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So you want to have a general strike
61 Plays4 years ago
Jason Kenney’s brutal class warfare on Albertans on behalf of the rich means people want to fight back. And one of the biggest tools working folks have to fight back is the general strike – but it’s not to be undertaken lightly. We talk to Sam Gindin about the lessons learned from the Days of Action in Ontario in the ‘90s fighting Mike Harris and what folks who are considering a general strike today need to to think about.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
Did you know that Progress Alberta is part of a national community of leftist podcasts on the Ricochet Podcast Network? You can find the Alberta Advantage, 49th Parahel, Kino Lefter, Well Reds, The Progress Report, Lefi Sales, Out of Left Field, and Unpacking the News, as well as a bunch of other awesome podcasts at Ricochet Media or wherever you download your podcasts.
Episode Introduction by Duncan Kinney
00:00:36
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We are recording here in Amiskwichiwa, Skigan, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory.
Critique of Jason Kenney's Government
00:00:46
Speaker
And ever since Jason Kinney started his campaign of brutal austerity and class warfare against working Albertans on behalf of the rich, we've seen trickles of it. We've seen mentions of it. You see it in the comments.
00:00:58
Speaker
on a news story, on a particularly shitty thing that Jason Kennedy's UCP government has done, or you see it in Progress Alberta's comment threads as well. And it's on people's lips. And the word that's on people's lips here in Alberta is a general strike. And I sympathize. I think it is one of the most powerful tools working people have when it comes to fighting back against austerity.
Interview with Sam Gindin
00:01:23
Speaker
And when you look at Jason Kenney's attack on working people, it's a perfectly normal reaction. Withdrawing our labor is the ultimate tool in the toolbox when it comes to us. Strikes work, but they don't just happen on their own. It takes planning and strategy, and we need to learn from what happened before.
00:01:43
Speaker
And that's why today on the show we have Sam Gindin. Sam was the research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974 to 2000. He's the co-author with Leo Panitch of The Makings of Global Capitalism, and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Marr of The Socialist Challenge Today, which is getting an expanded and updated American edition that's coming out this year. He's one of Canada's kind of foremost socialist and labor thinkers, and we're very glad to have him on the show. Sam, welcome to
Days of Action in Ontario
00:02:10
Speaker
the Progress Room. Great to be here.
00:02:12
Speaker
So, Sam, the reason you're in town and the reason we're able to have you on the pod face-to-face is that the Parkland Institute brought you in to talk about the days of action in Ontario between 1995 and 1998. Why don't you explain to our audience what those days of actions were and just kind of set the table for us for why you think the Parkland Institute was bringing you to speak to an audience of kind of labor activists.
00:02:34
Speaker
Okay, what Ontario faced in the mid-90s was something very similar to what you're facing today with Kenny. I want to be very careful about what you strategically do in one place and at one time. It doesn't automatically transfer, but it's absolutely crucial that we look at it and draw lessons from it. So I think that's the importance of looking back.
00:02:56
Speaker
So, let me just describe what it was, first of all, and then maybe give some context and get into some of the issues that are raised.
Community-Focused General Strikes
00:03:06
Speaker
What it was was a strategy of having general strikes, but in one community at a time, and spread over time.
00:03:17
Speaker
And I don't think anybody as far as I know this kind of a strategy has never really been tried anywhere before So it was very creative, and it was unique and So what it meant for example was that we would The government was elected in
00:03:35
Speaker
June of 95, in the fall it was clear how devastating this would be to communities. We had our first general strike in December in London, Ontario. Then we had a follow-up in February in Hamilton. We had a few more in March in a number of cities that were clustered together and then Toronto that October. So there was a space in between.
00:04:01
Speaker
The advantage of the space in between is that it gave us a chance to build. The advantage of concentrating on a community was that we could put our best organizers into that community. What we could also do is have a massive demonstration in that community to show that this really has widespread support, and it was crucial to do this with the movements. This had to be seen as this isn't just, nobody could label this as big union,
00:04:28
Speaker
out for itself. We were really representing the community. So there's very much of a class action. It was across unions and it was seeing workers as having a life in the community and being linked to the community and involving the movements. Critical here too was that to pull this off, we didn't need absolute unanimity. You have to understand that part of the strategy reflected how weak we were.
00:04:54
Speaker
And we were weak in a number of senses. One was that we were divided over the question of the NDP.
