In this article Phinneas Gage describes how workers at Canada Post have organized themselves, and the ups and downs and risks of organizing.

The Committee in Action
by Phinneas Gage

“So let’s talk about what happened in the last month or so”. I said looking over the room full of the usual suspects. Harjit told the story like this: “the supervisors came out on to the floor to talk to everyone about taking forceback (forced overtime), they didn’t think anything was up when they asked the first person and they refused. They just nodded made a note and moved down the row”. He was grinning like a maniac. “The supervisor then asked if it was a group decision, and everyone said no”. Pete continued the story beaming with pride “then the next one refused, and the next one, and the next one until the entire depot had refused forced overtime”. A sister in the back of the room asked what the supervisors did next “they ran back into their office and called upper management in the plant”. All of the workers simply said that mail was heavy, it had been a long day and they didn’t feel that doing overtime that day was a safe decision. This was when Harjit had sent the text out across the city and everyone heard about what had happened at Depot 9.

The workers at Depot 9 built their job action around a core group of workers who had staged a march on the boss action before Christmas. The action was a textbook example of what we taught in our “Taking Back the Workfloor Course”. The course was a single day of workplace mapping, basic strategy and a series of role plays designed to teach workers how to plan and execute job actions. The centre piece was a role play march on the boss where the workers take on a facilitator pretending to be a boss. The carriers were upset because the supervisors were being sloppy in assigning jobs to the workers who cover absences known as relief carriers. Usually this is done based on seniority (how long someone has been at the corporation) but often management will cut corners, either out of laziness or favourtism and assign the jobs based on their own whims. The relief carriers demanded that management respect the seniority list. After this action the supervisors were careful to assign relief positions properly. This gave the carriers the confidence to be more ambitious when the time came for them to stand together again. They were also smart about it, they claimed the victory for what it was and told the other workers on the floor about what they got by standing together and taking action.

Initially some of us thought the campaign around forceback might not go anywhere but supported it anyways as a learning experience; we discussed the initial action at Depot 9 and as one action among many other small actions isolated to a single station. We were very, very wrong on that prediction.

Later the next week scattered reports of workers refusing forceback across the city began to come in. Every time a small group of workers would stand together it would be sent out over the text message tree so everyone could hear about it, this also created a buzz and a lot of talk in the break rooms. Finally at one more depot everyone refused all at once, this was turning into a chain reaction.

The Committee in Action

The Organising Committee would meet monthly and would open every time with each member reporting on their station. This part of the meeting almost always took up half of the meeting. The committee members mostly shared war stories and talked about grievances on the floor and what the workers did to resolve the issues. Early in the committee a lot of work was put into helping each other out with problems and planning small campaigns around small concerns usually based in an individual workplace or shift.

One action had workers at a section in the plant ambush the boss in a “staff talk” (presentation by management) with a list of demands. They planned the meeting out like a march on the boss with a list of demands, a group of workers who were instructed to interrupt the boss so that the workers could speak and a third group that would relate stories about how management’s policies were affecting them. The main militants, a pair of sisters, sat at the back of the room and watched their organising play out in front of them. This was important for all of us in a lot of actions because we didn’t want to be the exclusive leaders; we wanted our co-workers to learn how to plan job actions by doing it themselves. The two sisters then sent a text message out so the whole city could hear about the action and build off of it.

There was also a lot of talk about what we could win based on the support we had on the floor behind a given issue. Up to that point we deliberately kept things pretty modest and planned actions that were scaled to our demands. When we got more ambitious with our demands we began to move up the corporate hierarchy. This wasn’t conscious at first but became extremely conscious further down the line. Demands were issued either verbally with the floor shouting the demands out or chanting, during a staff talk, or even sometimes in writing with a demand letter presented to a coffee break meeting for ratification and then handed in to the boss by a delegation of workers.

Issues like respecting seniority and information from management about the work plan for the day usually came down to pressure on a supervisor but staffing levels and work distribution meant we had to target managers or even directors for the entire city. We would target the level of management responsible for the grievance. This also meant our tactics had to change based on where our support was at, strong workplaces where they had a few actions under their belt were more daring and confrontational, others had to start the escalation chain at the beginning.

The workers would then attend an organising committee meeting, or send a report with someone based on a phone conversation. After every action we tried to encourage debriefing through the committee and ask what worked and what did not go as planned. Eventually this became an effortless part of the direct action process.

Ideally a strong committee should have as clear of a process for dealing with grievances as the “grievance process” in a mainstream union. For us the process went something like this:

1. Worker presents a grievance to the committee (this would either be the organising committee at the early stages or a shop committee or informal workgroup based on the job).

2. The Committee identifies the level of management responsible for the grievance and picks a tactic that pressures the appropriate level of the corporate hierarchy. The organising body that targets management should be built around the territory covered by the decisions that level of management governs. So a city-wide policy will ideally be challenged by the city wide organising committee and target the city wide management officials.

3. Committee members on the floor organise the action and raise the demands from the floor. There is no delegated negotiation; all important decisions in regards to a campaign are made in the shop floor “coffee break” meetings. Demands are issued and we would agitate for concessions. There was little room for management to make counter offers or cut us deals.

4. After the action the committee debriefs on what happened. They identify points on the floor where the campaign was strong and where it was weak. The organising committee identifies leaders and people who would be good for the workfloor mobilisation course and assesses the effectiveness of the action.

5. We would then assess whether the action worked. Part of this was identifying if we got what we wanted. If we didn`t get what we wanted we would go back to step two and try and turn up the heat either by moving up the chain of command or increasing the intensity at the same level of management. We would also assess whether the floor was stronger because of what we were doing or if there were places we needed to build support.

After several actions we learned that a lot of these fights need to be framed in terms of respect, dignity and doing what is right and not just in terms of getting what we want. Of course our motivation for doing a lot of things as radicals is the principle of the matter at hand but we doubted ourselves when we thought that large groups of workers would get on board with this line of thinking. We were wrong. Once we started appealing to people’s sense of self worth even if an action went badly many workers saw it as a victory in itself. Our coworkers won’t fight for a dollar. They will fight for dignity. Sometimes we fight over a dollar because dignity is what’s at stake; we can lose the fight for that dollar but still win back some dignity because we fought.

This process is not something that occupies the space that legal tactics fill in most unions. We would often have grievance forms on hand and encourage members to grieve violations of the collective agreement in addition to our job actions. There were also human rights complaints, health and safety violations and one demand letter made an appeal to the Criminal Code of Canada. However, there are places where direct action can run into conflict with the more conventional union strategy. In these instances we opted to favour a strategy that used direct action on the floor rather than building our militants into full time grievance specialists. This put worker self activity in the centre of our unionism and meant conventional legal unionism was used as a backup. We treated the law as a shield, but not a sword.

The Campaign Develops

Everyone sat on couches in the union office holding pieces of paper, taking notes and relating what happened over the previous month since the last meeting. “Well is the fact that the absent carrier is going to have twice as much mail going to create bad blood on the floor?” I asked. “It might” Pete said. Christine piped up, “I called in sick for a day last week to take care of my toddler and everyone refused forceback on my route, when I came back there was more mail but it was worth it. There were two others in my depot that had undelivered walks that felt the same as me. I don’t think it will create any conflict, at least at our station”.

“Look, this is a crisis, we’ve been trying to address this for years and have gotten nowhere” Christine said. She continued, “the forced overtime clause is supposed to be a last resort but we have depots that are using it three times a week when it used to be twice a year”. She was right, also injuries were up and this was creating a vicious cycle where workers would work too much overtime to cover absences, get injured and then create more absences while they took time off work to heal. This did create bad blood, once some workers started getting doctors notes saying they could not work overtime. After this happened there was even more pressure on the workers that were left to pick up the slack. The solution to the problem was simple of course: hire more staff.

“This month we have four depots that have held the overtime ban for a few weeks, but we still have six depots with no ban in place”. At a mass meeting called by the workers of Depot 9 the workers demanded to meet with one of the managers for the entire city. By all accounts the manager got roasted as angry carriers demanded answers as to why staffing the letter carriers was not a priority. He was furious with the union who he had felt put the workers up to it, when in actuality the union’s relationship to the struggle was much more complicated.

The Mass Meeting

Christine got the meeting back on track: “We seem to be stuck in the same four depots, the Mail Service Couriers, and certain parts of the plant. We need a way to get everyone on board and push the actions into places where we aren’t strong yet.” “Easier said than done” said Keith, we’ve got the depots where folks either have had some fight in them for a while, like Depot 3, or where most of the carriers are lower seniority and younger”. Christine nodded.

“What we need is a way for everyone, not just the four depots where we are strong, to talk with each other directly”, said Pete. “That way the folks that are worried can hear how it worked for us and maybe our attitude will rub off on them”. Everyone nodded. “A meeting!”, Keith shouted in a eureka moment. “We call a mass meeting, where everyone comes and tells each other about what they have done and how we want to spread it to their station”.

“What about the executive though? Will they be in favour of it?” asked Pete. Pete was thinking about how hard it was to get the direct action course going last time. The last time we tried something like this was the course and there was stalling for months before it got through. (For more on this, see “Waves of Struggle”). “Do we need permission to call a meeting?” replied Keith.

Two days later an email went out with a nice clean graphic, a date and a time. We also decided that two sisters from the floor would chair the meeting, and that everyone would get equal time to speak, including any union officials. This definitely upset some people who were used to having the President act as chair at the General Membership Meetings, however it was agreed this was a meeting called by the workers and that it would have no standing under the CUPW constitution. We were clear but firm, union officials were encouraged to attend but they would be in the stack alongside everyone else. When word hit the floor there was overwhelming enthusiasm for the mass meeting. This enthusiasm started to rub off on the entire executive and even those who were worried about it started to think this was a good thing.

Before the meeting Keith stood in front of a crowd of 160 workers, the meeting hall was packed and everyone sat in a huge circle. Christine gave him a slow nod and he read the opening address he prepared. In the speech Keith roasted the union for inactivity and blamed poor leadership for what had happened with forceback. The President of the local was staring daggers at all of us from the organising committee. Some of our coworkers looked pissed too. Many workers were frustrated with the union but the local President was tremendously popular on the floor, she got elected for a reason, and many of us in the committee disagreed with Keith’s argument that this was merely a question of leadership. The problem was with a lack of initiative at the base of the union too, the leadership played a role in this, but we had the same criticisms with the previous two Presidents also. (see On Leadership, On Contracts, and My Introduction). Plus, the meeting hadn’t been billed as one about problems with the union, it was supposed to be about fighting our bosses.

“This is bad, Phinneas”, Ike leaned in and whispered in my ear. I nodded slowly scanning the room, some members were obviously agreeing with what was being said, but at least as many were angry and felt this was an anti union tirade. As soon as Keith finished his speech there was some very enthusiastic clapping, but some members also put their hands up and were waiting impatiently, shuffling in their chairs in a way that only someone who intensely irritated can do. A split was developing. And in all splits there are two small fractions who get heated up and shout at each other and a majority who don’t want to be in a room with either group of shouters, let alone being in the room with both groups shouting at each other. That is, if a polemical argument broke out over Keith’s remarks, it didn’t matter who won because the argument itself taking place that way in this meeting would be a loss.

This wasn’t the time for executive politics so Ike decided to act quickly. He put his hand up and we all saw Christine sigh with relief, Christine knew Ike well and knew he was going to smooth things over. She wrote down his name on her pad of paper, even though Ike was a full time officer in the union he spoke when it was his turn along with everyone else, we were all equals in this meeting.

Before Ike spoke, Hank, a rank and file worker from Depot 3, and member of a charismatic church got up to speak. “I remember the good old days when Canada Post treated its workers well”, he started. “I used to call the supervisor by their first name, if I called in sick they would ask me if I was okay when I was back at work”. He paused for effect and to take stock of the crowd.

“We’ve been very reasonable on this issue, we’ve waited years”, his pace picked up from the calm and thoughtful tone of earlier in his speech. “But Canada Post isn’t listening! The union can’t do anything for us it’s up to us to do this! We can’t wait any longer, our friends are getting hurt, the new people are working in the dark and the overtime just keeps coming and coming and coming!” The crowd was getting really worked up at this point, but still a few people were shuffling uncomfortably, there was still a clear split between a lot of folks who were worried this was turning a little too ‘anti union’ and the passions of the crowd weren’t helping.

