For several decades, we have rallied, demonstrated, and petitioned authorities to change their policies, with no success. Our standard of living continues to fall, we keep losing social supports, the genocide in Palestine continues, climate change is accelerating, and the risk of global war is growing.

Governments can ignore public protests. They cannot ignore strikes. Strikes have power to shake things up.

Over the past two years, Air Canada and other commercial airlines have been transporting military cargo to Israel. The three-day strike by Air Canada workers stopped more weapons going to Israel than two years of mass demonstrations. Disrupting the flow of weapons was not the goal of the strike, but it showed the power of workers to stop the war machine.

Public protests are important to bring people together and raise their confidence to fight, but they must deliver results. When participants see no progress from their efforts, they become discouraged and drop out. To avoid that, we must use every public protest as an opportunity to draw activists into worker-based organizations that can deliver real change. I’ll say more about this later on.

When we strike, we need to strike to win. The goal of most strikes today is to get employers back to the negotiating table. Such strikes are generally staged as performances that inconvenience the boss but do little damage to their business.

When over ninety-five percent of workers vote to strike, they’re saying their situation is intolerable. A strike should remedy that situation, not make it a little less intolerable. We need strikes that aim to make a real difference — that aim to win.

An effective strike should terrify the employer into thinking they have no choice but to give us what we want.

Let’s examine how we got to this place of not winning, what’s keeping us here, and what we must do to win.

How We Got Here

Since capitalism began, workers have resisted demands to work harder and longer for less in dangerous conditions.

Until 1872, union activity was a criminal offense in Canada. Workers had no legal means to defend themselves, so they disrupted production with wildcat strikes. They didn’t plead with the boss, file a grievance, or circulate a petition; they stopped work. While this was very risky, it worked often enough to enrage the bosses.

WWI was followed by a global working-class revolt that peaked in Canada with the Winnipeg General Strike. To crush this revolt, the federal government criminalized strikes and outlawed most left-wing organizations. Membership in one of these organizations or even affiliation could get you five years in prison.

When repression failed to stop workers from striking, governments adopted a different strategy. As Hal Draper observed,

As soon as capitalists reconcile themselves to the fact that trade unionism is here to stay, they cease to denounce unions as a subversive evil that has to be rooted out with fire and sword in order to defend God, country, and motherhood, and turn instead to the next line of defense: domesticating the unions, housebreaking them, and fitting them into the national family as one of the tame cats.

In the mid 1940s, Canada legislated a system of contract-bargaining that took power away from workers on the shop floor and gave it to union officials. Union officials got the legal right to negotiate workers’ wages and benefits on condition of no strikes during the length of the contract. It was a devil’s bargain.

The contract-bargaining system serves as a marriage contract between government and union executives, where both parties commit to protect profits over meeting workers’ needs.

A Devil’s Bargain

Contract-bargaining is a multi-layered system of divide and rule. Its primary purpose is to outlaw working-class solidarity. Workers under contract cannot legally stop work in sympathy with striking workers, including those in the same industry.

Ontario public schools have four teachers’ unions and two education workers’ unions that negotiate separate contracts with the same employer. When education workers struck in 2022, it was illegal for other union members under contract to strike alongside them, even when they worked in the same schools.

Over the past several years, a series of public-sector strikes have gone down to defeat because each bargaining unit fought in insolation.

Contract bargaining also divided unions by creating a bureaucratic layer of managers with financial, legal, and negotiating skills. While their salaries are paid by workers, successful negotiations depend on friendly relations with the boss. To ensure those relations are friendly, union officials cannot strikes to seriously hurt the employer’s business. In return, employers deduct dues from workers’ paychecks and deposit them directly into union bank accounts.

Full-time union officials are not workers. They belong to the manager class that mediate between bosses and workers. Government and business rely on union officials to manage the labour force. As one union executive put it,

Unions probably prevent more strikes than they precipitate. Good unions work to defuse workers’ anger… Without unions, strikes would be commonplace, and confrontation and violence would increase. Unions deflect those damaging and costly forms of worker resistance. If our critics understood what really goes on behind the labor scenes, they would be thankful that union leaders are as effective as they are in averting strikes.

Union officials who defy government orders or allow strikes to spread risk huge fines, jail time, and the loss of their union careers.

That’s why CUPW didn’t call on postal workers to strike in solidarity with Air Canada flight attendants. That’s why the Teamsters union allowed workers at Purolator to scab on the postal workers’ strike. That’s why union officials pull strikers back to work when staying out a little longer could mean a win. This happened during the 2022 education workers’ strike, the Cargill strike, and the Air Canada strike.

Periodically, workers escape bureaucratic control to mount wildcat strikes or defy back-to-work legislation. Without a base of organized union activists to move these rebellions forward, the combined force of the capitalist class and the union establishment break the workers’ confidence and rein them in. We’ve seen this time and again.