NDP and Labor Movements
00:05:00
Speaker
And maybe I should just give a quick background on what happened here. In 1992, the NDP government got elected in Ontario. It was a surprise, a little bit like the earlier NDP government getting elected.
00:05:16
Speaker
And what happened with the NDP in government was that they took Labour for granted. There was a recession. They felt they had to make some tough decisions. So they opened collective agreements in the middle of the collective agreement, which set a horrible precedent.
00:05:32
Speaker
But it was because they were taking labor for granted and they were trying to show business that they could be trusted. They were catering to businesses who they had to win over. And I think that's things that would be familiar. It ended up with people getting pretty demoralized and the NDP losing to this right-wing government. And then we suddenly confronted a right-wing government.
00:05:51
Speaker
The divisions were over people who said, well, there's nothing to do but wait for the next election, and people who said you can't do that. You can't do that because it's not clear that you're going to win again. You can't do that because you can't wait that long. You can't do that because if you're just sitting around,
00:06:10
Speaker
You're inviting the government to do more. The problem with not fighting is you're inviting them to do more. It's an open invitation. And you're also demoralizing your own members. You're weakening your own union. Your members are sitting around saying, what's the union doing about this? So it really hurts the union in terms of building.
00:06:28
Speaker
So we had to, the counter argument was that we had to think new and bigger, and that part of our problem was our inability to think big. That's why we were in this place. So there was this conflict between people who said, we can't really do too much, and you have to wait for the NDP. There's also, I think, some of the people who said wait for the NDP were worried that if we did take this kind of politics seriously, the politics of the street, it might substitute for electoral politics.
00:06:55
Speaker
But instead of a province-wide general strike, you decided on this strategy of localized general strikes within a city or a location. Exactly, which is what I want to emphasize in terms of our relative weakness. We were divided along the NDP. We were uneven in our development. Some unions were more advanced, more militant, had a different kind of history, were stronger. So we were divided that way.
00:07:16
Speaker
But what we could do is because the bus drivers were on side, because the teachers were on side because they were bargaining, and the teachers were very conscious of they didn't want to just bargain by themselves because they would be isolated. So they loved this idea, which is a radical idea for them to have this general striking communities, but they saw it as helping them. Posties were on side. So it meant that even though we weren't united, we could actually shut down
00:07:43
Speaker
schools, government buildings, transportation, and key manufacturing. So that was another advantage of doing a community at a time. We had that strength. We could concentrate, bring in our best organizers, bus in people for large rallies. So that was the advantage of that strategy. Plus,
00:08:01
Speaker
It meant that it was sustained and we kept pressure on the government for a long time. Now I should explain that part of our thinking was we got to tell people not just that this was a bad government, but why they were doing this and on whose behalf.
Organizing a General Strike
00:08:15
Speaker
So we were really trying to go after business that was endorsing this. And the point of continuing it over time was to say you can have continued instability.
00:08:24
Speaker
in this profit over time, and you better stop pushing this kind of agenda with Harris. Now, the general strike question, which always comes up from the left when something like this happens, is important. I mean, you have to do something that's big, that's disruptive. You know, that isn't just a normal strike. That's absolutely critical. The problem with a general strike is if you're not really strong,
00:08:49
Speaker
You have to worry that you're going to be the one that fades. And if you have a general strike and it lasts a few days or a week or two, and then you give up, you're really in trouble. You've kind of exposed your weakness. That's one problem. And the other problem is it takes a lot to get ready for it.
00:09:06
Speaker
Well, that's the other thing too, right? I mean, people will cast off, well, they'll just toss it off, right? Well, let's have a general strike. It's like, well, that's a, that's a lot of fucking work. Yeah. And I'm curious about the actual mechanics, like how much, how much time and effort, what was being shut down? How much work between unions and organizers, like how?
00:09:24
Speaker
It was a phenomenal amount. What you said is absolutely true and vital. That if you are thinking about a general strike, you can't just announce it. There's a reason why you couldn't call a general strike a little while ago. There's a reason for why the
00:09:41
Speaker
conservative government got elected with worker votes. You just weren't strong enough. So you can't just suddenly turn around if you've been basically either a business unionism or going on business as usual. You can't just suddenly become that radical. It takes an enormous preparation and then it takes an enormous preparation to
00:10:00
Speaker
to have these, which are basically tests, to have these strikes at the community level. And then maybe you might, you know, it's not saying we'll never have a general strike, but then maybe you'll be in a position to it. So I do want to emphasize, yeah, a couple of things that you've said. You really need a strategy.
