to the heat of summer, Montreal's streets have been alive with protest in 2012, a battle ground between contrasting social visions.   As a vibrant social movement calls for the government to retreat on moves to hike university tuition fees, people on the streets are also fundamentally questioning the logic of austerity economics.

Protests are riding a political high that is sparking growing international attention, while the Parti Libéral du Québec is mobilizing for a serious push back in mid-August via Law 78.   Police and Sûreté du Québec forces plan to open college and university campuses on strike across Quebec by force, if students, professors and supporters move to protest the controversial legislation on site. This move would threaten to unleash legislated police wrath on the strike, clearly undercutting student assemblies and associations who continue to sustain the strike movement.

Activists are now collectively organizing, through popular assemblies and meetings across Quebec, ways to challenge Law 78 and the legislated attempt to crush the strike movement.

  “La grève est étudiante, la lutte est populaire!”, a slogan roughly translating to, “a student strike, a people's struggle,” illustrates placard signs and banners around the city. It is also a chant often heard in the streets.

Popular opposition toward Law 78 is steadfast, a law that inspired a thousand protests, turning a student strike into the largest social movement in a generation.   Emergency legislation, drafted May 2012 by the Quebec Liberal government, includes restrictions on protest, banning public gatherings inside and around university campuses, while obliging organizers of street demonstrations across Quebec to seek police approval at least eight hours in advance.

 In Quebec and globally, Law 78 has been met by widespread condemnation. Amnesty International states that the bill violates freedoms of speech, assembly and movement. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights openly criticized the bill in a June 2012 speech, saying that it restricts “rights to freedom of association and of peaceful assembly.”

 “At times when governments face a crisis of legitimacy, the state will often resort to repression,” said Aziz Choudry, a professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University.

 “It's important to have historical perspective, in Canada the RCMP spied on and harassed union activists, indigenous people,” said Choudry in an interview with The Dominion. “Today in Quebec there is a movement that has been able to sustain itself for a long period of time and now that movement is facing repression and criminalization. It's really important for us to challenge this but also see it as part of a historic reality.”

 On the streets across Quebec, thousands are joining nightly popular protests against the law, banging pots and pans in casseroles protests, inspired by the cacerolazo grassroots protest tradition, that took root in Chile during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and was used more recently during the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina.  

Nightly casseroles protests illustrate how Law 78 pushed more and more people to take to the streets, not only in protest and support for the student strike, but also as a form of voicing wider opposition toward a political and economic system that is increasingly seen as predatory and unjust. 

 “In Quebec there is popular support for the student movement, so now the government is trying to break the movement with repression,” said Rushdia Mehreen, a graduate student at Concordia University and members of the social struggles committee of CLASSE. “Since the strike began there was always physical repression by police at protests, with pepper spray, rubber bullets and physical police assaults, but the students continued, so now the state is utilizing legislation to repress the movement with Law 78.

  “The Quebec government chose repression because there isn't democratic, popular support for their policy to hike tuition fees,” said Mehreen, in an interview with The Dominion. “More broadly in Quebec, people do not support the framework of austerity economics, so repression is now the response to create fear and to try to force these unpopular policies on the population."

  In Quebec the move to hike tuition fees by $1,778 over seven years, representing an 82 per cent increase per student, has been billed by government officials as part of a “cultural revolution” that is now rewriting social policy in Quebec. It's not just students who are feeling the crunch.

In the healthcare sector, the Liberal Government moved to impose a $200-per-year healthcare flat tax, or “user fee”, for all in Quebec. At the same time, the government has moved to gut corporate tax rates, making them among the lowest in the western world.  

Quebec Finance Minister Raymond Bachand describes the policies as an effort to control public finances. But these changes occur in the context of a global drift toward austerity measures, a reality defined by a shift away from collective solutions toward societal problems, via public institutions—policies that place the burden of the ongoing financial crisis on the public sector, rather than the corporate sector, universally recognized to have sparked the current crisis.

  While working to re-engineer Quebec's public institutions, the Quebec Liberals are also pushing Plan Nord, a controversial development plan for the Northern regions of Quebec, inspired in ways by Alberta's tar sands industry, linking economic growth largely on resource extraction and drafted largely without meaningful consultation of the First Nations communities who live in the regions that the northern plan will impact. 