Then Ike’s turn came. He was a lot younger than Hank; he had expensive glasses designer jeans and a faux hawk. He stumbled a bit at first stuttering the first words of his speech but he quickly found his feet. “Jean Claude Parrot was one of the greatest leaders this union ever had”, the older members who remembered the years where ‘J.C.’ went to jail for defying back to work legislation nodded sagely. “But we make a big deal out of our great leaders, a big deal that even Jean Claude Parrot wouldn’t agree with. He always said that they couldn’t have any of what they had accomplished without the members taking action themselves, without the wildcat strikes and direct actions those glorious years would be nothing!” I’m a cynical guy but I could feel my own heart singing at this point. “Don’t look to the union for permission they cannot legally give! You are the union, the union isn’t the full time officers or the people in Ottawa, they are just a small part of CUPW; the union is every single one of us! This is what makes us a movement!” The crowd exploded, many started chanting “so-so-so-solidarity!”

The next speaker was Pete. He smiled broadly while re-telling the story about what happened at Whitemud South. “We were really worried when we were only the third depot to refuse forceback, first it was Depot Nine, then Depot Three”, the crowd cheered, “then it was us, and we thought the discipline was definitely going to come”. He shuffled his notes, and beamed at the room. “But we stayed strong and we did it, and that’s why I came to the meeting today, to say you all can do it too, together we can end forceback!”

Keith then stood up and read a motion to form a ‘Workfloor Mobilisation Committee’ to coordinate job actions all over the city. The motion outlined a committee that had broad representation from all the different depots, and sections and shifts in the plant. The committee would be independent of the local executive and would coordinate job actions outside the bylaws. Some of the tension in the room came back, but several executive members who were working on the direct action campaigns earlier spoke in favour of the committee. I was an executive member too, I voted in favour.

The Campaign Continues

The next morning the texts began to roll in:
“Depot 6 is refusing all overtime, management extremely upset”.
“Sherwood Park depot is refusing overtime and standing strong”.
“Depot 3 affirms that they will not do any overtime”.
“Depot 1 refused overtime for today”.

Each one was forwarded out to about seventy of our fellow workers, feeding more enthusiasm across the city.

A series of coffee break meetings began to roll out across the city where depot after depot affirmed that they had all but stopped mandatory overtime. In most depots a vote by a show of hands in a coffee break meeting generally decided it, this helped build the sense of strength and unity on the floor as workers saw how much support there was for the proposal. This pattern followed in about ten different stations and even spread to the plant as the inside workers used the momentum to raise their own concerns over days off and respect from management. Soon the spirit of militancy spread to the plant.

Then there were more text messages.

“Fork lift drivers just turned in their company vehicle operators permits. They are refusing to move mail until issues of health and safety are resolved”.

“In the offsite”, a part of the mail plant operations that were moved to another building, “workers marched on the boss over staffing concerns.”
Actions in one place would spur on actions in other places. They would often leap frog and places that had a lower level of agitation would often start at a much higher level than the first depots to start. Escalation would work on a different scale on a city wide level than it did on the level of an individual station.

At one point a coffee break meeting was as an extremely daring and radical act. Later on many of the stations would be organising a march on the boss as their first job action. The movement coalesced around the issue of staffing and health and safety, inside the mail plant and outside with the delivery personnel. Over a thousand workers at over a dozen different workplaces were involved in one kind of job action or another, either marching on the boss, refusing forced overtime, or participating in mass meetings on the floor. There were also petitions, chants from the floor, noisemakers and even some letter carriers would rock their cases and make noise to celebrate the arrival of Friday morning.

The Workfloor Mobilisation Committee

“Alright folks let`s call this meeting to order.“ Keith sat at the front of the room in the coffee shop and looked across the room. The usual suspects were all present, except for the executive members that served on the local organising committee. There were also some new faces from some of the depots that were brought in to the struggle. The group took turns telling everyone about the job actions at their stations, petitions, noise actions, march on the boss actions, and forced overtime refusals. Keith opened the discussion on the direction of the committee like this:

“The members look to the leadership of the union for direction, these actions can’t continue without real leadership in the local.” Pete looked uncomfortable and Christine shot her hand up. Keith smiled knowing he touched a nerve with some folks in the group but he wanted to press his point and a heated debate was just the way to do it.

Christine spoke her piece, obviously trying not to sound too annoyed. “Come on Keith it isn`t that simple, a lot of members just don`t have the confidence to take on a risky action yet. Having an executive member leading the charge isn`t going to change that. Folks need to learn and that only happens by taking risks yourself“.

Keith nodded, “people look up to their union leadership though and that is just a fact we have to deal with. It’s only natural that the union officers are seen as the people who need to make the decision to take action”.

“Isn’t that part of the problem though? I mean we have seen people question the union in a way they haven’t before and that’s healthy. We don’t want people to simply follow the union we want people to fight for something because they believe in the cause”.

Keith shot back. “You have to admit it is confusing to people when half of the stewards are saying one thing and the union leadership in the office is saying something else with regards to these actions. We need to be able to take these actions on through the proper channels. In order to do this we need to have a clear majority on the executive.”
“What if that executive buckles under the pressure too? What if they get scared when someone gets fired or the Labour Board steps in and threatens fines? Having strong leaders is great but why do we isolate them in an office and put them in meetings with management all day?”

Christine took a long sip of water and looked out the window. Pete, after reminding everyone that there was a rules of order, told folks that they should probably get back on track and take care of some business too. “You have the floor Christine.

“It looks like the ban is holding across the city, what we need to be ready for now is discipline in retaliation for our actions.”

Pete nodded, “definitely, the first hint of any discipline we need to see coffee break meetings across the city to discuss what to do”. Pete looked around the room, “seeing no more discussion on this item let`s move on to our discussion on putting on the next round of direct action courses“.

Trade Union Discipline

Typically the question that dominates workplace strategy is how the radicals on the floor should orient themselves towards the union leadership. When things really start to move in a shop another question arises: how is the union leadership is going to orient itself towards the actions on the floor? Our approach was a challenge to the traditional idea of what “discipline” means in a trade union. All unions rely on a strong degree of unity among their members. One way to get this unity is making a big deal out of leadership at the top. In almost all unions they say that the highest authority of the union is the membership. That is to say that most unions are democratic.

The basis of trade union democracy is the local meeting. Naturally the General Membership Meeting (in CUPW this is a monthly GMM) cannot meet all the time so there is a special committee, called the Executive Committee that reports to the General Membership meeting and acts on behalf of the membership at large between meetings. In CUPW there is also a corresponding regional executive committee and a national executive. These two groups have general meetings (conventions) every few years to decide policy and direction but otherwise the executive has the power to act in the name of the membership.

Now because the National Executive Board represents the will of the national membership represented by the National Convention their decisions are binding on all bodies below them, this means regions and locals. All decisions made by the regional office are binding on the locals in that region. This means that discipline flows from the top to the bottom of the organisation. The check on this discipline is the fact that the leaders are elected and criticised in meetings. (This practice is very similar to Democratic Centralism as practiced by various left wing political parties, particularly those that come out of the traditions of European Social Democracy such as the Bolsheviks or German SPD.) So there is open debate and contested leadership and a vibrant democratic culture but ultimately many decisions in regards to strategy and tactics are made at the top levels of the organisation and are binding on every one further down the chain of command. That is to say that traditionally many unions are what is called centralist. These practices rarely exist inside the bylaws of most unions due to a century and a half of social democratic union practice they are simply assumed.

Our organising on the floor through rank and file committees was a challenge to this system because in our organising the workers at the shop level decide on strategy and call out for solidarity from other workplaces. We encouraged members to act without permission and to take the initiative independent of the leadership. One informal motto some of us took up was “it’s better to ask for forgiveness afterward than to ask for permission first.” This lead to the committees being accused of being undemocratic because the workers themselves were usurping the power of the democratically elected local, regional and national executive bodies.

Ultimately this was a question of the kind of democracy our union or even society at large should practice. On one hand you have a democracy based on freedom of initiative, the democracy of our committees that is constituted by the participation of those involved towards a common goal. The Organising Committee meetings act as a check on everyone’s activity but everyone also assumes that folks have the freedom to act on their own behalf and not wait for some saviour to come down from the clouds with the answer for them. On the other hand you have a representative system that is democratically managed by the members but in essence acts as a workplace government in miniature. Many of these practices are implied but not outright stated, and in the long history of wildcats and independent action at the post office there has also always been a strong tendency towards independent action.

Some critics have said that direct action is a set of tactics and not a strategy. This is true when we’re talking about individual actions in isolation. When we organize ourselves around direct action, though, and the capacity to take direct action then it’s different. In that case, there is something special about direct action in that it cannot be managed from above and it chafes at every encounter with an idea of discipline that is based on strong leadership at the top of an organisation. For this reason it is not a strategy in itself, but it is does effect the kind of strategy you are going to use.

In order for workers to have real control over their own activity leadership needs to be built through action on the job, this leadership needs to be accountable to workers on the job, and for the leadership to remain accountable the source of that leadership has to stay on the job. We aim to build leadership on the shop floor and have the shopfloor be the place where our union makes decisions about how to fight bosses. This is also why many of the larger job actions began with a “coffee break meeting” where the workers would hold an assembly on the job and vote by show of hands on the course of action to be taken. From this starting point you build towards a sense of unity and discipline that does not feel external to the workers but comes from their shared struggles and interests. Discipline then becomes a horizontal force, not something from above. It becomes something that everyone exercises on each other instead of something imposed by leadership with a mandate from convention. The question is not simply one of organisational form or a crisis of leadership, and it’s certainly not about getting the right people elected to officer roles. It’s a matter of developing the spirit of solidarity and horizontal discipline in the struggle itself. Effective direct action requires this, and produces this.

The Local Executive

Sam stood in the hallway shaking with rage, “There’s a process Ike!”, he shouted. Ike was grinning ear to ear as the labour relations rep continued his tirade. “What is the board going to say about this? You’re going to get fined! This is Delton all over again!” The Delton wildcat (see “My Introduction“) was part of a previous wave of job actions a few years earlier.

Ike smiled calmly and said “the office had nothing to do with this Sam, though we were obviously happy to see everyone take so much initiative and show so much solidarity but this happened outside the union meetings. The workers did this themselves. Over a thousand of them took action themselves without our direction.” Sam shook his head and walked away briskly shouting, “fines, Ike! You better be ready to pay those fines!”

Later that day Ike was sitting between myself and Harjit listening to Craig, another executive member express his concerns about the job actions.

“I have no idea what is going on, I hear about a job action in one station after it happens, sometimes I hear about the job actions a week after they have happened. No one is asking us if it is alright- its total anarchy!”

Ike looked at Harjit and stifled a giggle, but the local President was not impressed either. I raised my hand and she gave me the floor.

”None of us know when an action is going to happen, to a certain degree we just have to trust the member’s judgement”. I paused. “None of this is political there are folks from all over the place in the local planning these job actions”.

”What if the members are wrong?” asked Craig out of turn.

”Is that any worse than if we are wrong?” heckled Ike.

Craig continued, ignoring Ike. “Look, we need discipline we can’t just have everyone running around doing as they please. We need to enforce the contract, if the language isn’t strong enough we have a democratic way to negotiate new language”.

I continued. ”I think we would do well to follow the lead of the floor on this stuff, give them the power to act and we do our best to back them up and give them support. We do not need to be the stars of the show, if Delton taught us anything sometimes things need to be done that the executive cannot take the lead on and that is alright.”

“Look, the members elected us to make decisions for them, there is a process and we have bylaws”, Craig was clearly not convinced.

Ike’s turn. “No one has broken any bylaws, it may be how things were done in the past, but no one is breaking the rules with independent committees. Show me the language in the constitution that says this if they are breaking rules”.

Sharon, continuing her slow pace and turns to lecture Ike, “so do these people, who are acting outside the constitution and outside the contract expect to be protected from discipline if the corporation tries to fire them?”

“Yes”, I said, “and they are justified in feeling this way, we don’t just give Solidarity to those we agree with when we fight the boss”.

Good Clean Wins

When radicals move from unfocused activism to real organising they usually go through a phase where they talk about winning a lot. It’s a way to show that they’re Serious Radicals Who Understand These Things. “What would it take to win?” “We need a victory.” Good clean wins don`t really exist, at least in our experience with direct action campaigns on the job. Everyone wants to think of labour struggles as like a backyard wrestling match where the opponents square off against each other. Eventually we pin the boss and they cry `uncle` and we get our concession.

What actually happens is you agitate like hell and the boss mocks you the whole way and does everything he can to make you feel powerless. Then the boss will come down really hard and try and punish the bad ones among you and buy off the folks who he can identify as wavering in their commitment. Then he will quietly address some of the concerns, usually without publically stating what is going on and if he has to acknowledge the change he will get professional help in crafting a plausible story as to why these changes were coming anyway.