In short, the contract-bargaining system blocks workers from organizing as a class and rewards union officials for supporting this system, even when it hurts the workers they represent.

The only solution is for workers to take collective control of their unions and reject the union-government partnership that blocks them from winning.

The Role of Government

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrines the right to strike for ALL workers, and the right to strike was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2015. In practice it is meaningless.

I challenge anyone to find even one example, anywhere in the world, where government ended a labour dispute by forcing an employer to meet the workers’ demands.

In a capitalist system, governments do not serve the greater good, no matter which party is in office. All governments function as the executive arm of the business class. That’s why they side with management. That’s why they label public-sector workers ‘essential’ and deny their right to strike. That’s why they threaten unions and strikers with heavy fines and prison terms for exercising their legal right to strike.

Canada has a small population, about one-eighth the size of the United States. Yet, last year Canada had more than double the number of work stoppages and more than 200,000 more workers on strike. We aren’t winning these disputes because we don’t challenge the rules, regulations, and laws that block us from winning.

The quickest and most effective way to change a law is to make it unenforceable. Every pro-worker legislation we have today was won by workers defying the law or threatening to do so.

It was illegal for public-service workers to strike until they won that right by striking illegally. Laws restricting abortion in Canada were struck down when they could no longer be enforced.

Successful strikes protect their members. When education workers defied a return-to-work order, union solidarity forced the government to repeal its anti-strike legislation. If Air Canada workers had stayed on strike, they could have had a total win. And a total win means no reprisals for breaking the law.

A Strike is a Struggle for Power

Organized workers have power. They enjoy higher wages, better hours, and important social benefits. Where union density is higher, inequality is lower, the environment is cleaner, and health is better. That’s because what benefits workers benefits the larger society. Most people know this, which is why they support unions.

The business class rely on the contract-bargaining system to limit the power of unions to advance workers’ demands.

Contract bargaining is a system of compromise that protects profits. Striking is the opposite of compromise; it’s a struggle for power, for the power to decide what matters more: their profits or our lives.

The strike waves of the 1960s and early 1970s increased the power of workers to raise living standards, win new and expanded social programs, and push inequality to its lowest recorded level.

In the later 1970s, the bosses counter-attacked. Instead of mounting a vigorous fightback, the union establishment submitted. As workers lost power, wages fell, working conditions deteriorated, union density dropped, and inequality rose to the record levels we see today.

Strikes were reduced to staged performances. The community-college workers’ strike is one example. There are two OPSEU locals, one for faculty and one for support staff. Each local is divided into full and part-time workers. Only the full-time support staff took strike action. Students and other workers, even in the same local, were free to cross the picket line.

Effective strikes don’t play by the bosses’ rules. They are not polite; they are defiant. Effective strikes say, “Our lives matter more than your rules, your laws, and your profits.” They get larger and stronger every day, as they call more and more workers to join the battle. And they don’t stop until they win.

An effective college-workers’ strike would plan well ahead of time to flood the colleges with flyers explaining the reasons for the strike and urging all staff and students to join it for the benefit of all. To prevent cars from hitting picketers, a vehicle blockade could have stopped anyone entering the premises. Workers at nearby industries could have been urged to join the picket line before or after their shifts or on breaks. Mass rallies could have brought hundreds, even thousands, of workers to stop anyone from entering, not only for a day, but every day.

Bosses will surrender if they fear that not doing so will result in a worse outcome.

Social Problems Have Economic Roots

Another way contract-bargaining divides workers is by separating social and economic concerns. The business class direct the economy based on what is most profitable. Governments direct society in ways that support the business class.

There is no democracy in the workplace. The law gives employers the right to control what work is done and how it is done. That’s the social dimension. Union contracts are limited to narrow economic demands with no regard for their impact on society.

Unions in the fossil-fuel industry oppose efforts to reduce fossil-fuel extraction because it will put people out of work. For the same reason, unions in the war industry defend making weapons for Israel.

Keeping workers’ focus on immediate economic concerns blocks us from building the class unity we need to solve these larger social problems.

The majority are not allowed to decide what is produced and how the wealth of society will be used. We are reduced to the role of passive consumers. So we protest. We protest economics through strikes, and we protest social policies in the streets. Fighting on two separate fronts makes it harder to win either battle.

Public-sector workers combine economic and social concerns. They challenge how their employer spends the social surplus, and they challenge the lie that what’s good for business is good for everyone. They want more funding for public services, not less. They want peoples’ needs to come first.

A great example is the postal workers’ Delivering Community Power plan to convert Canada’s network of over 6,000 postal outlets to community centres offering low-cost banking, high-speed internet, elder check-ins, EV charging stations, and even food delivery.