Popular opposition toward Plan Nord on the streets has been serious, with students joining forces with environmental group for Earth Day on April 22, a mass protest with hundreds of thousands on the streets, a key moment in the trajectory of the ongoing protest movement in Quebec. Outside the Salon Plan Nord in April, hundreds of environmental justice activists clashed with riot police. These tense protests marked a political turning point in the student strike mobilization, shifting the focus of street protests from tuition hikes toward a broader systemic critique of Liberal government policies.   

Some ask if the Quebec Liberal government's effort to control or force public institutions toward austerity has been a factor in pushing the party towards losing control.  

“Today in Quebec the government is failing to impose a neo-liberal 'cultural revolution' without force,” explains Guillaume Hébert, researcher at the Institut de recherche et d'informations socio-économiques (IRIS) in Montreal. “And when facing a growing student movement, a historic movement, the imposition of Law 78 is all about imposing an austerity agenda by force, an agenda aiming to commercialize education but also to privatize other public institutions in Quebec.

  “Many, many people in Quebec agree on the universal right to university education, so there is a discord between the neo-liberal model and Quebec's political culture,” Hébert told The Dominion.

“So we are seeing, as in Victoriaville and on many nights in Montreal that austerity policies are being backed and pushed by state force.”

In Victoriaville, the Sûreté du Québec provincial police force fired large amounts of tear gas and multiple rounds of rubber bullets on demonstrators supporting the student strike movement, severely injuring multiple students who traveled in hundreds on buses to protest outside a Liberal Party meeting. One student, Maxence Valade, lost an eye during the police attack.   

Questions are being raised on the streets of Quebec about the limits of democracy today in the context of a historic student strike. On top of the injuries in Victoriaville, journalists at Concordia University TV have also been repeatedly pepper-sprayed and hit by police batons while filming on the front-lines at nightly protests in Montreal.

  As political commentators shift their focus to the election campaign in Quebec, discussions inside the strike movement are now turning toward the limits for activists and social movements to express themselves in an era of austerity.

  “Democratic expression has always been limited and restrained in Quebec and Canada,” said Eric Shragge, professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University. “Liberal democracies are liberal to a certain point, once popular movements cross a threshold and move toward mass mobilization, repression is administered.

  “There is always a contingency plan of state violence and repression when people collective refuse the neo-liberal economic model that has been pushed for decades now,” said Shragge. “People are pushed to believe they need to find individual solutions to collective problems and that the market will bring solutions. Clearly this isn't the case and when people refuse this logic collectively on the streets, like we are seeing in Quebec, the state will eventually come in to bash heads.”

  The austerity agenda the Conservative Government is pursuing in the rest of Canada amplifies the current crisis in Quebec in different ways.   Although Quebec politicians question specifics of Canada's Conservative policies—namely the expansion of federal prisons—fundamentals of both governments' policies in relation to sustaining adequate funding for public institutions, like universities and hospitals, are similar.  

Beyond boosting policing and military budgets, the Conservative Government has cut funding in the name of 'balancing books', mirroring economic language of Quebec politicians and trends of austerity policies globally. For example, a watchdog organization responsible for monitoring Canada's spy agency CSIS was eliminated in the 2012 budget. This means less oversight for an agency with a long history of spying on and tracking the organizing efforts of social movements.

  At the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), people are drawing a parallel between repression against the student movement in Quebec via Law 78 and the back-to-work legislation imposed on CUPW this past fall.

  “In Canada, repressive legislation is targeting the right to strike, imposing heavy, heavy fines on unions for fighting back and undercutting collective bargaining,” said Aalya Ahmad, a writer and activist in Ottawa who works at CUPW.

  “Imposing working conditions and wages on workers through back-to-work legislation, first with the postal workers, then with Air Canada workers, is an attack on civil liberties,” said Ahmad, in an interview with The Dominion. “In Quebec Law 78 is part of this broader political environment, illustrating an incredible attack on students and professors, it's essential for unions and people in Canada to support the struggle in Quebec against Law 78 because our struggles are connected.”

  At the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) in Toronto, activist John Clark argues that both the conflict on the streets and scale of the protests in Quebec only signal the beginning of a larger conflict in society.   

“What is now happening is that post 2008 crisis and with the system hovering on the edge of a toilet bowl, the pace of austerity is being massively accelerated,” said Clark in an interview with The Dominion. “In the end there are only two ways to regulate a population, you can either meet their needs within limits, or get out the billy clubs.”  