With the forceback campaign we only found out the boss was hiring in response to everyone refusing overtime because one particularly dedicated militant was checking the job boards every day on the CPC website and noticed that Edmonton was hiring in a time of year when Canada Post does not usually hire. Eventually we found out our campaign was so successful Canada Post was hiring hundreds of workers. They have never publically acknowledged this victory to this day. They don’t want us to get bolder; they hope workers won’t learn or won’t remember the power we have collectively. Some members of senior management quietly conceded it was unrest on the floor that led to this course of action in private discussions with union officials. It was obvious anyway, but it feels good that management had to admit it, at least to themselves.

Claiming Our Victories

Harjit looked at the new kid next to him as he clumsily pushed the mail into the old wooden sorting case; he was slowly memorising the streets in case he had the same run tomorrow. He was moving much quicker, but slowed down for a second and turned to him, “you know why you got hired here don’t you?” The kid looked at him confused. “Let me tell you about what happened last winter”.

Note: This is one of several pieces on struggles at Canada Post. For more of these articles, click here.

All of us in the Recomposition editorial group are IWW members. The IWW’s constitution begins with a preamble, which reads

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

We sometimes struggle to express the concepts in the IWW Preamble in our own words. The article below, by IWW member Tim Acott, can help people to do so.

Annotated Preamble of the IWW Constitution

by Tim Acott

Introduction
The Preamble of the Constitution of the IWW was adopted in 1905 at the founding convention of that organization, and has been changed but slightly in the ensuing years. It is the most elegant, concise and brilliant document I know. It is the basic text of the IWW to this day.

I’m a wobbly, and I approach the annotation of this mighty document with no small trepidation. It’s a job that, perhaps, needs to be done. The language is a bit old-fashioned, though I wouldn’t change a word. Nearly a century of struggle, and the interruption of working class traditions and oral history, have made it a bit less accessible to a modern reader than I think it needs and deserves to be. I embark upon this project with the deepest respect for the fellow workers who wrote and adopted the Preamble, and the thousands of wobblies that have lived by it, fighting the good fight and giving us so very much, from that day to this.

Being a wobbly is about just going right ahead and getting after it. If a job needs doing, we don’t wait around for some expert to do it for us or to tell us how to do it. We working people can do anything to which we set our minds. In that spirit, I shall now attempt to clarify and explain the finest piece of writing I’ve ever read. The bold type is the Preamble itself.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

Well, here we go already. I know this puts some people off. Notice, please, that it says, “the working class and the employing class.” What it doesn’t say, and doesn’t mean to say, is that no member of the working class has anything in common with any member of the employing class. That would be pretty stupid. We, as individual human beings, have a lot in common. We all eat food, drink water, and breath air. We all live and after a bit, we all die. We can even interbreed and have fertile children. We have more in common than horses and donkeys do. We have been known to slip, though rarely, from one class to the other. This motion is usually downwards, mind you, as the working class is growing and employing class is shrinking. Members of the two classes do have some things in common, as individuals.

What we, the workers, need and want is in absolute and diametric opposition to what the employers want and think they need. We want more pay for our time, shorter hours, less boring and repetitive work, less dangerous and unhealthy work, and most importantly, control of how we spend the hours and days and years of our short lives. More control over what goods we produce and what service we provide, and how these things are done. More control over the effects of this production on our health, on the health and safety of our neighborhoods and our homes, on this beautiful planet earth. We want a safe and healthy place for the children to grow up (all the children, theirs as well as ours), and the possibility of a good, fulfilling life for them to lead. We, in short, want everything the employers need us not to have.

Our needs and wishes are simply bad for their business. The employers, as a class, need us to work longer, harder, faster, cheaper, with less safety rules, less pollution controls, and less say in the decision making process. What they really need is a vast army of slaves that don’t have to be fed and taken care of. Super duper robots with all of our skills and knowledge, that can do all the work in the world, like we do, but require less maintenance and hassle. These units of labor need to be interchangeable and disposable. What we want and need is to be truly free and in control of our own lives, the resources, the machines, the decision making process — in short, the whole ball of wax.

There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.

Like I said, it’s nothing personal, but the two classes are just natural enemies. We’re stuck in the middle of a war, the class war. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s a very real and ugly war with a body count that makes WWII look like a minor fender bender on a sunny Saturday afternoon. It’s war, and we fight it every day, but our weapons aren’t guns and bombs. Our weapons are education, organization, and the many and various methods of withholding our labor. We fight with our arms folded.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.

It’s not a war of our choosing. We were born to it, but we’ve damn sure got to fight it and get it over with. There’s just no real choice. We can’t walk away. There’s nowhere to go. Year after year, they take away more of our lives, create more misery, kill and maim more of our fellow workers, destroy more of this beautiful planet. They’ll never stop unless they are made to stop. They’re insane.

Once again, I’m speaking of classes. The employing class is made. They take more and more and more. They destroy more and more and more. They do not consider the cost in life, in misery, in degradation, in pollution. They do not consider the future. They only consider profit. They do not consider the children, not even their own. They only consider how to amass more capital. They, as a class, are mad dogs. I don’t say we must shoot them, but they must be stopped, and only the self-organized working class can wield a big enough hammer to do the job. That hammer is our organized and tactical withholding of labor, the many forms of direct action. We’ll get to that soon.

We find that the centering of management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class.

When they say “the trade unions” here they’re mostly talking about the official or business union federations and congresses, such as the AFL-CIO, CLC, TUC, etc. Let’s be clear about where we stand regarding the official union groupings. These union federations include a whole lot of fine union sisters and brothers, past and present; who have fought the good fight for us all many and many a time. We salute those fighting workers, those heroes of the class struggle. No wobbly has got a beef with a unionist that stands up for the working class. The IWW has had, however, a couple major beefs (beeves?) with official unions all along. These are differences of approach, of belief, on the most basic level. These unions were founded to represent the interests of a very small portion of the working class: the top of the heap, the white, male, native born, English speaking, skilled craftsmen, etc. It never meant to address the needs of the working class in general, but instead the aristocracy of labor. It was, and still partially is, organized along craft lines. In other words, according to the type of work one does. Thus, the railroad, or the post office, was and is, divided into many different craft unions. These unions generally do not cooperate with each other in their common struggles and with their common enemy, their common bosses.

The result of this bizarre organizing concept was and is union scabbing. One worker goes to work across the other worker’s picket line, with the blessings of their union. Weird, huh? How’s that going to force the boss to pony up with some better wages or safety conditions? In the past, the AFL, etc. went out of their way to scab on the IWW many many times and even joined forces with the bosses and government to scab against and punish IWW members. Every day, good union members are forced to dishonor the picket lines and struggles of their own. Curiously, the official union leaders accept capitalism and even believe that capitalism can work and that the working stiff, at least some of us, can get a fair deal, with some adjustment here and there. Wobblies have always known better.

Capitalism can’t be reformed, can’t be made to serve our interest. It’s got be replaced with a system of economic democracy, controlled directly by the workers, before the workers will ever really get a fair shake. Image: Black and white illustration. In the left foreground, a large group of people are gathered before two parallel bridges that span a river. On the other side of the river, in the right background, is a very high black wall with “STRIKE” written in huge white letters.Different ideas, different practice. In the long run, while we are in solidarity with working people everywhere, and with the rank and file members of any union, we’re bound to bump heads occasionally with union officials or anyone who thinks the boss is our pal. To wrap up, the IWW was founded by experienced, lifer unionists who were fed up with the existing labor unions and felt, based on their experience, that they needed to create a different sort of vehicle to serve the interests of the working class.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

So that’s just what they did. They built a better form of union. It’s democratic. It’s built to be controlled by the membership and to guard against corruption and union bureaucracy. It’s independent of any political party. It’s an industrial union, meaning that every worker in one enterprise, from the cook to the bookkeeper to the janitor to the driver to whomever, is in the same union. The fact is that their collective interests are identical, and this simple home truth is reflected and reinforced structurally in the way the union is set up. The IWW is built to fight for the workers and for no one else. It’s not made to support the government, nor the politicians, nor the career bureaucrats, nor the gangsters, nor any church, nor any national grouping or race or gender, nor, least of all, the bosses and employers and owners themselves. It’s our fighting machine, designed to be controlled by us, the workers, alone. It’s built for solidarity and democracy. It’s built for struggle, for self defense, for mutual aid, for emancipation.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “abolition of the wage system”.

No use beating around the bush, fellow workers. We’re here to fight for better wages and hours here and now, and we’re here to change the very system that controls the economy. Political democracy without economic democracy is a lie, a sham, and a cruel joke. We’re here to fight for better conditions now and for a better life in the future. No contradiction, it’s the same fight.

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

This sounds like some ancient prophecy, but really it’s just common sense. There’s nobody else to do the job. We’ve got to do it. Politics will always obey economics, never the other way around. Military power is just a reflection of economic power. The real power lies in the hands of the workers. That’s the big secret. Tell your friends. Tell everybody. We make everything that gets made. We provide every service. We do it all, and we can stop it all, just by folding our arms. The IWW is not about armed struggle. Armed struggle is simply not a big enough hammer to do the job. We hold the only power on earth great enough to defeat capitalism, and all we have to do is to get ourselves organized, and organized right. Then we can stop the madness and violence of the employing class, once and for all.

The army of production must be organized, not for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown.

We have to organize ourselves to fight the good fight here and now, and as soon as possible, to fight the last battle against capitalism; and we have to hold the whole thing together while that battle rages and after it is won. We’re going to replace the structure and organization of capitalism with the superior structure and order of real democracy, economic democracy, worker’s democracy. With that structure in place we will carry on, as the new democracy grows and transforms our lives.

By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

And there it is. The short term is in harmony with the long term. What is needed to fight the class war is the same thing that’s needed to build the new society. We don’t know exactly what shape it will eventually take. How could we? We do know that it needs to be truly democratic, to be controlled by the huge majority of the human race, those who do the work. We know that it can be the end to war and famine and slavery and ecological destruction, because these things are against our interests. When we, the workers, run the economy, we will be running the whole show, in our common interest, for ourselves, the vast majority, in peace and harmony. Now, that is something worth working for, worth living for, worth fighting for, and it’s, to my mind, quite possible. Won’t you join us?

Following the lead of our comrades at libcom, Recomposition will be participating in the blackout against SOPA. We are not as tech-savvy as libcom and so will be using the plugin that our blog hosting service has provided. We welcome discussion on these matters. For more information, see http://sopastrike.com/

This job gave me an inside view of the ‘credit crunch’, in fact in a real sense I was a part of it. The financial crisis also meant a lot of pressure passed onto the workforce, through speed-ups, stress and redundancies. I started the job in early 2008 after I was made redundant in my last job. I was recruited through an agency, but it was a temp-to-perm position following completion of a 6-month training period. This was my first permanent job in about 6 years of temping/agency work. When I started, I was reassured this wasn’t ‘sub-prime lending’, but ‘middle tier’. There were certainly rival companies with far less stringent lending criteria, who apparently got into problems later, so I guess this was more or less true. When I started, the company employed maybe 60 people. While the company had its own cash to lend, it much preferred lending other peoples’. So they had a relationship with several major banks (with whose bosses our bosses would take time off to play golf). Basically they’d borrow money to re-lend at a higher rate, and take the difference as a middle-man’s profit.

The company I worked for was based in the north of England. It specialised in commercial lease-rentals. These, it turns out, were quite the cash cow. They work similarly to hire-purchase, except the lending company (‘the funder’) still owns the asset at the end. A typical deal would work like this: A customer would approach a supplier for an asset. For example, the owner of a kebab shop might go online to buy a new deep fat fryer. The supplier would offer them credit and contact a broker, the broker would contact the funder (us) for a quote. Typical interest was 16% or more. If the customer signed up, the funder would buy the asset and lease it to them for a fixed monthly rental over a 3 to 5 year term. At the end of the minimum term, the customer could return the asset at their expense, or continue renting it (lucrative ‘secondary payments’). If they defaulted, they still owed all the payments of the minimum term, and had to return the asset (or have it repossessed).

The typical customers were small sole-traders or partnerships or new-start limited companies, stuff like kebab shops, pubs, restaurants, betting shops, estate agents… and business without a top credit rating and with a tight enough cashflow to prefer lease-rental to purchase. Typical sums were £4,000-£7,000, although occasionally we’d write a deal worth 6 figures. Companies with a top credit rating or a well-established trading history could get credit from major banks. The new-starts and smaller fish came to us.