00:10:16
Speaker
You really need organizers. You really need to reach your members. You need a lot of organizing skills just in terms of logistics of carrying this out. You know, we were bringing buses in in Hamilton. We had trouble actually getting them all into the city. Buses, signs, food, directions. Right. Health, you know, I mean, emergency health issues. You know, we had rock bands every 50 yards. So it was organizing cultural things. You know, we wanted to have a certain spirit to it. We wanted discipline.
00:10:47
Speaker
Well, you didn't want the police enforcing discipline. We went to the police to say, we're going to marshal. We're going to be the marshals. And we met with them ahead of time so that, you know, that was clear. And we disciplined it quite well. But let me point to a few other things that I think were critical. One was that we actually went to each local and got the members to endorse it. So it wasn't just something that was coming from the top.
00:11:13
Speaker
Once you do that, you better have answers for the members if they're going to lose a day's pay. And some of them are going to be nervous about whether they're going to be fired for skipping work. So now you had to actually use your organization to educate people. You had to send your staff into each place. And that wasn't an automatic. The first place I remember going to was St. Thomas Ford assembly plant in London.
00:11:34
Speaker
And the only thing that had really come into force, there was a lot of talk about everything, including labor legislation, but the only thing that had come into force was 27% cut to welfare payments, which mostly affected single mothers. And when the staff person came into the room, the meeting, he was booed.
00:11:53
Speaker
And he had to make the case. By the time he left, people were on site. They didn't want the kind of community that was being shaped by this government. And not only that, these people were skeptical. We're the first ones to actually call our office and say, what's the next one?
00:12:11
Speaker
And it just shows that workers are fluid. They might act conservatively, but it's not because they're fixed. They need to see that there's a plan. They need to see that it's a credible plan. They need to see that others are going to be there. You're not just asking them to stick their necks out. They don't need to know that they're going to win, but you have to know that this fight is going to matter.
00:12:33
Speaker
that if we, you know, there's a little bit much to think we're gonna win, going from nowhere to winning, but you could say, you know, it was perfectly believable that we can slow this down, and if we don't slow it down, it'd be a lot worse, but we can slow it down. And we did, in fact, get rid of some of the worst aspects of the labor legislation. We did eventually turn around some of the health care cuts in the last year of the Tory administration. They were basically forced.
00:13:02
Speaker
to reverse some of them and actually have fairly large increases. We cross picketed because it's illegal, so we had postal workers shut down, an auto plant, auto workers shut down, you know, government office or whatever.
00:13:19
Speaker
And the advantage of that was not just the illegal question, it developed solidarity. Everybody was really doing this together. You were getting integrated in doing it. We had co-chairs in each community. One was from labor, one was from the movements, and one was a woman. And again, the point was that we needed the community
00:13:43
Speaker
for legitimacy that it wasn't just a labor thing that wasn't just uh where was civil society and all of this how were they being integrated into these actions well one of the interesting things london was an example i may have my number wrong but as i remember it there were a couple of dozen social movements in the city who generally didn't speak much to each other either
00:14:03
Speaker
So one impact of this is it got them involved and it got them speaking together and being coordinated with each other. So they came along quickly because they're waiting for leadership. They're waiting for somebody with the resources to act. And the outcome of it was on the one hand, a lot of young people in the union who weren't very active actually got excited by this. This was fun.
00:14:25
Speaker
But not only that, a lot of young people and social movements who knew that labor is supposed to be progressive, but labor hadn't been exciting them for a long time. They suddenly saw that, hey, that's
Political Education for Movements
00:14:37
Speaker
who a real agent of change can be. We have to be linked with them. So suddenly, they could see part of something really big. And they got very excited. So the movements were great. They really participated, which really contributed to the numbers. But it also meant that you're starting to build a longer term relationship.
00:14:55
Speaker
in the community and changing how you think of what you're doing. All right. Well, I feel like we're in the like good vibes part of this story. So like describe the movement at its peak, right? Like when was, you know, these days of action, when were they flexing at the most power? When did they have the most people out on the street? Well, in the early parts of it, because the fight back started and people were very nervous about what happened, so when London
00:15:21
Speaker
Ontario turned out to be better than people expected. That got people excited about going further. Hamilton was great because it's close to Toronto and we could really get out a lot of the public sector. But, you know, Hamilton had, you know, Labour said 100,000 other estimates from the police were closer to 50,000. But whatever it was, I mean, the great famous protest in Seattle, that had 50,000 people. We had this in Hamilton. In Toronto, we had 200,000 people. And that was the police estimate. Some more.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, so we had more. So, you know, Harris was fading in the polls. People were excited about their potential. So, you know, that was kind of a peak and you're kind of going on. The question always in any large struggle is, then what?
