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It’s time for the NDP to put
capitalism on trial
Capitalism
isn’t working. The proof is overwhelming. Across Canada, 1.5 million are
unemployed, not counting discouraged workers and the under-employed.
The numbers are expected to rise well into 2010. The International Labour Organization warns that the number of
jobless worldwide could reach 239 million this year, and that young
people will be the hardest hit. The system’s spin doctors are trying to
fool the public by talking about ‘recovery’. But when pressed, the big
shots admit it is a ‘jobless recovery’.
The
failure of Canadian and global capitalism is evident in advancing
climate change, impending environmental disaster, and the spread of
drought and famine. It is apparent in the brutal imperial wars of
occupation, in the growing gap between rich and poor, and in the
assault on democratic rights wherever popular resistance takes to the
streets.
Clearly,
years of cuts, concessions, privatization, and tax breaks for giant
corporations did nothing to solve the biggest problems facing society.
They simply made the rich richer at the expense of workers. They
emboldened the ruling elite to demand more, stimulated corruption in
the highest places, and extended the life span of a dying, wasteful and
outmoded system that puts profits before people every time.
Even
if ‘recovery’ from the current world economic depression occurred
tomorrow, the fact remains that capitalism condemns humanity to
recurring cycles of recession/depression. It sentences us all to endless crippling wars, eco-disasters, glaring
inequalities and obscene oppression.
So,
why continue to make excuses for the system? Why continue to tinker
with the mechanisms of a death machine? Why keep Capital on life
support at the expense of Labour? As former
NDP MP Svend Robinson famously said,
“Capitalism is like a rabid dog that should be put down.”
The
time has come to stop scratching at the surface. We need to expose the
fundamental flaws, the deep-rooted contradictions of the system, and to
fight for a socialist alternative.
It’s
time for the NDP to put capitalism on trial
That’s
the task facing delegates at the party’s federal convention, Aug.
14-16, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
We
can easily demonstrate that capitalism is killing the planet and its
inhabitants in a multitude of nefarious ways, and that to survive the
working class and its allies are compelled to replace the system root
and branch. It’s the truth that needs to be told, with the power to
conquer misinformation and fear, and to give voice to millions.
The
NDP can lead the fight for a future worthy of humanity, but not if its
leaders mince words and make opportunistic concessions to the powers
that be. NDP support in the 2008 election campaign peaked at 22 per
cent, compared with 15 per cent now. The idea of entering a coalition
government with the big business-controlled Liberal Party dealt a
severe blow to the NDP’s independence as a
party of the working class. Since then, the party leadership has echoed
the lame lamentations of the labour brass,
when what is desperately needed, in addition to fixing E.I. and saving
pensions, is a bold campaign to turn government bail-out money into
public equity—towards the nationalization, under workers’ and community
control, of auto, steel, oil and the big banks.
Make
Capital pay for a massive public works effort to convert to green
energy, to repair roads, bridges, railways and ports, and to build
social housing. That is the way to defend and expand employment, and to
meet human needs by democratizing and planning the economy.
As
the NDP Socialist Caucus has argued since its foundation in 1997, and
which we re-state today with greater conviction than ever, to
survive the NDP must turn sharply to the left. Increasingly, this
is an argument for the survival and prosperity of humanity as a whole.
If you agree, please join us in fighting for socialist policies.
Liberal-NDP coalition stinks
in Toronto
Last
winter there was much ado about the prospect of a Liberal-NDP coalition
federal government. According to Conservatives, it would have violated
democracy and bankrupted the state. According to NDP officials, it
would have mitigated the economic crisis and provided a very
progressive alternative to Harper. The truth is that both claims were
wrong.
Do
you want to know what a Liberal-NDP government would be like? Look no
farther than the malodorous mess in Toronto. Among other things, the
unholy alliance that governs Canada’s biggest city allowed
basic services to erode, gave the rich a tax holiday, provoked a civic
workers’ strike and led a frontal assault on labour’s past gains.