“In Canada, the cutting edge of the resistance to the austerity agenda has come-up in Quebec. Even observing from the outside we see how shocking and unprecedented the repression of the state has become,” said Clark. “But I think Quebec is only the starting point, for both the resistance and repression, this will spread from coast to coast.”  

“The scale of this economic crisis is only beginning to assert itself and the austerity agenda is only getting started,” said Clark. “There is going to be a profound conflict in society in the near future and we need to be ready.”

  Stefan Christoff is a Montreal-based writer, musician and community activist who contributes to the Media Co-op, follow him on Twitter at Spirodon.

No à Loi 78!

Canadian Media Failed to Deliver

Martin Lukacs — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Media coverage of Canada Post labour dispute uncritical, Inaccurate

By June 14, members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) had been staging rotating strikes for 11 days. Workers had decided they would slow down the delivery of mail by striking in different communities for two to three days at a time. Workers in Winnipeg, Hamilton, Fredericton, Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Cape Breton, and more, had all taken their turns on the picket line.

So while CUPW members in Toronto and Montreal were walking the picket line on June 14, workers in every other community in Canada showed up to work as usual. Letter carriers — Canada Post workers who deliver mail in our communities every Monday through Friday — were told there was no work for them. No mail was being delivered that Tuesday. So mail sat in Canada Post processing plants; undelivered.

Indoor workers in Halifax, who process and sort the mail, were working — but no mail would leave the plant. Even priority packages, which should be delivered by noon the day after they are shipped, were not delivered.

In Fredericton, management sent indoor workers home after only three hours of work, even with mail still to process, according to a twitter update from activist Ella Henry. Fredericton workers had just come off a strike rotation, so the claim from Canada Post that there was no work for both indoor workers and letter carriers seemed quite perplexing.

Despite these circumstances, the local hourly CBC radio broadcast in Halifax told listeners all day that Canada Post workers “consider themselves to be locked out.” A CBC News headline online reads, “Union calls postal service reduction 'partial lockout.'”

The Canadian Labour Code, which governs postal workers, states that a “lockout” “includes the closing of a place of employment, a suspension of work by an employer or a refusal by an employer to continue to employ a number of their employees, done to compel their employees, or to aid another employer to compel that other employer’s employees, to agree to terms or conditions of employment.”

Letter carriers showed up to work on Tuesday, June 14, and were told to go home because Canada Post decided no mail was to be delivered. This is very clearly a “suspension of work by the employer” and in the context of the previous rotating strike, very much “done to compel their employees … to agree to terms or conditions of employment.”

The workers were locked out by their employer, plain and simple. The addition of the caveat “consider themselves” casts doubt on a clear situation, and works in favour of the employer’s spin on the situation.

There are several complexities that reporters and editors may not be familiar with when it comes to labour reporting. For example, during the June 14 partial lockout, CUPW declared the locked out workers to be on strike. This is not because the workers chose to strike that day. By declaring those members on strike, the union was able to protect workers who were not locked out from being pressured or disciplined for refusing to do the work of their locked-out co-workers. It is the responsibility of reporters and editors who intend to cover labour issues to understand these issues in order to cover labour issues fairly and accurately.

This example, though, is just one small example of the corporate and public media’s lack of fair, critical, and accurate coverage of the labour dispute.

Prior to both the rotating strikes and the lockout, which became a nation-wide full lockout on June 15, news sources reporting on the labour negotiations, repeatedly listed wages and benefits that Canada Post workers receive. At $26 per hour, a full-time worker makes about $54,000 per year. While this is higher than the median individual income of Canadian workers, it is well below the median household income of $68,860. The sticking point of the dispute was not wages for current workers. Instead, the issue has always been the implementation of two-tiered wages – lower wages for new workers. These lower wages would see new workers paid about $10,000 less than the median Canadian income, and more than $30,000 below the median household income. We are talking about middle-income, stable, secure jobs. The kind of jobs that governments argue are necessary for economic recovery. CUPW has been fighting to keep these kinds of jobs for new workers.

