In “Class Struggle in the Canadian State” in the last issue of New Socialist, I argued that Canadian society is marked by the success of the ruling class since the mid-1970s in putting workers on the defensive, implementing its favoured policies, reorganizing work and labour markets, and defeating Quebecois and aboriginal challenges to “national unity.”

The ruling-class offensive has weakened the working class as a social and political force. “Inequality, competition and divisions among working people have deepened. The percentage of workers outside agriculture who are in unions has declined from its peak of 40 per cent in 1983 to around 30 per cent. Many individuals and families have adopted private and individualistic ways of getting by, as seen in support for right-wing tax-cuts... Dependency on wage-labour has been reinforced, with more people now forced to hold down more than one job. People of colour, aboriginal people, women and queers are often blamed by members of dominant groups for the difficulties in their lives. All this makes for fertile ground for the ‘common sense’ ideas of neo-liberalism that dominate official politics.”

This article takes a closer look at the working-class movement today in the conviction that activists need to understand both the movement’s incredible potential power and real weaknesses. It does not offer any easy solutions, for there are none. Hopefully this article will generate responses and further discussion, since the stakes for working people are very high and most of the left hasn’t grappled with the issues.

First, though, what do we mean by “the working class” and the working-class movement? In Canadian society, few people have a strong sense of themselves as belonging to the “working class.” Most working people think of themselves as “middle class” -- they’re “in the middle,” with the rich above them and the poor below. We can see this way of thinking reflected in one of the federal New Democratic Party’s 2004 pre-election ads, which explicitly appeals to “middle class” people.

But the common notion that class is about income or wealth actually conceals a crucial division in society, between the majority of people who produce and distribute the goods and services that keep society going and the tiny minority that controls the bulk of society’s wealth. The majority is forced to work for the minority because most people have no other way of making a living (relatively few people who start their own businesses survive in the market for long).

This majority is the working class: all the people who work for wages and salaries and don’t have real management power, along with people (mostly women) who do unpaid work in the home, and rely for cash income on the wages of others in their households, or on welfare payments.

The working class is by far the largest class in Canadian society. It includes people in many different kinds of jobs, from high-paid software designers to call-centre and fast-food workers and countless others. Most are citizens; some are permanent residents, immigrant workers on temporary work permits, or refugee claimants.

Just because people belong to the working class doesn’t mean they think of themselves as workers or see their interests as different from those of the tiny capitalist ruling class (though many people partially understand this). Nevertheless, the working class has tremendous potential power. This power is not just a matter of numbers. Without the labour of the working class this complex and wealthy society could not function. When workers collectively refuse to work on a huge scale, capitalism grinds to a halt, as we see in general strikes. Working-class struggle will be central to a defeat of the neoliberal agenda of right-wing governments, not to mention any future attempt to replace capitalism with a genuinely democratic, free and sustainable society where human need rather than profit determines what is produced and how it is distributed.

Where’s the movement?

It should be clear that the working class in this society is hardly using its enormous potential power. Canadian unions have not been weakened as severely as in the US, but the level of collective action in workplaces is low: the number of workers who went on strike annually between 1993 and 2002 averaged around only 180 000. The picture outside the workplace is in some ways better. Since the mid-1990s there have been mass protests against neoliberal governments in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. Still, despite important efforts, there has been little action around the crisis of affordable housing, the weakening of employment standards, the erosion of public services, and many other attacks.

To understand why the level of working-class resistance is low despite the accelerating pace of attacks from employers and neoliberal governments, we need to look at the kind of movement workers have, as well as the conditions in which workers find themselves.

Working-class movements are made up of formal organizations, such as unions, political parties and community-based groups, plus informal organizations like activist networks. The most basic reason why workers form their own independent organizations is to defend themselves against capital. Workers also organize to fight for improvements within their society, from higher wages to unemployment benefits, affordable housing, health care and child care. In some situations workers organize to try to make radical changes in how society itself is structured.

In Canada, the organizations of the working class today are generally failing to mount effective defensive struggles against the kind of attacks being conducted by employers, governments and other forces of capital in this era of restructuring. As organizations of collective self-defence, most just don’t cut it. To understand why this is, we need to look back to the middle of the 20th century.

In the 1940s, two waves of strikes (many of them illegal) won important workplace rights for workers in Canada. Employers were compelled to recognize unions and engage in negotiations with unions over wages and working conditions. Unions had the right to strike to achieve better collective agreements. The worst kind of arbitrary bossing on the job was put in check.