Mayor
David Miller, a former NDP member, backed by a coalition of Liberal and
NDP city councillors, forced a strike on
30,000 inside and outside city workers—including ambulance, parks and
recreation, child-care, water, welfare, and garbage-collection workers
(see above photo). How? By trying to jam over 110 pages of labour concessions down their throats. The proposed
take-aways included attacks on seniority
rights, limits on transfer and promotion rights, a freeze on cost of
living increases, a two-tier wage structure, and an end to banking sick
days.
Over
70 per cent of the workforce, represented by Canadian Union of Public
Employees (CUPE) Locals 79 and 416, are women.
The average annual income for city workers is $40,000. None have severence pay. Most of them do not enjoy
compensation at retirement for unused sick days -- the hot button issue
that was disingenously used to portray the
municipal workers as ‘privileged’.
The
result of the strike, which ended on July 31 after 40 days, is a 6 per
cent raise over three years, one more designated holiday, wage
protection for any workers moved to a lower-rated position, pay for
rest breaks missed (in courts, children’s services and homes), improved
vision care, and a long-term phase-out of the banked sick time (current
full-time staff can continue to accrue sick days, or cash them in now,
or have their sick days frozen, to draw upon as needed, with a buyout
at normal termination; no sick days banking for new hires, who gain a
short-term disability plan).
In
other words, CUPE members withstood most of the city’s take-away
demands, and traded off a concession for some small gains. It was a
political defeat for Miller and his ‘progressive’ coalition, which
alienated both Labour and the hard right
wing. Could this fiasco, and the suffering inflicted on city workers
and residents, have been avoided?
Toronto, like almost every other
city, province, and central government in the capitalist world, is
suffering a financial crisis. Toronto’s chronic under-funding
malaise was not born yesterday. Massive cuts in transfer payments to
the provinces by Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1980s, were deepened and accelerated by the Chretien/Martin Liberals in the 1990s with the
Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST). Then the provinces off-loaded
to their cities responsibility for infrastructure costs associated with
airports, water, sewage, mass transportation, police, welfare, and
more—but without the money or tax tools required to cope with it all.
So,
cities had a huge expenditure problem. And they faced a choice:
mobilize residents to fight the changes, or just comply with the
neo-liberal corporate agenda.
How
did Toronto politicians respond? They
cut services, like street cleaning and snow removal, and limited public
access to swimming pools, arenas, community centers, and libraries.
They reduced water testing and park upgrades. City Council implemented
a range of regressive, consumption-based flat taxes on all citizens,
while at the same time reducing commercial property taxes, undervaluing
business land assessments and providing major grants and financial assistance
to business.
One
of the flat taxes Miller instituted, under the provisions of the new City of Toronto Act 2006, is the Municipal
Land Transfer Tax, which ranges from 0.5 per cent to 2 per cent of each
sale price. Another is the Personal Vehicle Ownership Tax, a
registration fee, on top of the already-existing provincial
registration fee.
The
city gave generous property tax breaks to big business. These include
subsidies, tax incentives, and/or deferrals for costly environmental
clean-ups, such as for empty industrial lands (‘brown-field
remediation’), as well as tax incremental equivalent grants (TIEGs), which involve rebates and minimal property
taxes for major commercial developers. Such tax give-aways cost the city billions of dollars in lost
revenue. Meanwhile small homeowners and tenants face steeply rising
taxes, rents, and fees—and public services continue to deteriorate.
The
Toronto Board of Trade lobbies the city to contract-out more city
services and work, and to privatize capital assets like Toronto Hydro, Enwave and the Toronto Parking Authority (worth
over $60 billion). But private services end up costing consumers more,
and a one-time cash injection from an asset sale doesn’t solve an
ongoing under-funding crisis.
So
the city turned to cutting its wage bill. It imposed an annual zero, 1,
and 1 per cent raise on its non-union staff, and sought to limit
unionized municipal workers to a similar increase, and to curtail their
benefits to boot. City councillors take home
over $99,000 a year. They gave themselves a 2.4 per cent raise, and
negotiated (or approved arbitrated) yearly increases of 3 per cent for
police, firefighters, public housing, port, and parking authority
workers.
