Ontario schooling assist employees: Vote YES to strike! Construct rank-and-file committees to defend public schooling and cease COVID!
The next assertion was mentioned and permitted by members of the Ontario Schooling Employees Rank-and-File Committee (OEWRFC), which was established in August to combat for the mass political mobilization of schooling employees in defence of public schooling and to cease COVID. To become involved with the OEWRFC, emailontedrfc@gmail.com or fill out the shape on the finish of the assertion.
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The Ontario Schooling Employees Rank-and-File Committee strongly urges the 55,000 schooling assist employees who’re members of the Canadian Union of Public Staff (CUPE) to vote YES within the strike authorization poll that started on September 23. A decisive vote for strike motion have to be made the place to begin of a political mobilization of all Ontario schooling employees and the working class as an entire to defend public schooling, defeat the hard-right Ford authorities’s wage-cutting and austerity insurance policies, and safe inflation-busting wage and profit will increase.
CUPE’s Ontario College Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) and the province’s 4 instructor unions are bitterly against mounting such a wrestle.
OSBCU has delayed a strike vote so long as it might with out upsetting a rank-and-file explosion. OSBCU’s largest native, Native 4400, overtly said in a communication to employees that the purpose of the strike vote is to “strengthen the bargaining committee” to achieve a “negotiated settlement with out a strike.” This beneath situations the place the federal government has thrown down the gauntlet by making derisory wage presents of two p.c per yr for these making lower than $40,000 and 1.25 p.c for these incomes extra, and by all however publicly vowing to illegalize any strike earlier than it even begins.
The 4 instructor unions—the Elementary Academics Federation of Ontario, Ontario Secondary College Academics Federation, Ontario English Catholic Academics Affiliation and Affiliation of Franco-Ontarian Academics—which collectively have over 200,000 members, have indicated they received’t even schedule strike votes till the late fall or winter, although their members’ contracts expired virtually a month in the past—on August 31, the identical day because the CUPE employees’.
Academics enrolled in these 4 unions ought to collectively demand instant strike votes and make preparations to stroll out alongside their brother and sister support-staff employees in OSBCU. This may require the development of rank-and-file committees in each college and office throughout the province to grab management of the wrestle from the union forms, and get away of the collective bargaining framework utilized by the federal government and unions to paralyze and smother working-class opposition.
Above all, lecturers, caretakers, schooling assistants, early childhood educators, college bus drivers, and administrative employees should acknowledge that to defend public schooling and win their simply calls for, they might want to wage a working-class political wrestle.
Premier Doug Ford and Schooling Minister Stephen Lecce are threatening to illegalize a walkout from the outset, as a result of they know {that a} strike by schooling assist employees might rapidly develop to incorporate lecturers and the remainder of Ontario’s 1 million public sector employees. The objective of this hard-right authorities of Thatcher and Poilievre admirers is to ram by means of huge real-term pay cuts for schooling employees and austerity budgets for public schooling, as a part of their systematic drive to dismantle public providers and open up the general public sector to company profiteering. By imposing wage “will increase” nicely wanting rampant inflation—at present at ranges unseen in 4 many years—Ford and his henchmen additionally intend to set a benchmark for the enforcement of comparable wage-cuts on thousands and thousands of employees all through the personal sector.
The schooling unions will not be opponents of this anti-worker agenda, which is supported by your entire ruling elite. Reasonably they provide their providers as authorities companions in imposing austerity and concessions on working individuals. All 5 unions have performed a key function in suppressing the category wrestle throughout many years of a sustained assault on public schooling, leaving colleges dilapidated and employees overworked. In 2019-20, they sabotaged employee opposition to Ford’s Invoice 124 and the 1 p.c per yr cap on wage “will increase” that it has imposed. Through the pandemic, which has formally killed over 14,000 individuals in Ontario and greater than 45,000 in Canada, the unions smothered all efforts by schooling employees to withstand the Ford authorities’s “income earlier than life” coverage that turned colleges into vectors for mass neighborhood an infection.
Simply as they enforced Invoice 124 by imposing rotten sellout contracts within the 2019-20 bargaining spherical, the forms is retaining schooling employees arbitrarily divided by occupation and college system. And it opposes any and all efforts to warn and mobilize employees towards the federal government’s plans to undemocratically strip us of our proper to strike and impose wage-cutting contracts by authorities fiat.
When a rank-and-file caretaker requested OSBCU president and lead negotiator Laura Walton how the union plans to reply to a strike-breaking regulation, she proclaimed it “the million greenback query.” However she had nothing concrete to say about what CUPE, Canada’s largest union with over 700,000 members, intends to do. It’s because the unions are getting ready to right away give up earlier than strikebreaking laws after which pin the blame on the rank-and-file. In the identical change, Walton blamed rank-and-file employees for the 2019 sellout over which she presided, declaring that there was “not the organizing or employee energy constructed to combat again.”
