Labour mobilizes support for locked-out Electro-Motive workers

 

I agree with Boom Boom, you're basically voting for the status quo by not voting against them on the one day every four years that counts for anything. Voters in Saskatchewan had to elect five CCF governments before they were able to create a province from scratch after the Liberals were finished.

Not voting NDP is a vote for FPTP election fraud and a continuance of the stoogery. Your let's keep the stooges-in-hand do-nothing attitude will not help any workers in the northern banana republic. Why bother complaining at all if you're not prepared to do anything about it? By not voting against the stoogeaucracy you're basically allowing Mr or Mrs Old Line  Party to speak for you. You might as well be nodding up and down in rapid agreement to the Caterpillar job losses, the Nortel job losses and branch plantization, and the ongoing sellout of your country. That's not a solution. That is actually making the job even more difficult for your perfect revolution - that one which has not happened in Canada since 1867 and likely never will.

ETA: Conservative parties in Canada once stood for public ownership of public utilities, and they were wildly popular because of it. And the Liberals once nationalised a significant portion of money creation and credit and boosted pensions to alleviate poverty among millions of Canadians too old and worn-out to work anymore. They were generations of Canadians who were martyred by two terrible world wars and economic depressions. And governments of the day were encouraged to do it by ordinary Canadian voters, and  with pushing and prodding for it by a CCF opposition party, forerunners to the NDP.

I agree with Unionist that Canadians can be all powerful if we desire to be. We can cause the two old parties to shift their policies toward the political centre and even a bit to the left where they once stood on a few significant issues. And we can do that by voting NDP. The rest will follow in time. But we have to start somewhere. The problem will not fix itself.

The status quo stands for the ongoing electoral fraud and everythying else you claim to disagree with but are not going to lift a finger on election day to cast a vote in protest of. The NDP are on the other side of that line. If you want a united front on the left in the style of 1930s Spain, then your best bet is to vote NDP here in Canada. It might only be a country in name at this point, but there is still time to change things. And change will not happen overnight. Like all things worthwhile, and as most older Canadians will tell us from experience, change will take some effort on our part and on the part of the future of this country and namely younger Canadians. The whole world is more politically conscious now than it has been in a long time. And we have to do our part. Sometimes revolutions require longer term commitments,  effort and sacrifice. Most socialists know this to be true.

Jun 14, 2004 Source : Kitchener-Waterloo Record "If a working democracy is founded on an enlightened electorate, we are in deep trouble. Early on, this federal election was reduced to a simple venting of rage by a frustrated electorate, egged on by the media. And for those consciences bothered by the lure of lower taxes and not so sure that the economic reasoning behind the gesture is not pure Barnum and Bailey, anger conquers the last inhibitions. Here we are, entering a century in which this country will be challenged to maintain a modicum of the living standards achieved at great cost over the past two or three lifetimes, and an election will apparently be decided by the self-absorbed. Lower taxes and revenge against those who misuse taxes and against a bloated bureaucracy that feeds off those taxes -- that's what this national election is revolving around. As for Canada's ability to prosper and to pass on a sustainable future to its children in a challenging, new world economy not based on fossil fuels, well, let the ubiquitous "they" look after those details. You know, the "they" that will always come up with something. The media are central players in this act of reductionism. As much-respected Toronto Star columnist Carol Goar has worried, the media "remind voters incessantly that they're grumpy and cynical," whereas they really "need to hear, in enough detail to make informed choices, what the parties stand for and where they differ." Another, more trenchant opinion by Antonia Zerbisias in the Star calls it a media that "distracts with trivia, just to better the bottom line." If, as an Ipsos-Reid poll found, only 11 per cent of the citizenry aged 18 to 29 could name the leader of the official opposition on the eve of the election, what percentage might be able to say what the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights could mean for the future of women wanting to end their pregnancy, for instance? Who is most likely to benefit from a general ignorance of such details? When Winston Churchill observed that democracy was the worst of governing systems, "except for all the others," he could not have reckoned with a citizenry reduced to this level of understanding. Or did he? And did only one in five of the twentysomethings in his time bother to vote? It took a world war to usher in voting rights for women and another to bring some security to the notion of universal democratic rights. For what? The "informed citizen" may now be an informed taxpayer. For neoconservatism, this was the key to electoral success, first exploited by the late Ronald Reagan. This corruption of the meaning of the individual in the democratic process should be the subject of protest -- because ignorance of what is going on in the halls of power will always result in feeling "lied to" when things go sour. Seven decades back, the newly "Progressive" Conservative Party of Canada, in the same pickle the Liberals find themselves in today, gave birth to a central bank and the beginning of a national broadcasting system and a national airline. The remnants of the airline and an emasculated Canadian Broadcasting Corp. struggle on. But the "new" Conservative Party of Canada would make short work of eliminating the last vestiges of the "deviant" act of its predecessor, carried out as a despairing attempt to save itself in mid-Depression. Ian Morrison of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting says that proposals by Conservative Leader Stephen Harper "would have the effect of dismantling Canada's national public broadcaster and would eliminate the vast majority of Canadian programs on television during prime time." There is nothing as dangerous to the neocon as an informed Canuck. And if it's too much to expect other media owners to leap to the defence of a public institution that has helped to hold this country together -- the minions of Global TV and the National Post have urged its demise -- where, at least, are the moral philosophers, the teachers? Those people who instruct the young have apparently succumbed to the postmodernist distaste for either history or anything not relating to the consumerism and mass communication of the late 20th-century post-industrial society." ------------------ First things first, in the electoral game, always.