My job was as an underwriter. In finance, underwriting is the process of assessing the creditworthiness of a credit application. You look at things like the applicants’ accounts, the equity in their home, for new starts you might look at their business plan, you’d check for any relationships between the customer and supplier (a common fraud would be imaginary assets), as well as seeing if the directors had a string of failed ventures behind them. We had to turn these proposals around within one hour (including the time it took for admin to load them into our system). The time pressure meant there was quite an intense working environment from the off. One of the other team members (Sam) in our team of three was also a trainee, so we were in at the deep end. Consequently, there was never much time for chatting with co-workers. We were all pretty busy, and the open plan office meant a manager was always within earshot.
Underwriting used to be a ‘profession’ with a sizeable salary to go with it. But like many jobs, it’s been deskilled over the years, and in many places completely replaced by automated algorithms. In some major banks, there’s still highly-paid professional underwriters working on multi-million pound deals. But at our place, it was pretty much low paid, formulaic work, applying a tick-box set of criteria and ratios to say yes or no, with borderline cases referred to the boss (the line manager was also a company director, as it was a small firm). We could have been replaced by an algorithm, but the company’s niche in the market meant they from time to time picked up on lucrative deals a computer would have missed by being too formulaic. So we were there to spot the borderline ones.

Starting work
Paradoxically the initial global financial crisis of 2007 had been good for the firm. As major lenders tightened up their lending criteria, more and more relatively good credits fell through the cracks to be picked up by the smaller funders. I was recruited into a team of three to replace someone who was leaving. Previously, the team had been all-female, managed by an alpha-male patriarch of a boss, who was also a shareholder in the company. He was an imposing guy, a former athlete and veteran of the industry, who’d previously worked high up in a multinational bank before becoming a director in this firm. He liked things done precisely his way, and if you weren’t doing it to his satisfaction, you’d soon know about it. When I started I was asked if I was comfortable working in an all-female team. Needing the job, and having worked in such teams before, I obviously said yes. But I didn’t realise quite how patriarchal the working environment was.

We were talked down to, dismissed out of hand and casually belittled as a matter of course. I definitely got the least of this, even when I made newbie errors. I think the ‘guy’ in ‘new guy’ was most pertinent. From my first week I heard stories from my teammate Lauren about the time our boss had made our Sam cry only a week before I started, loudly belittling her mistakes in front of the whole office. So, from the off there was a high-pressure, management-by-bullying atmosphere. The bosses would counter this by buying a round of drinks in a local pub every Friday on the company account. This was the main place we’d see each other outside of work.

The workload was pretty high and rising. Before long, every week was a record week. I had to hit the ground running, and as I was on a temp-to-perm contract kept my head down and went with the flow to begin with. This meant going along with the submissive workplace culture, and following suit when working all hours necessary to deal with the extra workload. This started out as working through lunch on the odd busy day, or staying late to deal with a last minute rush. Pretty soon the exception became the norm, and we were working though our breaks every day, and staying late every evening. None of this was paid, either in cash or time in lieu.

Unpaid overtime, stress
This obviously began to take its toll. I started missing evening classes, and ended up dropping out. Sam was a single mum and worked two jobs to make ends meet. She couldn’t stay late, and felt guilty she was leaving the work to me and Lauren. I tried to reassure her it was fine, it was our fault for staying late and not her fault. Pretty soon she managed to find a new job for much better pay, meaning she could just work the one. As me and Lauren were doing such a good job coping with the increased workload, the company decided not to replace her. A plus side to this was they ended my training period prematurely, which made me a feel a bit less insecure about standing up for ourselves.

We were banned from talking about our contracts, but working in this environment meant we built up trust quite quickly and confided in one another. It turned out Sam had been paid £2,000/year less than me, even though we were both on a ‘training wage’ and had started within a few weeks of one another. No wonder she’d been working two jobs! Now down to a team of two, our workload kept on rising. 10 hour days with no breaks were becoming the norm, and there was little chance to slack off. Potential deals dropped into a communal pot, and we had to pick them up and turn them round within the hour. All this was monitored (as I later discovered).

Stress was a major issue in the workplace. I was drinking too much, as were lots of people. A small act of solidarity became offering each other chewing gums on the train to mask the smell of a particularly heavy night. A note in my notebook reads: “Team brief: “we’re in a very difficult climate so I need you both to speed up, be more efficient. I take the point it can be demoralising, but you have to put the negative thoughts behind you and be enthusiastic.” FUCK THE FUCK OFF.” That about summed up my state of mind. Several people were diagnosed with severe depression (though I only found out about this later as people kept it to themselves). One woman in another department was off with stress. She lived with Lauren, who was pissed off at her for not answering her texts, saying she was selfish taking time off when we all had so much work on. Mainly, the stress affected my sleep. I was getting about 4 hours a night. I got through the morning on energy drinks, then in the evening tried to knock myself out with Whisky and valium. Weirdly, nobody seemed to notice at work. I kept my shirts ironed and my breath fresh, and got decent reports in my appraisals. But while I kept it together outwardly, I felt like a zombie most of the time.

Just saying no
Despite her attitude towards her flatmate, I managed to work on Lauren and in the small gaps when the boss was in meetings. I talked her round to leaving the office to get the train together (even though I went east and she went west). The idea was this way nobody would feel guilty for leaving the work to the other person. Gradually, we began leaving earlier and earlier, until we left on time. The very next morning after we left on time, we were both called into a meeting with the boss and the HR woman. We were told categorically it was “unacceptable” to take our breaks on “rare busy days”, i.e. every day. Lauren was terrified and all the work we’d done was undone. I managed to get her to keep leaving work together, but we went back to working through lunches and staying late. Shortly after this, Lauren’s flatmate Vicky came back to work from stress and was immediately let go. This sent a pretty clear message, and it’s hard to describe how precarious the atmosphere was at work.

It got worse. This began a steady drip-drip of redundancies. Every week or two, someone would be called into a meeting at 5pm on a Friday and told not to come back. It was indescribably stressful. Everyone was looking over their shoulders, and by this point (late 2008) the economy had taken a turn for the worse and the prospects of finding another job looked bleak. By this point, I’d had enough. I started thinking about how to organise against this. I had absolutely no clue where to start. I went for drinks with a few workmates and discussed it. Everyone agreed it was shit, but then we got drunk and nothing came of it. I wanted to just start working to contracted hours, but knew if I didn’t get Lauren on board I was just singling myself out for redundancy.

In the end, I decided to just start taking my breaks, and encouraging Lauren to do the same. She was reluctant at first, then one day, half-way through a sandwich, the boss asked me ‘which deal are you looking at?’ I replied, mouthful of sandwich, ‘none, I’m just on my lunch at the moment’. He insisted, ‘can you help out?’. I replied ‘No, I’m on my lunch’. The boss’ face just dropped, quickly replaced by an evil lingering glare as I merrily chomped on my sandwich. But he didn’t say anything. This was an incredibly tiny thing, but it had a disproportionately big effect. Lauren ducked behind the partitioned cubicle out of sight of the boss, and mouthed, beaming, ‘I can’t believe you just said that!’ From then on, we both took our lunches, and gradually moved back to leaving on time.

This time, our working to contract got us called into a meeting again. But instead of bullying, they’d decided to reduce our workloads. In short, they added some pre-screening to prevent us having to spend lots of time looking at deals we were going to say no to anyway. This reduced workload meant our contracted hours were normalised, and we got our breaks. A massive relief. However, the price of this was I’d singled myself out as a ‘troublemaker’. As I’d said, the patriarchal culture in the workplace had meant simply saying ‘No’ was inconceivable. Now I’d done it, they started looking for ways to get back at me.

The bosses strike back
One thing they started doing was pushing for me and Lauren to update our underwriting manual, a guide to doing our job used to train new people. As they’d made a point of saying they weren’t hiring, this was clearly about making us more replaceable. We talked about it and dragged our feet, deflecting follow-ups by saying we were prioritising hitting our turnaround targets. They also started monitoring our internet usage. I foolishly logged into libcom sometimes during quiet spells, and they called me into a meeting and gave me a print out, name-checking ‘a certain forum’. I was unaccompanied, but said literally nothing. My boss also made a point of me arriving at 9am and leaving at 5:30. His exact words were (recorded in my notebook at the time) “I can’t say anything about this as it’s in your contract, but it’s been noted”. This was obviously an attempt at intimidation. It didn’t work, but I didn’t know what to do next either.

About the only other ‘collective action’ we pulled off were little things. We made a point of buying chocolates, but only offering them amongst ourselves and not to the boss. From an atmosphere of atomisation and subjugation, there was a tangible sense of ‘us and them’, and a new sense of confidence and self-respect. One pretty cool thing a guy in admin did was work late one night so he could put the wall clock back by a few minutes. That meant he could get a later train and still be at his desk by ‘9am’. We were told the redundancies were over, and the survivors had a sense of being in it together – and against the company. This could be overstated of course, but something intangible but unmistakeable changed in the workplace atmosphere after we ‘won’ our work to contract.

However, we weren’t at all prepared for the counter-attack. After about 6 months of this, the effects of the credit crunch were rippling through. Our company started tightening up lending criteria, reducing the volume of business. Fewer people were starting businesses or expanding existing ones, further reducing volumes. The victory 6 months prior became part of the problem. With less work to do, redundancies were back on the table. And this time, informal, small-scale resistance wasn’t going to cut it. There was plenty of money in the company. A mate in accounts forwarded some documents which showed the directors had pulled out £100,000 each in dividends, before using the ‘weak financial position’ to justify cuts. But unless were could resist across teams, we were going to get fucked over.

And we did get fucked over. A few meetings in the pub notwithstanding, we didn’t get anywhere. The admin guy who changed the clock, unprompted, came out with “I’m not criticising capitalism or anything, but they’re absolutely ruthless.” I read that the same as “I’m not a racist, but…”. However, political opposition to capitalism isn’t very helpful unless it’s expressed practically. And it wasn’t. We weren’t organised. We didn’t know how to organise. The drip-drip of redundancies began again, and we faced them as atomised individuals. As an extra twist of spite, they got me on my birthday. At 9am the boss sent round a circular email wishing me happy birthday, making sure everybody in the office knew. At 5pm he called me into his office and I was gone.

Reflections
While there’s no such thing as value-free facts, I’ve tried to present the above narrative fairly dry to let people draw their own conclusions. Obviously a lot was left out. Much more could be said about the relationship of work to mental health, of the workplace dynamics (particularly the gendered ones), and the way something like a collective identity opposed to the bosses emerged in the process of speed-ups and lay-offs. But it’s long enough already, so those are themes I’ll have to take up another time. Here are some of the things I drew from the experience.

‘How not to do it’.
I had no idea to organise at work, having always worked in temp/agency jobs, and never having worked in a unionised workplace let alone an organised one. Consequently, I kind of made it up as I went along, with some reference to the stuff in the libcom organise section. And obviously I made a lot of mistakes. These would include: (1) a lack of strategy in building contacts. Over-reliance on organic friendships to make contacts meant the people I talked to about work issues weren’t reflective of the wider workforce. Particularly, there was a big gender divide. Some of the most pissed off and militant workers were young women, but they all socialised together, and normally separate from the men (e.g. going for ‘girls meals’ together). If I were to do it again, I’d try and have a conscious strategy for building contacts from other departments and teams to bridge these kind of informal workplace groups, which are only reinforced otherwise. This oversight came back to haunt us as we were picked off one-by-one for redundancy, and unable to even collectively discuss it, let alone resist it.

(2) Related to this, when we did meet up to discuss things, it wasn’t clear what it was about. I.e. we’d meet up to grumble about work, but it would also be a social. We’d often meet in a pub, and after a few drinks anything we came up with was forgotten by the morning. This was exacerbated by the heavy drinking culture arising from the stress. It would have made more sense to meet in say, a coffee shop, get through the conversation about work, divide up any follow-up tasks, and [i]then[/i] go for drinks elsewhere. Pubs are also loud, and as a social environment aren’t really conducive to collective discussions. I now recognise what I was doing instinctively as building a ‘workplace committee’, but I’d have made a much better job of it with a bit of strategic thinking rather than making it up as I went along.

(3) I totally failed to do any ‘inoculation’, in other words, preparing for the consequences of organising. It’s one thing to say ‘No’ to the boss. It’s quite another to deal with the fallout. While I wasn’t easily intimidated (frankly, I’d had enough), my workmate was and this set us back weeks, and could have let the bosses drive a wedge between us if they’d have been a bit sharper. We did have some conversations about the likely outcome, but nowhere near enough to be prepared. I guess this reflects the lack of proper conversations outside work, as inside work the whispered conspiracies were stolen in the short gaps in the panoptic surveillance of an open-plan office.

