In the BC Federation of Labour, solidarity is a joke.Take the Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada (IWA) For nearly a year the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) has been at the centre of the Campbell government’s campaign to destroy trade unionism in British Columbia. 9,000 hospital support jobs will be privatized by the end of 2004, the largest mass firing of women workers in the history of Canada.
These workers are being replaced by newly-hired employees of two huge multinationals, the Compass Group from Britain and the US-based Aramark Corporation, who will be paid half that of the HEU members whose jobs they are taking. These firings are a central part of the Liberal government’s campaign to privatize health care, but they are also designed to weaken and demoralize the HEU, which has been one of the strongest opponents to Campbell’s regime. Company executives were embarrassed last spring when the BC Government Employees Union released a taped conversation where company representatives baldly stated that all the former HEU members were to be blacklisted.This is union-busting, pure and simple.
Class Collaboration
But what’s completely unspeakable is that this campaign is only being made possible by the active class-collaboration of the IWA-Canada., and the silence of the rest of the BC union movement.
Last December IWA Local 1-3567 signed a secret contract with Compass Group before it had even hired a single employee. This contract provided for wages half that paid HEU’s members (which takes hospital cleaners back to the wage levels paid in 1968).The pay equity won over three decades of struggle is gone. There are no pensions. There is no maternity leave. And there is even an unprecedented “race-to-the-bottom” clause that means any contract provision can be downgraded to match any lower wages or worse conditions negotiated by the IWA anywhere in the health care system. Seven months later it signed a contract with Aramark whose provisions even allow the company to blacklist IWA members!
Worse Than Scabbing
This is worse than scabbing. This is absolute class betrayal. This is a division of labour, where the corporations and Campbell and the IWA play integral roles in smashing the most militant union in BC and the union brass has done nothing to stop it. Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti’s first response was to go after the HEU for publicly attacking the IWA (which is, after all, a CLC affiliate). However, he was eventually pressured into appointing a neutral umpire to investigate the HEU’s charge that the IWA had violated the CLC constitution. But one week after the umpire’s report came down finding the IWA guilty as charged, Georgetti addressed the IWA’s national convention and said...nothing. No condemnation, no ultimatum, no mention whatever.
This wall of silence has extended across BC’s once-proud labour movement. It’s a measure of how far this movement has fallen that this IWA-corporate-Liberal partnership has not resulted in the IWA’s immediate expulsion from the ranks of organized labour.And the question remains: will this union-busting go on unchallenged? There is no reason to think this sort of cannibalism will limit itself to this one example. If the IWA’s rampage continues, there’s every reason to think it will spread. So the BC labour movement is approaching a crossroads. Soon it will be confronted with a choice — solidarity, or the law of the jungle. And it’s an open question which will prevail.