Fidel does. Every time you suggest something the NDP could do to make a real and positive difference in the lives of ordinary people, he's quick to say you can't expect them to do that even given four years of majority rule.

According to him, Canada has a weak and ineffectual government, and U.S. big business runs the whole show. So apparently it doesn't really make a difference whom we elect.

Good news indeed. it is not often we see this kind of behaviour from corporations.

Hear-hear! 

And I take issue with some of the more fundamentalist socialists of us when they propose old style nationalisations and walking picket lines - the ones which used to be there before deep integration and neoliberal agenda of the last 30 years in general. Our good friend Karl Marx didn't envision the new liberal capitalism happening today. In Marx' and Lenin's time absentee owners of the means of production typically meant that the owners lived on the hill uptown where they were masters of all they surveyed, as in with their eyeballs and not stock tickers reporting on how their overseas operations were functioning. 

Today, we have absentee corporate landlords based in the U.S. and other countries  and sometimes beyond the need of the state in which they are absent from. With the new liberal capitalism of the last 30 years, absentee corporate landlords make decisions about branch plant locations in Canada. In times of economic downturn theyve been able to layoff workers here in order to prop-up operations at home. Under the new liberal capitalism and neoliberal trade deals such as NAFTA and "fully mobile capital" they tend not to even favour workers in their own countries. Manipulating mineral and energy prices is still on as usual, tho, with monopolizing natural resource wealth in various countries. But manufacturing has become especially foreign owned and controlled by absentee corporations since 1985. We can't picket strike lines where absentee owners are now completely absent from and who won the right to offshore to low wage zones while accepting taxpayer subsidies as rewards for screwing the workers here. We need to, believe it or not, re-gain or work to re-create those former relationships between local workers and the former absentee owners of the means of production. We need to insist on less foreign ownership of the means not allow more of it. Unions and workers really have become powerless to do anything about it under the new/neo liberal capitalism. And our old party governments have insisted on allowing Canada's national energy policy to be dictated to us from corporate board rooms and mostly in America. 

Yeah, the class struggle is so, like, last century!

That's completely false, but even if it were true, it would be no excuse for unions and governments to roll over and play dead in the face of neoliberal capitalism.

What the hell is an "absentee corporate landlord"? You're trying to make a false analogy with landlord-tenant relationships.

Branch plants are nothing new in the last 30 years. It's been that way for the last 100 years at least.

You keep using "absentee" as some kind of insult. With globalization there is no such thing as absentee corporations. They are everywhere at the same time; borders mean nothing to them.

Why, because the "absentee" owners have to be present in person to witness the picket lines, otherwise picketing is of no use? Do you want to tell workers they have no right to withdraw their labour and shut down production?

Yeah, Canadian capitalists are so much nicer to deal with than foreign ones! But don't expect an NDP majority government to do anything to change foreign ownership until they have been re-elected two or three times, because after all, the Canadian government is a weak and ineffectual puppet of foreign capital, presiding over a helpless banana republic.