(4) The issue: unpaid overtime wasn’t something that effected other teams: admin, accounts, collections etc all worked pretty standard hours as they weren’t so locked into the 1-hour turnaround (some admin staff did sometimes do unpaid OT during rushes though). It didn’t generalise, so the failure to collectivise things may well reflect a badly chosen issue. Maybe we could have picked something else first to build solidarity, or a ‘basket’ of issues to bring more people in. For example, everyone lived under the fear of redundancy. With hindsight something like collectively confronting the bosses (with a letter, or in a meeting say) demanding clarity on redundancy plans instead of what felt like a weekly lottery might have been worth pursuing, and might have pulled more people together, which could then have been a springboard for other grievances.

(5) Finally, individual confrontation allowed them to single me out. It might have been ok if we’d have discussed it and had some contingency for victimisation, but as ‘just saying no’ happened somewhat spontaneously this hadn’t happened. It also didn’t challenge the gender dynamics. Me saying no to my boss was pretty powerful. But if Lauren had said it, knowing she’d be backed up, it would have been an even more impressive reversal of the workplace power relations. I guess you can’t do everything at once, but it does seem like a mistake to just rely on those with the confidence to start with, rather than trying to develop everyone’s confidence, and thus to challenge problematic dynamics in the workplace.

Political organisation, or union?
I was a member of SolFed throughout this, which is the British section of the anarcho-syndicalist IWA. While the IWA has some active union sections (including the famous CNT in Spain), at the time we were very much a political organisation. By that I mean a group of people with similar political ideas, meeting up to discuss ‘politics’ and doing political activity, like distributing the Dispatch or Tea Break bulletins. While I could sound off about stress in meetings, as an organisation SolFed didn’t and couldn’t really help me. ‘Political activity’ was completely separated from my everyday life. At precisely the time when libertarian communist politics should have been most relevant, the opposite was true. And to be honest the last thing I wanted to do with my scarce free time was go to meetings disconnected from my life.

For me, this really made me feel like I didn’t want to be part of an anarchist political organisation, but an anarchist union. In other words, I wanted SolFed to be an organisation that could support workers like me in situations like this, whether through training, networking, brainstorming strategies, sharing best-practice, potentially meeting workmates outside of work to help with organising and so on. We simply didn’t have the capacity to do these things at the time (at least in my Local, and there was little co-ordination nationally outside of the education sector). I wasn’t alone in these feelings, and I think SolFed’s made great strides in this direction over the past 3 years. Certainly, were I to find myself in a similar situation again, SolFed would be an asset rather than an evening of alienated political activity with little relevance to my life. And I know other SolFed members are finding this in their workplaces too, though obviously it’s a work in progress. Regardless of the organisational specifics, I think it does make a difference feeling like you’re part of an organisation that can back you up, even if that back-up is only support/advice rather than industrial action.

‘Theoretical’ observations.
Finally, I’ll just make a few theoretical points. One of the big trendy theories at the time, and to a lesser extent still, is the idea of ‘post-fordist cognitive immaterial labour’, a radically new form of work, even one with latent communist potential (Negri & Hardt etc). Frankly, I think this is bollocks. This job was very much cognitive labour (mental arithmetic, writing emails etc), it was very much ‘immaterial production’ (we had to deal with people on the phone, show the right attitude, write emails in a specific company voice etc). But yet, it was basically a production line. Work came in, passed along a chain from sales to admin to underwriting, back to sales and to accounts and admin again, with each stage doing a fairly standardised set of tasks before passing it along the chain. So for me, the boring old Marxist emphasis on the relations of production still trumps the fashionable emphasis on the content of concrete labour. Another fashionable idea at the time I was working there was the idea of ‘faceless resistance’: small, invisible resistances like sabotage. Now this stuff is great. I think the guy changing the clock to allow himself to get a later train was brilliant. But I wouldn’t fetishise this stuff. I think there’s a danger of making a virtue of necessity. In our weakness, it’s easy to try and present this kind of individual, covert action as something sexy and radical, when really it does little, in itself, to change the balance of power in the workplace.

Stories from the CUPW Lock Out: or how to create a story that can reshape who we are and how we act

by Bruce ‘the Bruiser’ Darden

Before the Lockout

In the spring of 2011, during the rotating strikes and subsequent lockout of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), anarchists living in southern Ontario attempted to organize support and solidarity for their working class brothers and sisters. Specifically, members of Common Cause took an active role organizing community solidarity and fightback in Toronto and Hamilton. These members did not organize under the banner of Common Cause, but participated in the activities planned by the mass organizations that these members are a part of—especially Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP); the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly (GTWA); Steel City Solidarity (a solidarity network in Hamilton); and CUPE Locals 3902 & 3907.

The Saturday before the lockout I joined some comrades, in a GTWA initiative, to flyer subway and transit stations. The flyer was created to inform the public about issues the postal workers were facing; it contained information about the two-tiered contracts, unhealthy workplace conditions being forced on the posties, and some history about the role of CUPW in providing maternity leave for all people in Canada. The results of this action were many brief conversations on the street and around 2,500 handbills distributed to various areas within Toronto.

Events in Toronto really started to amp up on June 14 when CUPW locals in the city walked off the job to take their turn in the national, rotating strike. The GTWA flying picket squad joined with many other community and labour organizers at Canada Post’s Mail Processing Plant on Eastern Avenue (or what we affectionately have nicknamed the Eastern Plant) to stand strong on the line with the members of CUPW. At eleven that evening only a handful of anarchists were present at the rally, with a larger contingent of Marxist groups and other unionists also present. With 70 people there, that is not bad for a solidarity action called hours beforehand—even if it is in a city of millions of people

The next day, June 15th at 6pm, the House of Labour called the first of their poorly attended rallies in support of CUPW. The rally had about the same attendance as the one called the evening before. This time there was an absence of Marxist banners, but still a lot of paper sellers. The entire branch of Common Cause attended this rally; we also succeeded in rallying members of the GTWA flying squad, CUPE local 3902, and OCAP to march with us under a plethora of different flags and colourful homemade picket signs.

After listening to the canned speeches we went out for some cheer and to celebrate one of our members’ birthday. Then we got word—Canada Post had locked out CUPW workers, just as the Toronto nightshift was supposed to resume work. Leaving the bar, we gathered up our black & red flags and placards and returned to the Eastern Plant. Most of the Toronto Common Cause branch (along with some allies: an unaffiliated anarchist and members of CUPE 3902) walked the picket with our soon-to-be friends from midnight till three o’clock in the morning.

Over the following two weeks, Common Cause members continuously returned to the lines at the Eastern Plant—both as groups and individuals. Some of our group would stop by the depots in our neighbourhoods to offer support to the workers there as well.

Off the picket lines and into the neighbourhood

A meeting was held during this first week by the GTWA’s Public Sector Campaign Committee. Most of this meeting were spent discussing the CUPW lockout, especially a debrief of the flyering action from the past weekend, and plans to do another the following Saturday. It was decided, following the suggestion of a comrade in Common Cause, that instead of spreading outreach across the entire city, the focus of our efforts would be in the neighbourhood around the Eastern Plant.

The GTWA is the ‘youngest’ of all the mass organizations Common Cause members work with. This does not mean they are new to politics—in fact, GTWA has many experienced and dedicated members from a cross-section of unions and socialist organizations. Still, the GTWA’s ‘newness’ means the body does not have an established manner of dealing with solidarity in local struggles, and the GTWA’s activity could have taken many forms. The fact that it did take the form of a strategy of door-knocking and public dissemination of ideas, rather than a lecture discussing the struggle after the fact, is a promising development in the greater Toronto Left.

The next Saturday morning about fifteen individuals from the GTWA showed up to door-knock and flyer the community around the Eastern Plant. We started off with a quick meeting to go over talking points and decided on focusing on two in particular: the two-tier contracts for new employees, and health and safety issues, due to how letter carriers were being forced to change the way they carry bundles of mail. Then, after walking over to the picket lines, we talked to the locked out workers about our plan and asked them if they had any stories they wanted us to tell the public.

After splitting up into pairs, the person that flyered with me asked me to go over the talking points again, as we began to wander to the streets that we had chosen. At first, we didn’t knock on doors. Picking the newly built townhouse on the corner, we just put the GTWA flyer into the door handles. It was a pretty embarrassing walk back to the first real house on the street, with the younger activist inadvertently, or unconsciously, scolding the more experienced organizer as we talked about how we had to start actually knocking on doors.

We started knocking on doors and passing out flyers to people out for a stroll with their dogs and kids. At first it was hard for some of us to get up the courage to knock on doors, but we kept trying and it became easier and easier. The embarrassment soon fell away. We took turns talking to people that answered the door; both of us paid attention to how the other person spoke and the phrases they used. We started off individually approaching people on the street and by the end of the afternoon we were on either side of the thoroughfare both knocking on separate doors. In two hours, we had distributed over 150 flyers and about half of those flyers started conversations on porches and boulevards scattered up and down a couple city blocks.

Most folks expected they would get a negative response from the public; yet the great majority of responses were overwhelmingly positive from all the report backs. From all the conversations the two of us had that day, only four were in any way negative. Overall, the GTWA managed to distribute 2000+ fliers in a geographically small area (roughly 15 city blocks and a few supermarket parking lots). As we walked back to the picket lines, my partner said to me, “I liked that better than last week. I found that less stressful than talking to folks on the street and I had so many more good two-way conversations today.”

Props, or the slips of paper we hand out

Just as we gave our information leaflet out at subway stations and at people’s front doors, the informational handbills our group gave to the workers served the same purpose—to start a conversation. The important role of a handbill is not that the text will instantly convince the reader to agree with a position, but is of a ‘prop’ to start a conversation with that person. The information on the handbill can be read later, so most of the time, folks did not use the information as talking-points. Our organizers offered out the handbill and quickly went on to engage the worker in dialogue, wishing them solidarity and asking them about their experiences in the present struggle.

Over the two-week period anarchists attempted to get out some more militant—dare I say radical—literature to the workers at the Eastern Plant. Instead of handing out Common Cause’s newspaper, Linchpin, we decided to print up oddly shaped handbills containing stories written by postal workers from out west. There was a very favourable response to Phineas Gage’s “Yesterday at the Post Office”, and Mordechai Eben’s “My Day: Others too”—both which can be found on the lovely blog Recomposition.

Common Cause also printed a pamphlet version of Rachel Stafford’s “Postal Worker Solidarity Defeats Compulsory Overtime”—this is the one and only item we put out which carried the name and contact information for Common Cause. It was important to us that we acted in an honest and straightforward manner with the posties; when they asked us about the red & black flags or if we were a political group, we told them that we were anarchists. Neither did we want to hide behind the mass organizations, nor did we want to put our specific group front and centre.

It was important to those of us in Common Cause that we did not rush or overextend ourselves to produce original and ground-breaking propaganda for the postal workers. We wanted to be able to hand out literature—without the jargon of the Left—which would help steer the conversation towards rank ‘n file direct action. Using previously written material from Recomposition helped us with this aim: we did not need to rush to create something from scratch. The literature spoke directly to the posties’ own experiences and everyday lives, because it was written by other posties and it told stories of collective resistance emerging from the shop floor.

In Toronto it was often the anarchists sharing news of the lockout with workers on the lines. Common Cause members were spreading the news from one picket line to another; often sharing stories about the Eastern Plant, solidarity actions, or other events occurring on picket lines across the country. Once, anarchists handed out hundreds of copies of the Resolution for a General Strike produced by the Edmonton and Vancouver CUPW locals: the picket line captains and shop stewards were not even aware that this had occurred. By this time we had established ourselves as a reliable source of news.

All of this was not quite as smooth as it sounds; not everyone agreed on what we should be handing out to the workers or our neighbours. A small voice in our mass organizations wanted to hand out more explicitly anti-capitalist propaganda—invoking the socialist jargon of both past and current tendencies—or to be more front and centre about the organizations that were showing solidarity. In general we agreed that having an explicitly Marxist analysis (which often contains old-timey terms) would not be useful in engaging with workers we had just met. There were also concerns that such literature would seem bossy and possibly restrict worker-initiated action. For examples of what we actually did hand out, there are two appendixes at the end of this article.

Linking up: the chasm between ‘users’ and ‘providers’

The government and media kept framing the Canada Post lockout as a struggle between the workers or ‘providers’ of a service and the citizens or ‘users’ of the service. Many of us believed that we could reframe the conversation by continuing the community solidarity actions we were already participating in. We felt what was most lacking in our community solidarity was any kind of joint action or discussion between the community members engaged in solidarity actions and the posties themselves. In an effort to build a strong link between the workers on the picket line and the various community-based actions, two Common Cause members tried to call a general meeting (in a bar, of course).