00:16:11
Speaker
because the danger of a peak is you kind of get to the peak, and then you can go down the other side. And so there's two dimensions to this. One was the hope that we could actually win rank and file steelworkers and UFCW members, people who hadn't joined this.
00:16:27
Speaker
these reunions who are outside of participating they weren't participating we did make an agreement with them that we wouldn't shit on them for not being in it if they didn't run around saying this was a waste of time so we kind of tried to not take some act yeah not aggression packed very good way of putting it but we were hoping is that the rank of file would say shit this is working how come we're not directly involved and that they would rebel and that didn't happen
00:16:52
Speaker
I'll get back to, I think, why that didn't happen in a second. So that was one issue. Could you really accelerate it by getting more of the unions involved? And we couldn't. That was one problem. And if we could have, we might have been thinking about, well, maybe you need a general strike in southern Ontario or northern Ontario, and you kind of keep moving.
00:17:11
Speaker
The government held tight, and I think we shouldn't be surprised. This is a government that was recently elected. Governments have a certain legitimacy, even when they're doing lousy stuff. Defeating a government is a massive thing, as we're just seeing in France right now, which that conflict just ended. It's really difficult.
00:17:32
Speaker
So, at some point, people began to, especially the union leadership, but where is this going? Where is this ending? Are we continuing to build power? What's the end goal? And I think it did exhaust itself.
Limitations of Unions and Political Parties
00:17:44
Speaker
And there's a few lessons from this that I think are important. One is that unions are unions. They have daily functions. They're governing.
00:17:52
Speaker
structures with all kinds of different people in it, they're responsible in bargaining, grievances, contracts, bargaining, there's all kinds of things going on and they can move away from it from a while, which is terrific, and you can start developing a class perspective instead of just this particular perspective of I'm representing my members, which is great, but sustaining it needs another kind of organization whose job is to sustain it.
00:18:17
Speaker
And we don't have that. I mean, the NDP, you know, a political party should have been doing all the education. You know, we were running meetings, we put out tons of literature. The media was attacking us, which we loved because it meant everybody in these small communities was talking about it. We sent organizers into Tim Hortons just to talk to people randomly. I mean, this was really, this was what was happening in these communities because the media was immediately saying, unions announce chaos coming in two months.
00:18:43
Speaker
So actually, and if we didn't do our job, we would have gotten killed. But it forced us to say, we better get in there. And we got in there. And it showed what unions could do. But political education is the job of a party whose main goal in life is organized that way. And that's not what the NDP is. We can criticize it for not having radical policies. But the real problem is it's not concerned with how to develop working people.
00:19:11
Speaker
into collective agencies that can transform society. How do we develop their understanding? How do we develop their strategic capacity? How do we develop them as organizers? Or even just education, right? Like, what are you reading? What's your knowledge of how power works? Exactly. Study groups, podcasts. I mean, this is what newspapers, you know, you looked at the CCF in the 30s, there were dozens of newspapers. NDP doesn't have this anymore. And part of the reason for that is that they're electoralists.
00:19:40
Speaker
They don't see themselves as transforming society. They see themselves as getting elected and being a kinder face of neoliberalism, hopefully a little bit better. Well, if that's your goal, then you don't have to do
Sustaining Momentum Post-Protests
00:19:52
Speaker
all of this stuff. What you want from workers, it'll knock on doors and they'll give you some money. So the problem we were running into of what next? I wasn't surprised by the fact that the trade union leaders began to fade.
00:20:06
Speaker
because we shouldn't expect them to be revolutionary. What was disappointing was that the left itself criticized the leadership, but it itself, excuse me, it itself didn't figure out how to take advantage of this. Yeah, where were the NDP in this? Were they- Oh, the NDP was
00:20:28
Speaker
I'd say cool generally, but once you've got people in motion, they had to be there, they would come out to, sections of the NDP would definitely, rank of file members would definitely come to events, and some of the leaders started coming to the event, so they couldn't be hostile to it, but they weren't the leaders.