Yes, sadly the situation is hopeless. Instead of picketing and all that "old style" labour militancy we should just pack up and go home and wait for 2015 when we can cast a  ballot for a different, but weak and ineffectual government that we can't expect to make any difference until we have re-elected them several times as a reward for doing bugger all.

Yeah, I noticed that Spector, but what's wrong with that? You want some capitalist to show good motives besides doing the right thing? It's an unprecedented gesture as far as I know, and self-interest motivates everyone. We should praise it to the skies and use it for our own self-interest.

ETA: Oh and by the way, you're trying to change Fidel's mind? How about rolling a really heavy wheel up a hill?

 

Here's an example of what a non-NDP provincial government was prepared to do in a similar situation less than two years ago:

It seems at least some of our politicians aren't as cowardly and helpless in the face of foreign plant closures as Fidel imagines.

That's right, one word from Steve or Pinocchio, and Caterpillar will move 460 jobs to the right-to-work state of Indiana. We know.

Absentee as in the US-based Caterpillar corporation, and absentee stockholders and CEO's with majority foreign ownership and control with corporate headquarters based in America and other countries. As in picket all you want they can't hear you nor do they care because of vast expanse of fresh air and international borders separating workers and the owners of the means.

No, it's not like 100 years ago, Sleeping Beauty. Much has changed.

No, I was the one who began explaining this to you several posts ago and even months ago in other threads. You were the one inisisting that NAFTA meant nothing significant in terms of neoliberal trade deals. And you were the one arguing that three dozen key sectors of Canadian economy majority foreign-owned and controlled and mainly by superrich Americans should be a trifle detail to any real socialist government serious about creating socialism in one province or country. Your arguments have been little more than ambigious and arbitrary circular reasoning and mostly unrelated from one weak argument for maintaining stoogeaucracy in Ottawa to the next. You make about as much sense as a public service announcer with a mouth full of marbles sounding off over a blown speaker. All i hear is static and feeble attempts to communicate vague, disconnected ideas that were obsolete 35 years ago in a country that doesnt exist anymore.

They may not be nicer and may have actually figured out since that NAFTA was a bad deal even for them. Canada's oligarchs are now disabused of any notion that they would be scooping-up controlling interest in even a single sector of U.S. economy and let alone key sectors vital to national interests in America. Meanwhile more than three dozen sectors of this economy is majority foreign-owned and controlled as well as our national energy interests since the Libranos sold the environment to Exxon-Imperial and the fossil fuel industry based mainly in the U.S. But this doesn't concern you, because as far as youre concerned there has been no pawning off of and selling out of or hollowing-out of Canada since neoliberalism got underway in the 1980s. It's a blank period where nothing significant happened in Canada as far you can tell. Are you waiting for David Copperfiled to make things right in a finger snap? Undoing the damage done over the last 30-35 years is going to take more than four, I'm sorry to have to inform you. And with WorstPastthePost, making political promises beyond four years is surely a lie in this country. Ask the Liberal or Tory parties about making promises. McGuinty and Harper have made lots of them and kept very few of them.

These are crisis times for workers. With governments either outright hostile to, or unwilling to protect, unions, it is up to unions, workers and their supporters to take creative action, such as sit-down strikes and occupations.

CAW threatening to occupy Electro-Motive plant

LONDON, Ont. -- The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union is prepared to occupy the Electro-Motive plant in London if owner Caterpillar Inc. doesn't bargain a severance package, Local 27 president Tim Carrie says.

The union occupied a Caterpillar front-end loader plant in Brampton in 1991 to get the company to the table after it announced it was closing that factory.

It worked then, and the workers are prepared to do it again, Carrie said on the weekend.

Ooh, Fidel will be outraged! Think of the possible consequences for the poor taxpayer!

Why all the sarcasm and mockery, MS?

Not sure if Thomas Walkom's item has been posted yet - apologize in advance for duplication:

Caterpillar closing part of a coordinated attack on unions

The whole article is worth a read (as is always the case with Walkom).

 

Well in fairness, Boom Boom, what would you call this:

There's no monopoly around these parts on name-calling.

It's a clear, undeniable fact that Danny Williams boldly (rashly, call it what you want) did what NDP provincial governments are a little too conservative to even contemplate. It reminded me of this situation a decade ago:

Hargrove wants taxpayers to save tractor plant

That was the Buhler Versatile plant.