Did
David Miller target CUPE members to win brownie points with the
provincial Liberals? Perhaps he has an eye on an Ontario cabinet position. Or
perhaps this is just an inescapable consequence of his alliance with,
and dependence upon, large corporate and financial interests.
Regardless,
Miller’s ‘progressive coalition’ of New Democrats and Liberals is
following in the footsteps of ‘third way’ governments led by Tony
Blair, Bill Clinton, and Bob Rae. It tries to make workers pay for the
crises of capitalism that we did not cause. Moreover, Toronto city bosses are taking
advantage of the current economic depression to weaken unions and
further lower the standard of living of all working people.
Miller’s
Liberal-NDP coalition was backed by the Toronto and District Labour Council at the 2007 municipal election.
This
is what you get when Labour subordinates its
organization and interests to a capitalist coalition. While the NDP has
committed many crimes when it held the reigns of government on its own,
the party can be held accountable by its Labour
and popular base when the latter are organized to fight for a Workers’
Agenda. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, is accountable only
to Bay Street.
For
that reason it is crucial that working people break the NDP councillors from the Miller regime at Toronto City
Hall, oppose an NDP alliance with any capitalist party, and fight for
NDP governments committed to socialist policies at all levels. That is
the perspective needed, combined with mass action, including sympathy
strikes, in support of workers resisting concessions. That’s how to
defend Labour’s gains and to make Capital pay
for the crisis it created.
Mixed Gains in Canada’s
Summer of the Strike
Across
Canada, resistance to the employers’ agenda is visible in a growing
number of disputes. Most are strikes against concessions demanded by
bosses trying to take advantage of the global economic crisis. An
exception was the two-day strike by 340 Via rail engineers that stopped
passenger train service across Canada, July 24-26. The dispute is now
going to binding arbitration by agreement of the parties.
About
3600 employees of Vale Inco, most of them at
the company’s flagship Sudbury nickel mines, walked off
the job on July 13. According to United Steelworkers director Wayne
Fraser, Vale Inco wants the elimination of
bonuses to workers when the price of nickel is high, plus the
imposition of an inferior pension plan for newly hired workers (with
defined contributions, instead of defined benefits).
It
is a battle over future profits for the Brazilian iron-ore giant Vale
do Rio Doce, which bought Inco
in 2006 for $19.4 billion. Nickel soared above $24 (U.S.) a pound in
mid-2007, fell to $5 (U.S.) pound in late 2008, but is rising again,
reaching $6.68 on July 13. The USWA’s Fraser
said that around $7 a pound, the company is “going to make huge money.”
Meanwhile,
a 93 per cent strike mandate, and a vigorous public (“Our Communities
Need Good Jobs”) campaign, achieved victory for 7000 Liquor Control
Board of Ontario workers represented by the Ontario Public Service
Employees’ Union (OPSEU) in mid-July. LCBO management proposed to take
away job security (by ‘temporarily’ laying off full-time workers during
slow periods) and to continue to ‘casualize’
jobs by creating a two-tier system of part-time workers with no
benefits. Not only did the bosses back down, but they promised to
create more full-time positions at the 610 LCBO outlets across Ontario, give benefits to
part-timers, and provide the same 3 per cent annual wage increase won
by Ontario Public Service workers last year.
But
lack of struggle often produces the opposite results. Some 450 Globe
and Mail newspaper employees, members of CEP Local 87-M, ratified a
concessionary deal that averted a strike on July 2. The new contract
imposes a two-year wage freeze, followed by increases of 2, 2.5, and
2.5 per cent through to June 2014. New employees will have to join a
defined contribution retirement plan instead of the existing defined
benefit pension plan. The union did stop the lengthening of the work
week, restrictions on outside activities, and the weakening of
job-security language.
So
the pattern in the Summer of the Strike tends to show that it pays to
fight back.
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