One hundred and fifty ‘invitations’ were printed and handed out to postal workers on the line at the Eastern Plant and during the House of Labour’s rally at Dundas Square (truly the centre of the universe as folks not from Toronto would joke). Email lists were flooded trying to get activists and organizers from across Toronto to attend. About seventeen people ended up showing up to this public meeting—not a single postal worker came.

During the meeting we decided it would be better to go to the workers at the Eastern Plant to have our meeting instead; the next day four people went to set it up. It was clear to us that the lack of posties in attendance was due to the short two-day notice, the wear-and-tear of the lockout, and location of the meeting (a downtown bar). While we were still at the bar, our loose network of activists and organizers decided to draft a quick agenda for the meeting and started planning how to accomplish the items on our agenda.

We decided on three ideas to approach the workers with: we wanted to talk to them about coming to show our solidarity when they were being forced back into the plant the following week; we wanted to know if any posties wanted to participate or had ideas about the door-knocking and flyering that the GTWA was doing; and we wanted to talk to them about an action we were planning at the (Dis)Honourable Minster of Labour, Lisa Raitt’s, office the following Tuesday.

The next day, Friday, I showed up to the busiest picket line I had seen at the Eastern Plant since the rotating strike. Workers that I had started to build a relationship with approached me to tell me about the rally that OCAP had called in support of them; they were really happy about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the rally was supposed to be a meeting, or that a large number of community groups working together were behind planning the meeting, not just OCAP.

At the main gate there was a TV station van setting up its camera, and members from all the groups represented at the public meeting slowly starting to show up. We were pretty nervous as we walked the lines with our fellow workers: what should we say to them? That this wasn’t a rally, or that they should not expect too many folks to show up? Some of our group mumbled that the union was using our support to bolster their line, but then, shouldn’t they be doing that—since the numbers on the picket lines were incredibly low? (Many workers had complained to us that most of their co-workers were not showing up on the lines.)

After a quick chat with the picket captain, an education officer, and the president of the local, we decided to make a bunch of noise and address the posties once the media had left. I was forced into making a short speech on the lines—about the different groups who had come out that day, how we all supported the posties, that we would be coming to wish them luck when the company forced them back, and lastly, the announcement of the planned action at Labour Minister’s office. Another Common Cause member went around collecting names and phone numbers of all those workers that wanted to join us on the action.

The community members present spread out among the posties and tried to have conversations about these ideas with them, some of these conversations went better then others. That evening was the first time any of the community organizers or the CUPW members had seen a uniformed police presence on the picket lines: more on that later.

Going back in: what can the community do?

Over the weekend most of the community groups did not do much solidarity work on the lines. The GTWA stopped their flyering and door-knocking, even though the idea was floated on its email lists. A couple of Common Cause members went to a picket line at the Eastern Plant, and at least one more made sure to talk to the workers at the depot in their neighbourhood.

That Sunday, Common Cause members and other labour activists got together to make more solidarity picket signs (in many colours and with glitter) and to write the message we wanted to give the workers who would be forced back to work the next day. Once the back-to-work legislation was given royal assent, we struggled to find out the time in which workers would be returning to work; this became a problem. It was after 9:30pm the evening before the rally, and we could not use our phone trees (either informal or those of GTWA’s and CUPE’s flying squad lists) because we still did not know what time to tell folks to come down. At least one of us, me, was really worried: what if no one came down to show the posties our support? Was it all for nothing?

On Monday, June 27th, we showed up to wish the posties solidarity as they entered the plant. A hair shy of twenty people showed up for the 2pm shift’s return to work. The picket lines were down (about seven hours before the 8:30pm deadline) and there were not many workers present. We stood in solidarity with the rank-and-file militants and picket line captains that came to show their support, and passed around an excellent handbill (written by a non-affiliated unionist that had just moved to the Centre of the Universe). Conversations started and ended like this; “Solidarity brother/sister. We are here to support you. Work safe. Don’t let them push you around.” The forty workers who were heading inside chanted, “So-So-So-Solidarity.”

As we smoked and shared stories of the picket lines we had walked in our past, other community organizers and workers for the 4pm shift slowly showed up. There were about forty-seven community members there by the 4pm shift, but only about seventy workers: where were the rest? It is a shift of over 400 posties! Did the majority of workers not show up for work? This time, as the workers walked in the front doors and chanted, about twenty community members marched to the doors with them.

It should be noted that virtually all of the forty-seven people who came to show support came from the mass organizations that Common Cause works in; especially OCAP and GTWA, plus a few from the CUPE flying squad. Virtually all of them! Not that all of these community activists and organizers share sympathies with Common Cause or anarchism (actually some of them hate us), but we work with all of these people in a variety of organizations across the city.

Damn! that pissed off Canada Post security. We were ushered off Canada Post property but set up nearby on the corner. A former member of Common Cause, who remains a good friend, brought out a sound system and we started to play some tunes while standing on the corner of the property. We held this picket for another hour and a half, as cars (and Canada Post trucks) honked their support.

Throughout the strike and lockout, there was a problem of how many individuals (and organizations) on the Left chose to act opportunistically in relation to their solidarity with the CUPW members. At this last solidarity action, we saw this again. When the workers where heading back into the plant, there was a single Marxist that was not wishing the workers a safe (and slow) day back on the shop floor but was instead focused on trying to sell his magazine to the workers heading back to face their bosses. Actions like this give the impression that the Left is not interested in workers—or their struggles—rather, these individuals/groups demonstrated that their interest lies solely in promoting their own organizations.

This ain’t over

About one week into the lockout, the House of Labour called for another rally in support of CUPW. This time it was downtown, at Dundas Square, but at 9am in the morning. This was definitely the largest solidarity event, with a hundred or more out of town posties joined by staffers and other paid unionists—since the rally was at a time in which most workers were on their shop floors: working.

There was an attempt by the other unions to get their membership involved in the solidarity support with the struggle at Canada Post. This activity was centred in Mississauga; a Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) organizer—who worked in the GTWA and had recently been a combatant in the Air Canada labour conflict—organized a shift of CAW members to plan and attend a rally at the Gateway Plant during their lunch hour. They were also instrumental in linking up the activities of people in Toronto, Hamilton, and Mississauga, as it was they who introduced us to the CUPE 966 organizers—and this started the planning for the joint action that occurred the day after the posties were forced back to work.

The Common Cause Hamilton branch also organized a going-back-in action at the plant in the Hammer. They brought out members of CUPW 3906 and members of Steel City Solidarity—two of the mass organizations that the Hamilton branch organizes in. While it was smaller than the Toronto action, their action was still a big hit with the workers on the line. The Hamilton branch had also focused their energy that weekend on organizing two cars full of people to come to the Tuesday action at Lisa Raitt’s (the Conservative Minister of Labour) office in Halton.

Tuesday, the day after CUPW went back to work, the Toronto community waited at a subway station to get a ride to Lisa Raitt’s office. There were only ten of us there, and the bus that was coming to get us could hold 50. CUPE 966 arrived in their super cool pink Flying Squad bus to bring us to Halton. As the contact person, I was a little timid about telling them that we could not fill the bus. They did not care; in the words of one of their members: “It only takes one person to cause a scene.” So the members of OCAP, GTWA, CUPE 3902 & 966, and a postie loaded onto the bus and headed off. We met up with our friends and comrades—folks from CUPE 3906 and Steel City Solidarity from Hamilton—and blasted Twisted Sister’s ‘We’re Not Going to Take It’ as we unloaded in front of the (Dis)Honourable Minster’s office: it was closed for lunch.

We decided, instead of picketing an empty office, to march down to the Canada Post depot about two blocks away. When we got there, a bunch of workers who were on their smoke break, or entering the depot, approached us asking what we were doing. We told them we were there, as community members, to tell Lisa Raitt that we were not going to take these attacks lying down (CAW was also ordered back to work a couple weeks before), and that if she did not want labour peace that was cool, since we wanted class war. They were quite happy about our presence and even took our literature to hand out on their shift and in the lunchroom: another postie on her chopper joined us with a CUPW picket sign stuck out of the tail, constantly revving her engine: damn right it was cool.

After about an hour there (and being thrown off the property again), we headed back to the office. We went inside to talk to the MP’s aides and let the CUPE folks present our demand for answers. We told them that we were coming back—lets hope this was not an idle threat. We left pretty fast, since we were not planning a long occupation, and went outside to make some more noise and sing “Solidarity Forever.” Before heading back to Hamilton and Toronto, we marched back to the Post Office to sing the same song –which we had just practiced—to our fellow workers inside the depot.

Closing remarks

The solidarity work done during the CUPW strike and lockout really helped the flying squads of southern Ontario. The GTWA’s flying squad did a great job mobilizing their members, and it gave them an opportunity to try out and refine their phone tree. It activated the CUPE 3902 flying squad (a Teaching Assistant local at the University of Toronto) in the summer months—a slow period with students. It allowed the folks in Hamilton to start building up a flying squad that incorporates individuals from a lot of the mass organizations that the Hamilton Common Cause branch works within.

For the majority of time we were on a picket line, no one saw a single police officer (except the one plain-clothes labour liaison that was there at shift change and at rallies). The two times we did see cops in uniform were at the rally/meeting at the Eastern Plant and at the action at the Minister’s Office. Both times, the pigs went up to the ‘respectable’ unionists and told them that we (specifically OCAP and sometimes ‘the anarchists’) were troublemakers and that they should be worried about doing actions alongside us. In the case of CUPW, the president of the local smiled, then came over to laugh with us; he had done a bunch of work with OCAP in the 1990s and did not think that we were that bad. A picket line captain and a shop steward at the Eastern Plant also joked about us being troublemakers as they reminisced about the 1997 strike—there was little love for cops with them. The president of CUPE 966 told us of her visit with the cops in Halton: as members of the mainstream unions looked at the black and red flags one said, “You should have brought the Black Bloc with you.” It is great to see public sector unionists openly welcoming the solidarity of anarchists—especially after the smear campaign from the media and the State revolving around last summer’s G20.

The CUPW solidarity actions show us the advantage of organizing in mass organizations, rather than organizations made up only of anarchists (or specific organizations). Anarchists were successful in organizing community solidarity because it was done through the mass organizations that we participate in; this allowed Common Cause members to draw on a larger group of people. More importantly, it allowed us to create new relationships and build upon old ones. It also took people from different organizations and put them in contact with each other as they worked together on a constructive and empowering project.

I hope that by telling the story of struggles by, for, and with the workers in Toronto during the CUPW strike and lockout demonstrates the strength available to those who do solidarity work through mass organizations and inspires more work in this direction as our struggle continues.

—

Appendix A: The handbill given out to workers as they went back into the plant

What’s next?

As the recent CUPW Negotiations Alert said:

Quote:
Just as we were united on the picket lines, we need to be united and strong when we are back in the workplace. We need to send a strong message to Canada Post that the lockout was wrong, and that their reliance on legislation is shameful.
How that strength and unity is demonstrated will be different across the country, in each local and each workplace. Some will likely ‘work to rule’, slow down, defy, use the grievance process, or come up with any number of creative ways to resist a forced contract.

What’s common everywhere is that it’s the rank and file members that need to take the lead. Political lobbying and legal challenges can be useful, but the heart of any union is in the organization and mobilization of the rank and file.

For those that weren’t on the lines, we need to sit down with them as sisters and brothers and give them the confidence and inspire the commitment to continue the fight that CUPW has been waging for over 45 years.

CUPW led the fight for public sector unionism with the wildcat strikes of 1965 and the union has been at the forefront defending workers ever since. It was CUPW that first won maternity leave for members in 1981 and pushed for it to be included under EI, so other parents could have some security to take care of their kids.

And now, Canada Post and Stephen Harper want to divide and break the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

Not on Our Watch.

Solidarity Forever!

—

Appendix B: A handbill for passersby at the action in Lisa Raitt’s office

Communities in Solidarity with Postal Workers

The right to collective bargaining is outlined in Section 2(d) of Canada’s Charter of Rights- Freedom of Association. This was guaranteed only recently in a 2007 Supreme Court case. But before that, what did workers do?

We collectively bargained and went on strike to win our demands, including fair wages, health and safety, the eight-hour day and the weekend. For more than a century before unions were officially recognized by the government of Canada, workers got together to talk, fight, and negotiate with their bosses. We do not need the government to grant us the right to strike or the right to collectively bargain. Workers did it before the state gave us these rights, and workers will do it after the Harper government takes them away.

We all rely on our mail service but workers rely on our right to strike for a better life much more profoundly. This is why we will not be falsely divided as service ‘users’ and ‘providers’. We are one body of workers with the same economic interests.