Taming the movement

However, these gains came with strings attached. Unions were forced to accept management’s right to run the workplace as it saw fit. Unionized workers could only legally strike against their own employers (not in solidarity with other workers or against governments), and then only when their collective agreement had expired. Direct action on the job to resolve problems was banned; complaints had to go through lengthy, bureaucratic grievance procedures. Union officials were obliged to make workers respect strike bans and other contract provisions, under threat of penalty.

During the years of economic prosperity and low unemployment from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, unions were able to win better wages, benefits and working conditions through routine collective bargaining within the labour relations straightjacket. In this era, many unions ceased to have a strong activist presence in the workplace. Participation in union activity and democratic control by members over their unions declined, making the unions more bureaucratic. Solidarity between unions also weakened. In these years, the dominant politics of the working-class movement became a very moderate kind of social democracy that sought to achieve reforms only through the constitutional channels of parliamentary politics. The NDP was supposed to deal with whatever couldn’t be won through collective bargaining. Radical left politics were banished to the margins by officially-sanctioned anti-communism and red-baiting, except for an inspiring breakthrough in Quebec in the 1970s that didn’t plant lasting roots.

Put to the test

Since the end of the “Long Boom” in the mid-1970s, the working-class movement that developed in the previous three decades has been put to the test by aggressive employers and right-wing governments and found badly wanting.

The official leadership of the movement has not taken up the difficult task of trying to organize the strongest resistance possible. It remains wedded to the existing way of doing things within the current framework of labour relations and parliamentary politics. This isn’t just because its ideology isn’t anti-capitalist. The officialdom as a social layer has interests of its own. Militant struggle would jeopardize union officials’ relations with employers and even land them in jail. Sitting politicians could lose their seats. Unless its institutions are so threatened that its own existence is endangered, the officialdom is unlikely to take risks.

It’s now common for unions to give up past gains. Unions are not keeping up with the expansion in the fastest-growing sectors of the workforce, particularly private sector service jobs. In the private sector, many leaders openly embrace cooperating with employers in the drive for higher corporate profits; in the public sector, some accept government cuts in the name of balancing budgets. Unions whose leaders reject neoliberalism and take a more militant stance, notably the Canadian Auto Workers, still accept labour-management cooperation to boost competitiveness even if they don’t always proclaim this as policy. Racism, sexism and heterosexism run deep within the working-class movement (just as in the rest of society); efforts to counter these forms of oppression are at best limited and at worst tokenistic gestures.

Despite their many limitations, unions at least give some workers the possibility of defending themselves against their bosses. This opportunity is rarely available to workers dealing with problems outside the workplace, such as eviction, deportation or pollution. Community or neighbourhood-based workers’ organizations are few in number.

In recent years, the NDP has moved to the right and become less a part of the workers’ movement than before. The NDP is an apparatus unable to do anything but organize around elections, run by an establishment that accepts the basic framework of neoliberalism and whose only interest is chasing votes (as its defeat of the New Politics Initiative in 2001 showed).

Across the movement, small numbers of officials and hard-working activists often have a virtual monopoly on initiative and decision-making; we can see this in many union locals, NDP riding associations and community groups. Workers are often actively or tacitly discouraged from getting involved in their organizations. In unions where membership involvement is encouraged, officials often try to ensure that they still remain in control.

The ineffectiveness of most of the movement in the face of capital’s offensive has led some radicals to predict rank and file revolts against those who continue down the road of giving concessions and losing battles. Unfortunately, there have been very few organized challenges to this disastrous course above the level of individual union locals. Resignation has been more common than revolt. This reflects a deep and prolonged crisis of self-organization with several causes. For half a century the bureaucratized workers’ movement has made its own small contribution to the training in passivity and deference to authority we get from families, workplaces, parliamentary politics, schooling and other aspects of life in advanced capitalist society. The shrinkage of the radical left’s presence in the movement has meant that fewer activists come into contact with traditions of militancy, democracy and activist education outside the official movement’s institutions.

Looking ahead

All those who see the need for a different kind of workers’ movement -- committed to militant methods of struggle, organizing in highly democratic ways, practising a solidarity that lives up to the old slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all” and engaged with other movements in the development of a new anti-capitalist politics -- need to start by understanding the movement as it is today.

We should then start paying close attention to every initiative and struggle that, however small and imperfect, represents the kind of workers’ movement we need. Such actions need to be publicized and generalized. Some examples:

• strikes that reach out to become community-wide struggles • mass pickets that defy injunctions limiting picketing • mid-contract strikes (wildcats) • organizing drives by low-wage workers using mass direct action • mobilizations for higher minimum wages and welfare rates • campaigns for immigrant and refugee rights and against deportations • rent strikes by tenants • networks and caucuses building rank and file power against employers and union leaders who collaborate with them • educational projects to develop grassroots activist leaders