00:20:45
Speaker
The unions themselves became the political arm and the educators. And they didn't see it as an opportunity to do the education and then do that. Quite the opposite. I think they were happy for it to end so that everybody can go back to electing the NDP.
00:21:00
Speaker
It either wasn't organized enough or it wasn't thinking strategically and it was more concerned with just pushing militancy, just keep going. And what it didn't do is every time we left a community, we left something there, but when we left, it was over. We just took everybody into another community. This was an ideal time to go into those communities and organize. People were pumped.
00:21:23
Speaker
And you could, again, you'd have to think about, well, creatively, what should we do? You know, unemployment was an issue at the time. Should we go door-to-door and find out what people need, what their skills are and say, well, why don't we have more childcare? You know, would you be, you know, if you had childcare, would you be willing to work? And start thinking about a local community plan for doing things. We didn't do that. We didn't recruit people who were saying what next. We should have been recruiting people. We didn't have the capacity to do that. You just moved on to the next community, next project. We moved to the next community, next project. And the left itself didn't behave any differently.
00:21:53
Speaker
You know, they were good soldiers in in doing all this stuff. So there was a missed opportunity from the left. So this thing ends and when these things end People have these memories they are anybody who's involved I spoke last night at the Parkland Institute and a woman stood up to correct the numbers I used in Hamilton an old elderly woman who was in it and before she sat down I I asked well you were there. How did you remember it? You think that I'm?
00:22:23
Speaker
giving the story an accurate description. And she said, it was the best moment of my life. So people remember it and it affected them. But once you stop having the structures and the struggle, you go back to normal life. And what normal life tells you is you don't really have that much power. You're dependent on the corporations. You're cut off. You're worried about your own problems, your union. Even where there's collectivity and solidarity, it's still just your union. So
00:22:50
Speaker
You know, so we have to look at it in terms of what did we learn. We did learn that the members will be there if we give them a plan and structures and support them and do the education. That was an important lesson.
Need for a New Socialist Organization
00:23:03
Speaker
We learned that we have incredible capacities. Give our stewards something to do, train them, hire, put full-time people onto these things and we can organize through the logistics
00:23:14
Speaker
That was impressive. So, you know, we learned those kinds of impressive things, but we also had to learn that we needed another organization that does this full time. That organizes the public, that works with the public. And organizes workers in the public. And, you know, that's what a Socialist Party should be. You have to remember that at the end of the 19th century, when Social Democratic parties were first formed,
00:23:37
Speaker
They were formed to get workers to vote, because at that point in time you had to have property, otherwise you weren't given the democratic franchise. But, you know, the German party, it had pubs, it had libraries, because it saw it as, well, that's where workers discuss things.
00:23:54
Speaker
We want workers to read. And newspapers, right? Yeah, tons of newspapers. It didn't just have newspapers, it had journals. It had theoretical journals. It had newspapers where you debated something, where you had two sides. Throughout Europe, they had soccer clubs. This is where the soccer clubs came from. Union Berlin. Yeah, I mean, this is where they all came from because it was a cultural thing.
00:24:17
Speaker
if you weren't going to have culture, this is how you rooted people. This is how you got to the families. They had swimming clubs. So that sense of what a party is was lost. And that's been one of the major defeats for the working class. We lost that. And once you lose it, one of the things that happens is that when we think about organizing people, we think about awareness, we think about injustice.
00:24:44
Speaker
We think about urgency, the environment, the right. But if people don't see structures they can work through that matter, they can't have hope. And if they don't have hope, they don't make a commitment. And then you have to have a way of reproducing this. The trouble with the protests is that they end.
00:25:03
Speaker
So you have to have ways of sustaining things. And for that, we do need an institution, whatever we call it. But I think it used to be called a party, a space to strategize, a space to educate, a space to lead campaigns, a psychological anchor so you could actually believe in something that's working. And talk with people who share your values and beliefs. I mean, I think, yeah, you could argue that capitalism's greatest success over the past 50 years has been successfully atomizing us and reducing us to our individual component parts and kind of smashing that.
00:25:32
Speaker
solidarity that used to exist, as you say, and yeah, any kind of left-wing organization should be thinking about how to build these types of institutions. Exactly. How do you bring people together? Yeah. I mean, the normal workings of a capitalist society tend to divide people. But then you've got neoliberalism doing exactly what you said, and workers have ended up internalizing it. People will always do something to survive and for their family to survive.
