The CLC and Its Affiliates are Dead, Stop Supporting Them
In 1956, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada and the Canadian Congress of Labour merged to form the Canadian Labour Congress.
The Trades and Labour Congress, the major national labour body in Canada until 1940, did not charter provincial federations unlike the present day CLC. Instead, its annual conventions elected provincial executive groups with nominal responsibilities to represent the TLC at the provincial level.
On a political level, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) founded in Alberta in 1932, represented a number of groups including socialists, farmers, and labour groups.
The New Democratic Party (NDP) was created in 1961 by way of a merger between the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in an effort to make democratic socialism more popular with Canadian voters.
Tommy Douglas, the long-time CCF Premier of Saskatchewan, was elected the party's first leader. The NDP claimed to represent the working class and unions of Canada in politics. It was to be a socialist party advocating the democratic left instead of right wing politics.
The NDP, as both a federal and provincial political party in Canada, is a party that boasts of being the furthest left of Canada's mainstream political parties. It was once noted for its socialist roots and its connection with organized labour; however its tendencies, once in power, have turned out to be much less left than first promoted.
A significant proportion of the NDP's membership consists of associate members who belong to the party by their membership in affiliated trade unions. Of late, trade unions and the NDP are showing more of a tendency to comply with corporate interests than with workers' interests. The NDP seems to have severed any meaningful connection from its roots, the workers and become more sympathetic to the owners of the machine.
Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto warned that the owners of the machines and the people who worked at them were like owls and mice, natural and irreconcilable enemies. Yet union and union affiliates play with the owls as if old familiar friends rather than irreconcilable enemies.
The NDP will never be elected federally, that much is a reality. Canada has become too much of a sanctuary for capitalistic owls. If workers want to make a significant difference their only means may be to eliminate the road block to change, the Canadian Labour Congress and its affiliates who bow to the whims of the system. Workers will have to force the CLC out of the way by whatever member action possible, including civil disobedience.
Some activists like Mario Savio and Mahatma Gandhi practiced and preached civil disobedience of their own form.
Mario Savio an incendiary student leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, a movement credited with giving birth to the campus "sit-in" and with being a model for the protests against the Vietnam War, is remembered for the words he spoke on Dec. 2, 1964, from Sproul Plaza in front of Berkeley's main administration building, to a large crowd of protesters, many of whom took part in a sit-in inside the building and a campus strike.
There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cannot take part; you cannot even tacitly take part. You've got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, and the gears and all the apparatus, and you have to make it stop. And you have to make it clear to the people who own it, and to the people who run it, that until you are free their machine will be prevented from running at all.
The great Mahatma Gandhi is quoted saying:
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness...Every citizen is responsible for every act of his government...There is only one sovereign remedy, namely, non-violent non-cooperation.
Whether we advertise the fact or not, the moment we cease to support the government it dies...
Ghandi strongly advocated civil disobedience and nonviolent mass protest as the most effective way of achieving social change. These means may be our best strategy against those union institutions that persist in controlling out futures.
The BC Federation of Labour, lead by Jim Sinclair, has put all their energies into controlling and suppressing their rank and file membership. How is that consistent with its' constitution or the CLC's constitution?
Is the purpose of the BC Fed it as it states on its website is "To protect the labour movement from all corrupt influences and from the undermining effects of all totalitarian agencies which are opposed to the basic principles of democracy and free and democratic unionism"? Have they fulfilled that purpose?
How did the BC Federation of Labour support the HEU workers and all other workers that stood beside us? Instead, they used our dues from per capita to undermine workers futures and many workers futures. There are enough institutions seeking to suppress workers rights without paid union associations assisting in the slaughter of workers wages and rights.
Alicia Barsallo, an outspoken NDP possible candidate for Vancouver-Kingsway seems to have broken ranks from NDP party lines and spoke up against the recent sell out of the BC Federation of labour. Barsallo, teacher, law graduate, feminist, a human rights, civil rights and labour rights activist had this to say about the BC Fed in a recent media release.
BC was left with only the provincial election to get back at the BC Liberals... as if through elections alone we could subdue powerful transnationals for whose benefit our services and resources are being privatized.
Do BC Federation of Labour leaders have any idea what it is like to work for $10 an hour under the constant fear of having your job disappear?
Have BC Federation of Labour leaders ever considered that it is the task of the labour movement to use its organizing power to fight injustice?
These questions are all very thought provoking. We all need to seriously reconsider our options and one of those is to withdraw our membership affiliation to these organizations that have done little or nothing for us.
All HEU and CUPE locals should be drafting resolutions now. We need to have a serious debate and consideration of where our hard earned dues are going.
What has the CLC done about the IWA 1-3567 fiasco? ASOLUTELY NOTHING. Does that bother any of you?
The CLC and its provincial affiliates these days appear closer to Karl Marx's depiction of owners than advocates of the interests of workers. Why should workers pay per capita to support an obsolete institution that is dead for them? We all need to stop paying to these traitorous labour organizations.
If civil disobedience should become a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt, so should civil disobedience become a sacred duty when the unions and their associated affiliates barter with such a state and share in its corruption and lawlessness. Every union member is responsible for every act of his union association. There is only one sovereign remedy - namely, non-violent non-cooperation through civil disobedience.
Why do you continue to give your dues to labour organizations like the CLC and affiliates like the BC Federation of Labour? They do not represent your interests any longer. The HEU sell out is very clear evidence of that.
Don't forget that trade union bureaucrats strongly believe they are essential to the well-being of the union movement because they are specialists. They are "in the know", they are experienced, etc. This justifies their salaries, their need to keep things from the members, and their occasional regrettable duty to go along with strike-breaking legislation without even consulting their members.
This self-appointed elite status also makes union leaders very distrustful of workers making decisions further justifying cutting workers even further out of the decision-making process. They work on the premise that workers must be protected from themselves because workers are not experts and because they tend to get carried away by emotion.
If workers start to do radical things and learn by experience how to organize and fight and protest effectively they might not need the high-paid union bureaucrats. Then what would the latter do? Would the highly paid union bureaucrats go back into the members ranks where many are being paid lowly wages under far more stressful work conditions or would they just join the profiteers like IWA-Canada's President Dave Haggard did?
The moment we cease to support the government-friendly union institutions like the Canadian Labour Congress, it will die completely.
Wait! It's already dead. The CLC and its affiliates are dead. Get active and Stop Supporting these so-called labour organizations that gush sympathy for corporate interests and leave their members' priorities in the dust under a pile of lame excuses.
Start your campaign now. Stand up and do something-be an activist. Spread the mighty word. Mass email friends and associates. It is time to stop this labour sympathy for pilfering profiteers.