Many sources, including the CBC, continuously cited Canada Post’s statistic that mail volumes have fallen 17 per cent since 2006. In the Vernon Morning Star in BC, an editorial told readers, “E-mail obviously took over sending a friendly letter in the mail long ago for many of us and internet billing has become the norm … Therefore the amount of mail going into the system has obviously decreased.” Overall, however, mail volumes have increased by 10 per cent since 1997. Considering the worldwide economic recession that has been going on since at least 2008, it is understandable that mail volumes would be down the past couple of years, but it’s hardly an obvious trend. Where was the slew of reporters who should have been asking Canada Post President and CEO Deepak Chopra about the impact of the recession on mail service, whether there were signs of recovery, and what Canada Post was doing to improve and expand services for the future?

Also, there was little to no investigation of why or how mail volumes are dropping. Are people using the mail less? Are people using other mail services? Has Canada Post lost contracts to private companies, or has it given contracts to Purolator, which it owns? Are all volumes down? It is very possible that letter mail volume is down, but parcel shipping is up (think about all the online shopping people do.) Also, the whole argument that mail volumes are down because more things are being done electronically needs to be examined since the internet has been around for a while now. Why wasn’t the corporate and mainstream media looking into all of these issues? Why wasn’t the media exploring what Canada Post could be doing instead – improving door-to-door delivery, providing expanded public services (think of how processing EI claims at a post office could reduce backlogs), or the slew of services taken up by European postal services in the face of more electronic business.

How many stories, instead, were written on the opinions of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business on the strike? How many opinion editorials were published by right wing think tanks? Where were the journalists who are supposed to uncover facts?

Perhaps most frustrating was the incompatible arguments that on one hand mail is becoming irrelevant, and on the other, the disruption of the mail service has significant detrimental impacts on the economy – so detrimental that the government needed to legislate the resumption of mail service. Canada Post and the Harper government can’t have it both ways, and where were journalists to interrogate this contradiction?

Repeatedly, articles published that Canada Post lost over $100 million during the labour dispute. This is a number that was put forward by Canada Post and reporters have given no context for how the corporation arrived at that number. Reporters did little to question where that number came from or even when those losses were from.

While the rotating strikes presented delays in mail delivery, mail was still being delivered to the customer, something that postal workers were keeping in mind. While in a legal strike position, they could very well have held a nation-wide strike and stopped mail delivery all together. Instead, rotating strikes were implemented to balance the need to pressure Canada Post to bargain in good faith, and to continue to serve Canadians. Still, though, the corporate and mainstream media consistently repeated Canada Post’s rhetoric that service reductions, and the lockout were the fault of the union.

News sources completely failed to point out that locked out workers received no pay from Canada Post. Postal workers, like all Canadians, have families and bills and responsibilities and were being prevented from working by their employers. What was the economic impact of 48,000 workers being locked out? How much did workers see in lost wages? What were workers doing to make up the lost wages? Did they borrowing more? Did they dipping into savings? Did bills being left unpaid?

Where is the corporate and mainstream media on all of these questions?

Deafeningly silent.

Kaley Kennedy is a member of the Halifax Media Co-op and is involved in Support Postal Workers, a campaign organised by people in Halifax to generate community support for postal workers.

postal workers.ottawa

Protesters Stage Sit-In at York University

Geordie — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:31:58 +0000

A sit-in at York University began Monday where CUPE 3903, the York University union local representing teaching assistants, contract faculty and graduate students has been on strike for 5 weeks.

With the union making a variety of strong demands and the University refusing to bargain further the strike has dragged on for 5 weeks and tensions have grown.

For-profit media has largely written anti-union pieces unilaterally in favour of the University. Many editors in the corporate sphere have suggested the government enact back to work legislation of a questionably legal nature.

In the meantime, 80 students in support of striking workers are occupying the University Presidents Office demanding to question the University President. Classes for the rest of 2008 are scheduled to be canceled today.

Xstrata Faces Strike and Credit Crunch

Geordie — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:48:56 +0000

Bad month for Xstrata, one of the worlds biggest mining groups.

First, CAW Local 599 goes on strike in Timmins, Ontario at the Copper Kidd Metallurgical mine.

Then it's pitch to take over Lonmin, an Anglo-African platinum mine company , fails because of the Credit Crisis.

Xstrata took over Canadian mining company Falconbridge in 2006.

Local Media and GM Strike

dru — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:47:27 +0000

Editor and Publisher has an interesting piece about the anti-union stance of newspapers that publish in union towns like Detroit.