00:26:01
Speaker
But when they don't see those collective organizations, like a party, what do they do? They work through their summer vacation so they'll pay off the increase in dues. The kids stay at home a little bit longer so they can save some money. They find individual solutions. You opt for lower taxes. It's like a wage increase.
00:26:19
Speaker
And so you end up reinforcing, reproducing neoliberalism. And you can't combat that in just kind of hoping, well, people will get pissed off and something will happen. Yeah, they'll get pissed off and they might protest or they'll solve it themselves. But it has to be organized. It has to have some kind of a structure. And that's why the need for a socialist organization is more important.
00:26:41
Speaker
than ever before at a moment when it isn't there at all. When it doesn't exist. Okay, so let's take it back to the original thing,
Organizing Advice for Alberta
00:26:50
Speaker
right? So you want to have a general strike. If you could give advice to people planning a general strike in Alberta today, what would you have to say to them?
00:26:58
Speaker
I guess I would emphasize that if you can't get your members on side, don't think that you can pull this off from the top. It'll just fade away. They'll see your weaknesses. So it has to involve. The issues have to be there, and the issues are clearly there. That's not the problem. But it does have to educate the members so they really understand, because some of this hasn't been put into place yet, they really understand what's coming, and it's going to be worse. So the kind of education is necessary.
00:27:28
Speaker
You have to start actually giving a more radical education because it isn't just Kenny. Kenny can be replaced. There's an agenda, and you have to show that this is happening elsewhere. There's a pattern here. They're cutting corporate taxes. They're defending public services. Yeah, and that's not new. You've seen it in Ontario. You see it in the United States. You see it in Europe. So that's one thing. You have to give people a sense that fighting back has to be a class project.
00:27:57
Speaker
that you're not alone. Your union can't just say, I'll go on strike and that somebody else is going to, they're just going to pick you off. You have to realize that, hey, we have to fight differently. You have to realize that something has changed. And somebody put it at the meeting yesterday, there's an existential crisis. I mean, unions have to really ask whether in their old form they can really represent their members. And if they can't,
00:28:19
Speaker
It's going to be easy to attack them. As the liberal order fractures apart, as it is increasingly shown to be unable to provide for people's basic needs,
00:28:30
Speaker
And we see the right capitalizing on this, right? Like, what is to be done on the other side of the equation? Exactly. That's why the urgency is, you know, it's the environment, but it's also that the alternative is that the right is going to take advantage of the frustrations. So, you know, it's absolutely fundamental. We have to get it into our heads that we have to do something. You know, when the 80s, this kind of stuff started in the 80s, people thought, well, wait it through. It's just a particular government.
00:28:55
Speaker
It'll change if there's an election. And we've got to get that out of our head. The Ontario NDP still have not won an election since the 1990s. We have to really say, look, we're facing something that isn't going to go away unless we really organize to fight it.
00:29:12
Speaker
We have to fight it. We still have unions that have certain resource and strength. We have to transform the unions It's just a question of having more union dues and more density. We need different kind of unions and we have to think this through What does that mean and how do we struggle? So it's not just saying we have to struggle. It's how do you struggle and then strategically? I would just be careful about Calling a general strike
00:29:37
Speaker
unless you're so strong that you think you can sustain it. And even then you have to ask, well, you know, states are pretty legitimate. You know, they're going to make this illegal. They're going to get the police out. People are going to start drifting away. So you have to be so prepared, and it makes much more sense
00:29:53
Speaker
to raise the question of how do we strengthen ourselves so that one day we can do that kind of action. And I think, you know, we shouldn't write off the legislative thing. We do have to come to government, but it's not to come to government to administer a capitalist society. We have to come to government to transform the state so that it helps us democratize society. If you leave the state and electoralism to reactionaries, you will get
00:30:18
Speaker
reactionary state, reactionary government. And I also think that yes, the idea of organizing a general strike is an idea to hold in your head, but it has to be part of a longer term project. It has to be the ultimate goal with the underlying, but doing all of the things that you're talking about.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think you put it well by saying that it has to be part of a larger strategy. It's a tactic. And as a tactic, you decide when it's useful, when it's not, and what forms to take. And I think also people should think creatively about, so what do you do here? You know, the rotating strikes is one idea that we came up with. There's other things that could be done. I mean, you could decide that let's have a week of protest and every day shut down a different part of the economy or the government and disrupt for a week.