These lies cowl up the unions’ decades-long complicity in authorities strikebreaking and the suppression of the category wrestle. The principal political mechanism by means of which the unions have accomplished that is their partnership with the pro-austerity, pro-war Liberals and New Democratic Get together. In 2012 and 2015, when a union-backed Liberal authorities outlawed strikes by tons of of hundreds of schooling employees, the unions stood their members down and meekly accepted the federal government decrees. Right this moment, the unions again the minority Trudeau Liberal authorities to the hilt. They’re the most important supporters of the “confidence-and-supply” settlement the NDP struck with Trudeau final March to maintain his minority authorities in energy because it spends tens of billions of {dollars} to wage warfare with Russia and imposes “post-pandemic” austerity and inflation-driven actual wage cuts at dwelling.
The Liberal/NDP/union alliance’s assist for utilizing society’s sources to wage warfare on behalf of Canadian imperialism and enriching the monetary oligarchy gives the important thing to understanding why Ontario’s schooling unions are working tirelessly to maintain their members divided and weak. They’ve all insisted on bargaining individually and pursuing their “personal” technique, with the 4 instructor unions planning to let assist employees employees combat the Ford authorities alone. As they did in 2020, the instructor unions hope to make use of an OSBCU-engineered sellout of the low-paid assist employees employees as a sample for the concessions-laden contracts they may then search to push onto their very own members.
Not one of the unions have raised a single demand associated to defending schooling employees from the COVID-19 pandemic, the best well being disaster to hit Canada in over a century. Thus far, a minimum of 62 youngsters beneath the age of 20 have died of COVID-19 in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of kids and tons of of hundreds of schooling employees have caught the illness in colleges, with untold numbers affected by the debilitating well being results of Lengthy Covid.
This state of affairs is insupportable and should develop into the place to begin for a political counter-offensive by schooling employees in Ontario, throughout Canada and past.
The Ontario Schooling Employees Rank-and-File Committee (OEWRFC) proposes the next plan of action to all Ontario schooling employees, no matter your union membership, pay grade, skilled designation, or some other arbitrary distinction:
1. Vote “Sure” within the strike poll in case you are an OSBCU member and demand that the overwhelming vote for strike motion, that everybody is aware of employees will ship, be acted upon forthwith. Should you belong to a different schooling union, demand an instantaneous strike vote so you may stroll out along with OSBCU members.
2. Demand an instantaneous halt to all secretive bargaining between prime union bureaucrats and the Ford authorities. All bargaining should happen within the presence of representatives of the rank-and-file and ought to be livestreamed for all schooling employees to comply with.
3. Focus on the OEWRFC’s program along with your work colleagues. Convene conferences at your college or different work location to determine rank-and-file committees outdoors of the stifling management of the unions. These committees ought to make preparations to defy back-to-work laws by making the schooling employees’ wrestle the spearhead of a mass mobilization of working individuals to safe pay and profit will increase, and the funding of billions of {dollars} in public schooling. To this finish, delegates from the committees ought to contact mother and father of scholars and different employees to clarify why their wrestle have to be supported.
4. Be part of and construct the OEWRFC because the political and organizational management schooling employees must safe victory. The OEWRFC insists that employees can solely defend public schooling and put an finish to the lethal pandemic by waging a frontal assault on the huge wealth monopolized by the monetary oligarchy, which holds sway over all facets of social and political life. The OEWRFC is affiliated with the Cross-Canada Educators Rank-and-File Security Committee and the Worldwide Employees Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees as a result of we firmly imagine that this wrestle may be waged solely by means of the unification of schooling and all employees throughout Canada, the US, and internationally. The prospects for such a wrestle have by no means been so promising, as proven by the wrestle of rail employees in the US, and the marketing campaign of Mack Vehicles employee Will Lehman for the presidency of the United Auto Employees (UAW) on a program of abolishing the forms and inserting management again within the fingers of the rank-and-file.
What schooling employees confront within the Ford authorities is the rule of Bay Avenue, which is bleeding the working class dry to pay the total prices of the pandemic, the US-NATO warfare towards Russia and rampant company profiteering. Employees should reply with a political counteroffensive, uniting schooling employees with the broader working class, on the idea of a socialist program that can place public schooling on new social foundations. Reasonably than subordinated to the capitalist drive for revenue, public schooling and all social selections have to be oriented to serving the wants of the overwhelming majority.
