Necessary Steps in Tough Economic Times
Today we share an article that first appeared in Deric Shannon’s book The End of the World As We Know It? published by AK Press. “Necessary Steps in Tough Economic Times” by Marianne LeNabat, one of our editors at Recomposition, takes us through an overview of how students in recent decades have become saddled with debt, how a student movement rose up in NY during the height of OWS, some of the lessons we can draw from organized resistance, and the ripples that student fights caused spreading solidarity throughout various sectors of society. Read More
Snake March
Workers gather over one thousand strong to protest back to work legislation. Concluding Phineas Gage’s three-part series on struggles at the Canada Post during 2011, we present ‘Snake march’. In this final installment, he describes the moral as the lockout drags on. Parliamentary filibusters and symbolic occupations fail to turn the tide on contract negotiations. The postal workers return to work, determined to not let management bulldoze them in the shopfloor. Check out here Part 1 of the series and also Part 2. Snake March A truck pulled up to the parking lot in front of the main downtown Post Office. Christine and I jumped up and started unloading signs from the back. Camera people were setting up all around the truck and The Local President was going over the notes her people helped her prep for the interviews. Slowly the crowd swelled as people walked in from the bus stops, then a big bus from the Nurses union pulled up and people filed out. Half an hour later the crowd was huge spilling out of the parking lot. Around 1,000 people showed up. Gil McGowan, the President of the Provincial Labour Federation, took the microphone from a local executive member who was managing the speakers list. The shopfloor committees huddled on the other side of the crowd, largely ignoring the people who had their faces in the television cameras. Sheila was chairing the committee meeting. “Okay so what’s the plan?” Read More
As We See It / As We Don’t See It
The twentieth century went back and forth between two extremes. On one side, individualism would reign supreme in the ambitions of ‘great men’, in the excesses of Wall Street and in the quest for meaning in art and literature. On the other hand, the glorification of a caricature of the human community in the phony communism of nationalized industry under a party dictatorship. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, a battle raged between the need for social action on the parts of large groups of people and the debasement of humanity that happened in the name of this action. A simultaneous perversion of humanity and the individual occurred. As We See It/As We Don’t See it stand out as one of the best attempts at expressing a politics that both reflects the battle between these poles and cuts to the nature of this tension. No doubt like anything that old, parts of it are now a bit dated, but the basic sentiment and approach are as relevant now as they ever were. These texts were taken from the on-line Solidarity and Subversion archive at af-north.org As we see it / Don’t see it by Solidarity I. As We See It Read More
Scabs! Part II: The St. Albert Wildcat
This entry is the second part in a two-part story from contributor Phineas Gage about a wildcat strike by contractors at the Canadian postal service, and continues our coverage of struggles within Canada Post. The phone rang irritatingly early, early enough I ignored it the first time. Apparently Lise-Anne called several other executive members after she left a message for me. I later found out the message she left me said: “they’re cutting our pay by 30%, we had a coffee break meeting and we vote unanimously to walk out in response, what do we do now?” The phone rang again, this time I picked up. “We just walked out, we’re sitting across the street in the Tim Horton’s”. Eight months prior I had talked to the workers at this depot about racial discrimination and harassment one co-worker was facing. They marched on the boss with eight people that sent a strong enough message it put an end to that issue. Even if the racist supervisor was still around he was a lot quieter. The workers became more assertive, and very strong on the floor. A series of small actions built the solidarity among the rural workers to the point where they felt strong enough to fight a change to the work measurement system that was going to cut their pay by almost a third. “Did you make any demands?” I asked groggily, sometimes folks are so angry they forget to say what they want. “Yeah, we wanted a repeal of the policy and he told us that the union was going to be upset we did this”. “What did you say to that?” “I said we didn’t need their permission to do this, but the local President and Sharon are coming down to talk to us and see what they can do to help”. Read More
Postal Worker Solidarity Defeats Compulsory Overtime
Recomposition is happy to post this article by Rachel Stafford about a recent victory in an ongoing struggle postal workers are having with management about compulsory overtime. Appropriately enough, our May Day post is about conflict over how long workers have to work. Read More
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses’ Offensive Look Like?
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses’ Offensive Look Like? by Alex Erikson If you read stuff about the labor movement of the 1970s and 80s, there is a lot of talkabout the “bosses’ offensive,” an aggressive attack on workers movements by capital. A friend of mine from Italy told me that in 1977, the bosses and pro-boss workers (we call these people ’scissorbills,’ because their words cut you) staged a march of several thousand people in opposition to the continued wildcat strikes, sabotage, and occasional kneecapping, kidnapping, or assassination of bosses in the plants of northern Italy. This action was sufficient to change the climate and turn the cultural tide against the workers’ insurgency. In my own workplace, we have seen an ebb and flow of class struggle on a micro-level. Initially, when the union went public, the boss was so afraid of us that he would sneak in and out the back door of the store without us knowing. We actually had a hard time planning actions because we could never find the boss to make demands. Read More
My Introduction…
My Introduction… By P. Gage The first permanent job I got at Canada Post was in the early weeks of the spring of 2007. It was an ‘inside job’ processing and splitting up flyers between one hundred or so letter carriers. I had been working for Canada Post as a Term (read temp) for a year before getting a permanent position. Because of the labour shortages in Alberta I moved up in seniority quickly. Being the flyer guy in the depot made me far from the most popular person. Letter carriers like delivering flyers even less than their customers like getting them, they see them as a waste of time and not worth the $0.15 piece rate they get paid to deliver them. It did mean that I got to talk to almost everyone in the depot and hear their opinions on everything. Sometimes those opinions were not just about how much they hated seeing me every morning. Read More
Wobble the job! The Building Trades Wildcat in Alberta
The Building Trades Wildcat in Alberta Alberta labour laws are not only some of the most repressive in Canada, they may be some of the most repressive in North America. For decades the labour movement tried to change the laws in Alberta, demanding the right for all workers to strike between contracts, to collectively bargain, and anti-scab legislation. Their main weapon was lobbying a government that was hostile to their very existence, and making alliances with marginalized left-wing politicians who were shut out of the corridors of power. For a long time more and more workers were robbed of the right to strike either directly, like farm workers, university teaching assistants, and nurses, or indirectly by tying them up in so much red tape that a strike was almost impossible. Read More