00:31:02
Speaker
And then do this again. Or, you know, in another month, warn them that if they don't start slowing down, this is what's going to happen. You absolutely have to get the public on side so they can't isolate you. So they can't claim we're the elected government and we have support. You have to show that, no, you ran without those promises. You lied.
00:31:21
Speaker
And now you're exposing yourself and people are turning against you. So getting to, you know, we have to think of the class as including the community, partly because workers do live in the community, which is so important, but there's all kinds of people who aren't in unions that we want to reach. And that's another thing that's very important. You do not want precarious workers to resent you because you have a union job. You want to, and you can't say to them, oh, we're on your side.
00:31:45
Speaker
You have to show that you're on their side, and you can only show you're on that side by using your resources and your members to struggle for these broader things that are important to them. Especially as the rise of precarious work is just, you know, going and climbing the edge exponentially.
Role of Teachers in Labor Movements
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, and you've got union workers who are becoming increasingly precarious too, like auto workers who have two-tier wages and young workers having, you know,
00:32:08
Speaker
So the posties fighting, you know, two-tier pensions and all that stuff. Yeah, so we just have to see the struggle is bigger rather than just being intimidated by it. We have to think about transforming our unions. We have to think about strategy is more than protest. We have to really think it through.
00:32:26
Speaker
We have to do all the logistical, difficult stuff of training and education and planning. And we really have to think in class terms. Like we're trying to build workers who are just fragmented individuals who happen to sell their labor into a social force that can lead the transformation of society. And we have to define the class very broadly. Not, you know, the way it used to be defined as the industrial working class is what
00:32:51
Speaker
There's no, there's very little factory floor to organize anymore, right? I mean, ultimately you're right though. There are more of us than there are of them. Yeah. Although, you know, we shouldn't, you know, we keep saying, you know, I mean, for example, there are large workplaces, warehouses for Amazon are enormous.
00:33:07
Speaker
Walmart is a very large space. So there still are large workplaces and where there is manufacturing, it's important. Transportation is incredibly important logistically. And the importance of things like healthcare and education is they can't be moved.
00:33:28
Speaker
and brought and they provide a social service. So they link immediately to. Well, and they're one of the few public goods we have left, right? Like health care, education, and maybe libraries are the three things that people like, well, no, like the private sector should not be providing those things. It's interesting you bring up the teachers in Ontario and how instrumental and how much they were a part of the process there because they were going through bargaining. I mean, the teachers in Alberta are, I think it's probably fair to typify them or characterize them as not as militant as Ontario teachers who are currently on strike.
00:33:57
Speaker
in Ontario, but the bargaining for teachers is coming up. And I think it's worthwhile for the teachers to consider a more militant turn and to actually turn towards a unionism that looks at strategies like this. Yeah. No, I think that's important. I mean, you know, I mean, in Ontario itself, you could see the beginnings of union teachers when, you know, the post-war boom ended and teachers were starting to be attacked and teachers in Ontario.
00:34:25
Speaker
had fairly good conditions, that they were starting to be attacked, and they began to pay more attention to the labour movement, get into the OFL. They're in the Ontario Federation of Labour, unlike here. But teachers in Ontario are fragmented into five unions, so that's one problem. And teachers have tended to vote liberal, is another issue. So the question for teachers is, you know, what you posed. I mean, they're going to confront this, and if they confront it alone, they will not get anything.
00:34:56
Speaker
It'll be worse. They're going to build resentment against them. They don't work in the summer and they've got a great pension. And so teachers have to take on this fight. Elementary teachers, for example,
00:35:12
Speaker
very hard for them to go on strike because what's going to happen with the kids. So they have to really think this through. Can they set up alternative childcare centers? Can you have rotating strikes as teachers? But what you really have to think through is you have to get to the unions. And you can't get to the unions unless you're fighting. You can't go to the unions and say, we're not going to fight. Well, you take on this fight. You have to fight. And then you have to get the community. So one of the great things that's happening in Ontario is that there's been a lot of organizing of parents.
Importance of Parent Support
00:35:44
Speaker
By the way, one of the things that the Harris government in Ontario did in the schools was it took principals out of the bargaining unit to make them into managers and to divide some of your power is one thing it did. It also canceled a parent-teacher.