This would be a tremendous social benefit! And we could do it if workers directed the economy. But we don’t, and that’s the war we need to win.

Every social problem has an economic base.

There’s not enough affordable housing because housing is built for profit, not need. Hunger is widespread because food is produced as a commodity, not as a social good. Gender oppression is rooted in a lack of social supports. Racism divides workers and raises profits. Climate change and environmental destruction are caused by the drive for profit. And wars are fought for power and profit.

Our rulers refuse to admit this. They feed us bullshit lies that rising prices, poverty, unemployment, and the lack of affordable housing are caused by immigrants, lazy people, greedy workers, gender rebels, or human nature — never their insatiable thirst for profit, the root source of all economic and social problems.

To solve these problems, we must connect every social protest with workers’ economic struggles, and we must link every workers’ fight-back with the need to end the rule of profit. The main obstacle to fighting as a class is the government-union alliance that divides the working class and keeps us down.

The Public-Relations Strategy

During the post-war economic boom, rising living standards made it seem that contract bargaining could deliver real gains. This changed with the economic recession of the mid-1970s. To boost their profits, employers imposed mass layoffs, contracted out, and demanded concession contracts.

As workers’ conditions deteriorated, the labour movement was faced with a choice. One option was to reject the contract-bargaining system and mount a class-wide fightback. While this option offered the best chance of defending workers’ rights, it would inevitably provoke government retaliation. Unwilling to risk union decertification, crippling fines, and possible prison terms, the union establishment chose a much safer option, the public-relations campaign.

Public-relations campaigns are based on a moral argument — that what the employer is doing is wrong, and if enough people say so and the courts agree, then our combined moral outrage will pressure them to do the right thing. This is a losing strategy.

The overwhelming majority of people in Canada support a fully public medical system. Yet, our combined moral pressure has not stopped the under-funding and privatizing of healthcare. Our global moral outrage against the genocide in Palestine has not stopped it, or even slowed it for a second.

Solidarity strikes are a display of class power. The public-relations strategy is a sideshow that offers the appearance of a fightback without disturbing the power relations between the classes. And that’s the problem.

The employers are attacking us as a class. We can prevail only by fighting back as a class on the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all, and a win for one is a win for all.

Connecting social and economic concerns means more than building public support for striking workers. It means supporting workers to use their economic and social power to shift the balance of class forces in our favour. The more control workers have on the job and in society, the more we can meet people’s needs.

The Big Picture

The global capitalist system is in terminal crisis. It cannot solve the catastrophic problems it has created: mass deprivation, climate change, toxic pollution, environmental destruction, devastating wars, and declining economic growth.

To sustain their failing system, governments are using public funds to rescue failing companies, bail out banks, and privatize public services. These measures shift the private-sector crisis onto the public sector, forcing public debt to rise sharply.

Increasing military spending also raises public debt. The major powers are rearming for a third global war in the hope that victory will boost their failing economies, or at least prevent their rivals from subjugating them. Canada is no exception

Instead of solving pressing social problems, the federal government plans to buy a dozen submarines at a cost of $10 billion each and 15 surface combatant naval vessels. The first three ships will cost $22 billion (and two to three times more over their lifetime.) By contrast, just $1 billion will be allocated to homelessness over multiple years. That’s one-eighth the cost of just one of those 15 naval vessels.

To block mass rebellion, governments spend even more public money on mass surveillance, police, prisons, and paramilitary forces. They also use right-wing and fascist attacks to turn working people against each other.

The business class have no choice. Not subsidizing the private sector would hasten economic collapse. Not competing militarily would mean surrender to stronger powers. Not suppressing the working class would mean mass revolt and possible revolution.

Conclusion

Whether college workers stay out or return to work, the province will continue to defund and privatize community colleges, just as Canada Post will continue to dismantle the public postal service to boost profits and pay for war.

Striking postal workers could lead a class-based movement to defend all public services and raise living standards for all workers. The time is right because all workers face similar attacks. What’s missing is a critical mass of rank-and-file unionists who understand that joining forces and fighting as a class is the only way forward.

In 1930, Antonio Gramsci described the global capitalist crisis that preceded WWII,

The old world is dying, and the new world is not yet born. In the space between, a multitude of miseries flourish.

His words are still relevant. The old world is one where profit matters more than human survival. The new world is one where workers, who create all the world’s wealth, decide what is produced and for whose benefit. This is both necessary and possible.

Workers are the economic foundation of society. We cannot raise ourselves without upending every layer of society that presses down on us.

Striking on its own cannot transform society. A strike says what we will NOT accept, what we will NOT do. However, winning strikes build workers’ confidence that we can use our economic power to change the world.

That is why we must strike to win.