Collective agreements negotiated by CUPW set the standard for the wages and benefits of many more people beyond their membership. If the rest of us hope to earn a livable wage for ourselves—and our loved ones—we must stand in solidarity with striking postal workers as they fight this battle for all of us. This means speaking out against back-to-work legislation and helping to defy it if needed.

Sincerely,
Communities for the Right to Strike

“An Injury to One is an Injury to All”
“! NEGOTIATE DON’T LEGISLATE !”

Below is the audio recording from the Hamilton stop of the tour, held on October 22, 2011. The talk outlines a perspective on workplace organizing not dependent on union executives, but rather on empowering workers to fight their own battles. In the audio recording Stafford explains why it’s important to deal with issues as they arise on the floor through direct action, worker education, and participatory decision making in order to build the kind of struggle that can aim for the whole pie — not just a bigger piece. The talk also offers first-hand context to the recent CUPW struggle, which saw postal workers go from being on strike to being locked out and quickly legislated back to work. This bitter experience was a clear example of the bosses’ ongoing campaign to claw back the very rights workers fought for (and won) decades ago. Because postal workers are not alone in facing cutbacks, exploitation, greedy bosses, and the like, they have a lot in common with other workers — and we all stand to learn a lot from one another’s struggles.

Listen to Part One:

Listen to Part Two:

RACHEL STAFFORD:
A postal worker, anarchist, and rank and file trouble maker, Rachel Stafford has been organizing to build worker power within and outside of the post office. Applying skills and perspectives developed as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), she has organized for direct action at her job and supported others as a trainer in the IWW’s Organizer Training program. Rachel writes about and reflects on her experiences as a member of the editorial collective of the Recomposition blog.

Interested people should also check out Rachel’s article “Postal Worker Solidarity Defeats Compulsory Overtime” and other articles about Canadian postal worker struggles here at Recomposition.

Our friend and comrade Invisible Man has contributed stories before about life on the job. In this piece he provides an analysis of race and policy and movements in Quebec. In a time of crisis and with a potential for rising right-wing movements, his points are relevant to people around the world.

 
Reasonable Accommodation 
The accommodation debate began with the Dawson College shooting spree. Not many remember it now, but it’s a fact.

I remember sitting in a café near Guy-Concordia, hours after the tragedy in late 2006, with an Arab friend of mine – a Dawson student who’d narrowly missed the bullets himself. Still reeling from the shock, we both reacted to Kimveer Gill’s picture on the TV set by believing he was a White boy. But not the blonde sitting across the table from us. She knew right away that he wasn’t White, though she was hard-pressed to identify “what” he was.

Mere hours earlier, one of the fine journalists of Montreal had asked another near-victim (a Francophone White girl known to us) whether the shooter was “Arabe, pis terroriste?”

I think the translation gets through just fine.

To the credit of the Quebec media, though, the ethnicity of the shooter remained unknown for a few weeks. It didn’t become a big deal until much later – in a climate when his Punjabi-speaking mother had become a new journalistic “angle.”

But three days after the Dawson College shooting, Toronto journalist Jan Wong (for reasons best known to her alone) sparked heated controversy in her Globe and Mail column. She pointed out that the three school shootings in Quebec – at the Polytechnic, Concordia, and Dawson – were all carried out by members of ethnic minorities. And all in Quebec.

Wong pointed out that a racist society like Quebec’s would inevitably produce such aberrations from time to time, given its treatment of minorities.

I didn’t get the point of Wong’s argument then. Years in retrospect, I see that the Dawson shooting was just like Richard Wright’s Native Son all over again: complete with the minority criminal; the blonde murder victim, daughter of a well-placed Montreal family; a parallel true even to the media barrage that followed.

Perhaps Wong, of Chinese ancestry, born and raised in “cosmopolitan” Montreal, knew something about the subject of Quebecois racism. However, she tended toward contrasting “francophone, pure-laine” Quebec with Anglophone Canada in this respect; as if there were a difference.

The offices of Stephen Harper and Jean Charest both issued statements sharply condemning Wong and warning of future consequences. The House of Commons passed a resolution demanding an apology for the column. She never complied.

Given a month or two, Wong’s “neo-racism” (as someone called it) passed out of the public eye in Quebec. It seemed to us the issue had died down, but closer examination proved that it was actually continuing on a lower profile. Racist “letters to the editor,” which would normally have been edited or rejected due to their content, were approved for publishing: a warm-up exercise for the full-on media campaign that would follow.

Enter the US military and the US Department of Treasury. First, the Treasury banned Iranian nationals from holding US dollar accounts in Canadian banks. Second, the US company Bell Helicopter, based in Dorval (just outside of Montreal) took 24 employees off “sensitive” military contracts because of their nationality. At least two interns, a Venezuelan and an Arab, were let go.

It was a blatant case of Charter discrimination. Nobody gave a damn. The media began to talk about “accommodation.”

Soon afterward, the tiny Quebec town of Hérouxville passed an “immigrant code of conduct” that grabbed international headlines. Town leaders called for restrictions to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, advocating the declaration of a “state of cultural emergency” similar to the War Measures Act that quelled Quebec’s nationalist terrorists, the FLQ, in 1970. They claimed to ban such things as “stoning women,” and wearing face coverings on days other than Halloween. Later, André Drouin, town councilor, revealed the whole thing as a media stunt.

But the provincial election was coming up.

It would be rather tempting to dismiss the “code” as the product of small-town minds in sub-zero temperatures. But the race-baiting, now described as a “debate,” didn’t stop there. A news poll, published on front pages in giant print, claimed that some 60 percent of Quebecers reported themselves as “racist.”

Muslim girls wearing hijabs were banned from soccer and martial arts competitions. The wearing of veils at polling stations was outlawed at both the provincial and federal levels. Elements within the Montreal school board called for the abolition of hijabs in the public school system, and, of religious holidays for staff.

Orthodox Jews were accused of trying to oppress women by glazing the windows of the Parc Avenue YMCA, near a synagogue. Immigrants were accused of marrying their sisters to gain entrance to Canada. The popular animated show Têtes-à-claques had an episode where some White travelers to Africa were boiled in a pot by a bongo-beating cannibal. Someone found a Montreal cop’s blog, where a racist song about Blacks was set to a Caribbean calypso beat.

A mosque and a Torah school were firebombed within days of each other.

I remember a cartoon from back then. A Quebecois lumberjack has cut down a Christmas tree. “You can’t do that!” says another. “That’s favoring one religion over another!”

“But I cut it down with a kirpan!” smirks back the lumberjack.

Let me tell you, those were some tough days. But few non-Whites have ever wanted to be “accommodated.” We’ve wanted to be left alone.

Why, in Quebec of all places, would the pitting of immigrants against “Quebecois de souche” become so seriously a part of the political climate?

Since its colonization by English Canada, Quebec has been a centre of resistance. A dominant Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie, in alliance with the Catholic church and domestic political collaborators (such as Maurice Duplessis), produced its opposite in a culture of working-class resistance – which leaves its mark on Quebec’s collective consciousness to this day. Historically, Quebec has the highest rate of unionization (44%) and some of the most combative unions in North America. Quebec’s comprehensive social welfare programs, rent controls, and the generally progressive worldview of the Quebecer are a product of this protracted history of anti-imperialist class struggle.

It was this progressive worldview that led more than 60,000 to face down riot police in the streets of Quebec City against the FTAA in April, 2001. On September 9, 2002, hundreds gathered outside Concordia University to demonstrate against a speech of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu – successfully shutting down the event. Over 100,000 Quebecers – Quebecois, Arab, and others alongside each other – demonstrated in the streets of Montreal against the invasion of Iraq, in the bitter cold of early 2003. May Day 2004 was attended by about 150,000 workers. In 2005, a massive student strike of 250,000, the largest since 1968, shut down the post-secondary educational sector, attracting massive public support. As late as 2006, even high-profile Quebec politicians such as Gilles Duceppe (leader of the federal Bloc Québecois), Liberal MP Denis Coderre, and Parti Québecois leader André Boisclair all felt the need to respond to rank-and-file pressure – by publicly joining street demonstrations of 15,000 against the bombing of Lebanon.

Each of these events had its own significance. But the common thread is that Quebec’s fundamental values appeared alien to those of the “accommodation debate.” On the surface, it seemed that Quebec’s history of resistance in times of imperialist war, and the cosmopolitan makeup of Montreal in particular, was a volatile mix that would permanently dictate political reality in Quebec. But clearly, this was a false assumption. What happened?

The Accommodation Debate’s Political Roots

As I’ll explain below, the racist debate was made possible by the Quebec labour leadership’s stifling of the workers’ initiative to take on the ruling class and its government. But the specific catalyst for the debate, and the ADQ’s masterful adaptation to it, traces itself back to the xenophobic mentality of the US’s “war on terror” – a mentality which, up till that time, was not prevalent in the Quebec political climate. Although most minorities came under attack at one point or another during the accommodation debate, special fire was directed at Arabs and Muslims, particularly Muslim girls and women. This was no coincidence.

After the federal Conservatives took power in 2007, the issue of Quebec posed a dire problem for the strategists of Canadian capital. Although the rural areas had largely swung Conservative, Quebec’s public opinion still ran high against the war in Afghanistan. And the Valcartier Brigade, composed of young Quebecers, was due for deployment to Afghanistan later that year.

Although these soldiers had been sent to Afghanistan before, this time the brigade was headed for the dangerous Southern region: there would inevitably be deaths and casualties. In the urban centres of Montreal and Quebec City, there would be a great risk of re-triggering the massive demonstrations that had accompanied the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Lebanon. (In fact, Prime Minister Harper admitted as much in a media interview.)

What, oh what, can an Albertan do with Quebec?

The invasion of Iraq was a key turning point in world politics; it became a litmus test of loyalty to the Bush clique’s vision for the dominance of the world by the US ruling class. It also spawned the largest global protest movement history has ever seen. Montreal’s demonstrations were the largest in Canada and ranked among the largest in North America. These demonstrations were a very clear indicator of the political reality in Quebec: Quebec was the centre of Canadian resistance to US foreign policy.

In December, 2004, the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal Party adopted a resolution against Canada’s participation in the Bush-initiated Continental missile shield. On the basis of a highly anti-Bush, anti-war population (especially in Quebec), these resolutions had significance for Martin’s leadership. The government finally announced that it would not participate in the ballistic missile shield initiative.

The Liberals were becoming less and less of a useful tool to US interests – and the Quebec factor played a huge role in this. The Conservatives’ ambitious “Canada First” defence policy, as posted on the party’s website at the time, included increasing military personnel to 75,000, militarizing the Arctic, the Great Lakes, and the coasts, and “ensur[ing that the] Canadian defence industry has access to the United States defence procurement market.” After Harper’s election, the military bureaucracy – and thus Canadian arms-manufacturers, with a material interest in US foreign policy – became the basis of Conservative rule.

In the following period, “Canada’s New Government,” as it referred to itself, went to great lengths to prove itself Washington-friendly. The war in Afghanistan became a major focus. NATO’s forces fell under Canadian command, while the Canadian military budget skyrocketed. Military recruitment and arms production became centres of attention.

Yet after all this time, and all these dramatic events, Quebec’s political climate remained opposed to the Conservative war agenda.

The link between the Conservative government and the “accommodation debate” was shown when, for no apparent reason, the ban on veils (or other “face coverings”) at the polling booth was extended from a provincial ban to a federal ban. The measure was announced, in French, during the Governor-General’s throne speech.

Social Roots of the Media Frenzy

The blame for the accommodation debate, lies squarely on the shoulders of the labour leadership of Quebec.

Allow me to explain myself.

Camouflaging its neo-liberal programme in “sovereigntist” rhetoric, the Parti Québecois had pursued austerity measures and anti-worker policies for years. The defeat of the PQ in 2003 was a reaction to its attacks on working people (and not a rejection of sovereigntist sentiment, or a victory of federalist policies). Quebecers voted them out, and voted in the Liberals, who’d promised more money for education and health care.

Once in power, a red-faced, corpulent provincial Liberal leader (formerly the charismatic, curly-haired federal Conservative leader named Jean Charest), introduced us to his unique expression, “la reingénierie de l’état.” New to the French language, this term “re-engineering of the state” found synonyms in the decade-old rhetoric of Ontario’s “Common Sense Revolution” or Alberta’s much-vaunted “Advantage.”

In one sweep, the Charest government attempted to eliminate the CEGEP system, passed Bill 142 which banned 500,000 public sector workers from striking, and lifted long-standing protective measures in the manufacturing sector (which contributed to the loss of over 100,000 manufacturing jobs since the Liberals took power – before the present economic crisis began in 2008).

