If in the 19th century Marx and Engels could prematurely proclaim that Communist revolution was a “spectre haunting Europe,” in 2024 the business class of North America and its compliant mainstream press were growing increasingly nervous about a different but related spectre, a working class that was showing signs of increased and well organized militance.
Strikes were more common and workers, still remembering the hypocritical Covid-era praise for them as heroes and the post-pandemic collapse into attempts to restore business as usual exploitation, are pissed off, and their anger has been expressed with increased levels of organizing and work stoppages.
The Business Council of Canada was worried, and sternly warned in a November Globe and Mail op ed item that “We must do something about frequent labour disruptions harming Canada.”
The Business Council panic was focused on dock and rail work stoppages, decrying “62 work stoppages in the transportation sector alone in 2023 and 2024, involving close to 20,000 workers…” but these strikes occurred in a context of more general unrest, particularly among workers of colour and women workers. One business friendly site online expresses the same alarm as the Business Council of Canada but on a global scale, bemoaning the fact that “From ports to production lines, labor union strikes are on the rise in 2024”.
The face of organized labour is increasingly brown and female. The traditional image of a “worker” as a white guy in a hard hat has never been accurate or inclusive enough, and some of the most significant news on the labour front this year has been made by workers who do not fit that sexist and racist image. Unions that make efforts to be more inclusive are likely to thrive, and they made news in 2024.
Much of this news was made in the health care, hospitality, service, and delivery sectors, with important progress made in organizing coffee shops like Starbucks and service/transport operations like Amazon.
For example, in Laval, Quebec, workers at the only unionized Amazon facility in Canada are expecting an offer from the employer in early 2025. And in March, the United Steelworkers announced it had successfully organized its first Starbucks outlet in Toronto. By then, the USW had already succeeded in organizing Starbucks outlets in Calgary, Edmonton and Sherwood Park in Alberta; Victoria, Vancouver, Surrey and Langley in B.C., and in Waterloo, Kitchener and Ajax in Ontario.
Meanwhile, south of the border, the Starbucks Workers United union struck at over 300 coffee shops across the US over Christmas.
And Amazon, the world’s second largest employer this year, with over a million and a half employees worldwide, is facing both unionization pressure and legal trouble in 2024.
In December, the Teamsters announced the launch of the largest strike in Amazon history hoping to leverage the 10,000 plus Amazon workers who currently belong to the union into significant gains in recognition and contracts. And Amazon has trouble in court as well. In the District of Columbia, the company is accused of deceiving customers about its pricey and hard to escape delivery membership program, Prime, recruiting new members even in neighborhoods where Amazon has opted not to make company deliveries.
And back here in Canada, hotel workers are winning significant and hard-won victories. As already noted in an earlier column, members of Unite Here, Local 40 won a contract in Vancouver giving its membership the highest wages yet awarded in the Canadian hotel sector
All this encouraging militance takes place against the backdrop of a widespread tilt to the right in many jurisdictions, most notably the imminent Orange Julius Caesar take-over of the American state and the likely win of Trump-lite Tory Pierre Poilievre here in Canada’s next election. Add to that the ongoing damage done by global warming, population displacements and wars of imperial expansion and genocide from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan, and the reasons for worker optimism need to be tempered by realistic assessments of a difficult global situation.
There are no guarantees that we will win in our age-old fight for justice, but one thing is certain: If we do not fight back, those who want to create and expand oligarchies and dictatorships will continue to thrive. We would all be well advised to remember the wonderful quote from Antonio Gramsci writing from a Fascist prison in 1929, when he said that a revolutionary needs to be a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the will. True then, and even more on point now.
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