00:36:00
Speaker
organizations, which weren't that great, but they were democratic form. Interface between parents and the schools. And they centralized education. For all the talk about neoliberalism being seen as weakening the state, that's not quite correct. Neoliberalism strengthens the state in certain ways and then weakens it in others. And they took much more control over the content of education so the teachers couldn't teach.
00:36:24
Speaker
progressive things. This was a major issue. But getting back to the teachers here, they're going to need the labor movement. They have to see the labor movement talking radically as a positive because the alternative is going to be they can't be militant by themselves anyways. So they have to see that as positive. They have to see putting some of their resources into helping
00:36:46
Speaker
parents organized. And what they did in Ontario was they made contacts in schools. They started in their own neighborhoods in Toronto, but they eventually spread it to the whole province. And online, they gave them kits.
00:37:02
Speaker
So they knew all the impacts of all the education cuts, and they gave them the simple things. How do you run a meeting? How do you write a letter? And then they set up a list so they could call people out for demonstrations. One of the problems is that the teacher's strategy is still very top down. So the members don't really know what they are, what it is.
00:37:26
Speaker
So they're kind of sitting around wondering, which isn't a good thing. They feel cut off. And the parents are being used by the leadership in a certain way. They're really supportive of what the parents are doing. They're joining and articulating why the cuts are so bad. But if you end up just calling the parents and saying, we've got a big demo tomorrow, come. That's not what you want to do. You want to find a way of integrating them also.
00:37:53
Speaker
into the strategy. These are all democratic questions that have to do with improving your strategy. So for teachers, you know, it's forcing teachers to think of themselves as, they may have always thought of themselves as professionals that have a certain status.
00:38:09
Speaker
And that's good because you want to have that status, you want to have that kind of autonomy and control. But what they're seeing is that you're going to lose it if you're not actually seeing yourself as having other things in common with people. And so, you know, so again, these are all moments.
00:38:26
Speaker
to keep learning these things. And the question is, can the labor movement do it? Or do we also need socialists who are thinking about this all the time by the nature of what being a socialist is, also to organize themselves to engage in these fights and to think strategically. Well, I think that's a fantastic place to leave it. Sam, thanks so much for coming onto the show. What's a way for people to follow you? Do they buy your book? What's a way people can support you and follow what you're up to?
00:38:50
Speaker
You have a Twitter account? I don't know. No, I don't have Twitter. You know, I'm part of the socialist project and we do a lot of things in our own community in Toronto in terms of forums, etc. But we put out a bullet.
00:39:07
Speaker
which is worth following. It really keeps up with political events and struggles everywhere. What's that called? Where can people find it? On the Socialist Project webpage. They can find all the material. We do a lot of streaming. We stream all our forums that we do so they can be reached by others. We do podcasts. So there's a lot of material there that I think is worth following through. And in terms of
00:39:30
Speaker
The Days of Action, I might put together some materials so that we've got something available and we can send out to people if they want to contact me at sam.ginden at gmail.com.
Contact and Support Information
00:39:42
Speaker
And if parents, if they're thinking about parents organizing, we can put them in touch with people who did this in Ontario and pass on their kits so they can do the same thing here.
00:39:53
Speaker
I think Edmonton doesn't get on the radar very much, I have to say. Or Alberta, broadly speaking. Other than the tar sands and a view of Alberta as being right wing. Or reactionary politics. And my experience coming here is to actually get excited.
00:40:14
Speaker
about what's happening here and I think that getting some more links on questions like the environment and questions like conversion with what's happening in Ontario would be terrific.
00:40:24
Speaker
OK, well, Sam, thank you for so much for being on the show. And folks, if you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing interviews like this, there's a few things you can do to help us out. You can definitely smash that like button when we post it on our social media. But beyond that, we really do like it when you rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on whatever your podcatcher is of choice. It's really awesome if you can share this content with your friends. If you have a friend who's been yelling general strike whenever Jason Kenney's name pops up.
00:40:53
Speaker
definitely share this podcast with them. I think they will get a lot out of it. The other thing that really helps us out is giving us money. If you want to join the 250 other folks who help keep this independent media project going with regular monthly donations, you can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and contribute, you know, five, 10, $15 a month. It really does go a long way to helping us more financially sustainable. And it is, you know, Jim and I's full-time job, this project and all the other things we do at Progress Alberta.
00:41:23
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments on the content or the conversation that we had today, I really do want to hear from you. Please reach out to me. I am on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Thanks so much to cosmic family communist for the amazing theme. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Sam again and goodbye.