Charest’s attacks were the signal that the cozy class collaboration secured by Premier Lucien Bouchard’s 1996 “zero-deficit” pact (uniting the PQ government, the main employers’ association, labour unions, and student federations) was no longer going to hold water. This unleashed a wave of protests from the unions and the students under the slogans: “Charest – Ostie de crosseur!” (“Charest: fucking jerkoff,” the main labour slogan) and “La paix sociale est terminée!” (“The social peace is over!,” student union ASSÉ’s slogan).

Post-election 2003 saw a push toward a general strike. This call got the overwhelming support of the union rank and file. The CSN labour federation took the initiative and received a full mandate for a general strike. The larger FTQ received 90% ratification from its member locals. As a barometer of the scope of the movement, May Day 2004 was attended by an overwhelming 150,000 workers. But the upsurge was undercut: under the guise of a “holiday truce” for the 2004 Christmas season, the general strike was quietly scuttled.

I remember it well. When the 60-year protective legislation of the garment industry was lifted in 2003, I somehow managed to survive a 10 percent reduction in the industry’s labour force (no doubt due to the intervention of my union representative). Every worker I knew was ready for a fight with the government. But the moment never came.

The climate of demoralization that set in following the betrayal of the labour leaders was the precondition for the rise of a reactionary current like the ADQ. But the vacuum was not immediately filled by the right wing.

The Quebec student strike of 2005 became a catalyst for the underlying discontent in Quebec: as the only sector of society which was willing to take on the government, the students received massive popular support from the middle classes as well as unemployed associations, some unions, and the public at large – who joined their demonstrations in the tens of thousands.

But just as the appeal of the student strike began to swing in broader strokes, the “appeasement” wing of the student movement (the FÉCQ/FÉUQ leadership) moved for calm, after five weeks of striking. While the strike did force the government to back down, all that it actually achieved was to maintain the status quo.

Public disappointment with the labour leadership turned the turmoil in Quebec into its opposite. The student movement had lost its momentum – and, even at its peak, could only provide token support to the workers’ struggle. People kept losing their jobs; the middle class, particularly, felt the squeeze. Precisely when the majority of Quebecers were looking for firm solutions, and a strong, principled stand, an ossified union bureaucracy stalled the movement, and a vacuum of leadership emerged.

In the absence of the organized militancy of the unions, the employers’ associations regained the upper hand. But they needed a new political tool in government; neither the PQ nor the Liberals were credible leaders any longer. This meant that a wing of the employers’ associations would aggressively back a new party, to channel the alienation of the middle class and rural areas behind its social agenda.

Enter Mario Dumont.

Dumont had founded the Action Démocratique du Québec at the tender age of 24. The tiny centre-right party had never had much to offer the Quebec voter. In the 2003 election, soaring predictions had been made about the ADQ’s potential; but it had wound up with a total of five seats. The ADQ was laughed off as far too conservative for the Quebec taste, and openly criticized as too close to the US Republican party.

Beginning his career as a “sovereigntist Liberal,” then flirting with the PQ, Dumont’s ADQ incarnation had shifted gears from “sovereignty” to “autonomy.” In 2005, he professed support for the student strike. In 2006, he condemned the transit workers’ strike.  But for all his serpentine motions, few were paying attention.

In 2007 – the election mere weeks away – Monsieur Dumont showed up in Herouxville. Now everyone was paying attention.

The Quebec media, diligently finding something wrong with every ethnic group in Quebec but the Québécois de souche and White Anglo-Canadians, apparently suffered from short-term amnesia when it came to dealing with the root of the debate. Why should Iranians be banned from holding American currency? Was it unjust to fire people because of their national origin? Did this American behaviour violate the “codes of conduct” known as the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights? If these events could happen in Quebec, in Canada, did it say something about the state of national sovereignty in the current political context?

Substituted for these questions were the pressing concerns of journalistic integrity: How can we stop immigrants from imposing themselves on us? Why are they terrorists? Shouldn’t they be forced to act like us? Doesn’t the Charter force us to violate “our” cultural values and destroy “our” true identity?

“How many?” the headlines would ask coyly. “Too many!” Dumont would fire back into the TV cameras, broadcasting his dead-eyed stare and thinly pressed lips in simulacrum of political worthiness. Repeat ad nauseum.

Once it had captured centre stage, the ADQ made gestures toward the middle class, hinting that its “high rate of taxation” was solely due to parasitic transit and city workers, daycare workers, and students all demanding too much of the public purse – and constantly threatening to strike. (Naturally, M. Dumont failed to mention that eliminating these nuisances would also be of great interest to the ruling class.) At its root, the ADQ programme proposed an alliance between the middle class and employers’ class, to break the powerful public sector unions and the restive student movement.

Having fallen under the wheels of business and government, trampled over by hundreds of thousands of demonstrating workers and students, the PQ’s paix social now lay dead in Quebec’s streets. “We need a firm hand, like in the good old days!” shouted the employers’ associations. We need a firm hand, like Maurice Duplessis, hinted the media.  “The immigrants and the unions are holding Quebec hostage,” Dumont read from his cue cards. “I look to Duplessis as a model.”

And so it was that Pinocchio became a real boy.

On March 26, 2007, the face of Quebec politics changed dramatically. The Parti Quebecois saw a massive defeat, falling to 36 seats and forcing leader André Boisclair to declare that sovereignty was off the agenda “for the short term.” The ADQ jumped from five seats to 41. This put them only seven seats behind the minority Liberal government. It was the first minority government in 139 years in Quebec.

In his “victory speech,” Dumont referred to his party’s electoral success as “a revolt of the middle class and the rural areas.”

The PQ went through a painful identity crisis, its various internal factions chewing at the innards of what was now little more than a political corpse.

After the elections (amidst feverish media prattling about a “constitutional crisis” which might force a change of government to the ADQ), the minority Liberals gave a conscious and public response to the ADQ’s focus on the middle class. It used federal transfer payments – intended for health and education funding – to grant a $1 billion dollar tax cut to the (upper) middle class.

And the media applauded. Perhaps the newsrooms received boxes of chocolates from the Conseil du patronat du Québec. Probably not.

The accommodation debate was a well-orchestrated ploy by the organized capitalist class to capture the anger of middle-class and rural Quebecers at itself, substituting racial and religious minorities as scapegoats. Rallying them behind the ADQ, Quebec’s economic leaders turned these new social allies against their old enemies: the organized working class and student unions.

The cover of political observer l’Actualité, following the Quebec elections, bore Mario Dumont’s face – accompanied by the headline: “Harper owes me one.” Indeed. Perhaps some credit might have been extended to the media corporations, Bell Helicopter and the US Treasury Department for their help as well.

Through Quebec’s accommodation debate – just as with Denmark’s “cartoon controversy” – the ruling class manufactured a tangible Arab, Muslim “enemy” where none previously existed, in an attempt to promote increased military spending and recruitment, and the deployment of soldiers in Afghanistan to a public solidly opposed to the war.

Agent provocateur

Another personality came onto the scene, providing a perfect counterpoint to Dumont’s demagoguery. During the days of the cartoon controversy, a Montreal imam at al-Qods Mosque had begun making a name for himself as spokesperson for the Muslim community. Said Jaziri led a peaceful protest against the publication of the cartoons and the defamation of Islam. At the time, no one knew who he was.

Mr. Jaziri reappeared when the town of Hérouxville passed its infamous “immigrant code of conduct.” Just as Mario Dumont made his name by visiting Hérouxville to support the “code,” Jaziri made his by traveling there to oppose it. He publicly visited Hérouxville with his wife – who wore a hijab, but did not cover her face, in strict accordance with the town’s law.

Said Jaziri quickly became a media personality, and was presented as the Muslim authority on the accommodation debate. In many ways, he provided the perfect foil so that the “debate” could continue.

Apparently, all this high-profile activity took place while the imam was undergoing a review of his refugee claim. Jaziri was deported from Canada to his birthplace of Tunisia, where he claimed he risked being tortured or killed. Canadian authorities accused him of hiding a police record he had accumulated in France. According to the Montreal Métro of October 16, 2007, Mr. Jaziri defended himself by saying that “his judicial record had been erased after he had accepted to collaborate with French security forces.”

His record of public service couldn’t save him. Exit Jaziri.

In an interview with a Quebecois talk show host (who began one sentence with: “If I were to rape you here today…”) Samira Laouni, NDP candidate, described Jaziri as an “agent provocateur.”

The Accommodation Debate in International Context

On February 7, 2008, the Associated Press published the following regarding the Spanish elections:

Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy, campaigning for March 9 general elections, presented a proposal Wednesday in the Catalonia region, home to the heaviest concentration of immigrants in any part of Spain. Immigrants…would be granted the same rights and benefits as Spanish citizens if they complied with the proposed rules, Rajoy said. Specifically, he said, immigrants seeking to renew a one-year residency permit should have to sign a legally binding document pledging to “obey the laws, respect Spanish customs, learn the language, pay their taxes and work actively to integrate themselves into Spanish society and return to their country if during a period of time they cannot find work.” Interior Minister Alfredo Rubalcaba called the proposal meaningless because immigrants already have to abide by the law and enjoy rights, just like Spaniards…. The proposal is widely seen as mimicking one that Nicolas Sarkozy pushed through in France in 2004 when he was France’s interior minister.

Naturally, it reminded some of us in Quebec, of Herouxville’s “immigrant code of conduct.” After securing the thinnest of majorities in yet another election, the Liberals adopted a similar measure to recoup any remaining support for the ADQ.

What Does it Mean for Worker Revolutionaries?

The accommodation debate was a means of buying off the Quebecois working class, by portraying immigrant and minority workers as a threat to the Quebecois national identity – and Canada’s national security. It was used to build up a right-wing party that would defend the interests of the capitalist class more intensely, employing demagogic sentiments that tried to play workers against the middle class, and Quebecois workers against everyone else on the shop floor.

The accommodation debate was also useful to the ruling class in that, to a certain extent, it divided the left. The unions were silent on the issue, with even the CSN leadership merely encouraging its members not to vote ADQ. Even some “revolutionaries” on the left were not immune to the climate.

But as the war in Afghanistan continues, and the working class re-arms itself for a renewed struggle with Capital, there are lessons to be learned and events to prepare for.

The racism which characterizes the “war on terror,” and the witch-hunt atmosphere of the accommodation debate, were and are good for employers. In addition to fostering a receptive climate to arms production, the military, and the reactionary ADQ, the accommodation debate helped further develop an underclass of low-paid, desperate-for-work non-White employees.

The legal restrictions on civil liberties which the ruling class imposes on us today in the name of “national security” will be turned against militant workers, of whatever melanin concentration, tomorrow. Meanwhile, company owners deliberately stir up racial animosities and favouritism in the workplace – in order to break strikes, drive out unions, and ultimately drive down wages and working conditions. It is not “terrorists,” but rather the capitalist class, who conduct an assault on the way of life that workers have fought for.

If one section of the working class is weakened, the class as a whole becomes more vulnerable to the overall aims of the capitalist class. If the unemployed are not organized, they will be used as scabs. If the workers’ organizations do not provide the lead, the vacuum will be filled by religious fundamentalists and White nationalists, who will exacerbate the conflict to their own ends.

The capitalist class can be relied on to whip up racism again and again in more and more vicious forms in their battle to conquer the workers’ movement. Instead of using war budgets to ameliorate the conditions that produce unrest among workers and students, the ruling class chooses to demonize anyone who looks like the “enemy,” worships like the enemy, or merely has the bad luck of working in the wrong factory at the wrong time – trying to play worker against worker.

But perhaps the experience of 2007, the ADQ and reasonable accommodation, can serve as an inoculation against the rhetoric of the bourgeois populist. Or, there is another possibility.

Instead of public opposition to the war in Afghanistan, or outcry against US government interference with workers on Canadian soil (both of which had been part of the social reality before the media campaign), the climate in Quebec was one of ethnic polarization, mutual distrust, and increased racial harassment from police officers and ordinary citizens. Then, on Sunday, August 10, 2008, following the police killing of an 18-year-old mechanics student, the streets of North Montreal went up in flames.

Borough mayor Marcel Parent exclaimed in bewilderment: “What happened there was absolutely unforeseeable. People in Montréal-Nord are not rebellious.”

“For two years we’ve been expecting that at any given moment, things would explode,” Harry Delva, a Montréal-Nord social worker, told le Journal. Two years. That takes us to mid-2006, when the harsh gusts of the “accommodation debate” began to spew from the media outlets.

“He who sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind,” said the Old Testament prophet.

Editorial note: Here are Invisible Man’s other stories that have run here at Recomposition. “C’est pas un pays, c’est un hiver” and “The Shoe Nazi.” He also write a blog of his own.

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