In his article The political education of the BC teachers and their leader Jinny Sims Robin Mathews says the BCTF was naive about the politics of the judicial system in BC and should have been prepared to protest the Madamn Justice Brenda Brown’s ruling.
Matthews says “the Supreme Court of British Columbia has joined forces with the Gordon Campbell government; and any organization that is going to fight the Gordon Campbell government has to turn on the B.C. Supreme Court and expose it for its prejudice, its injustice, its war against the population of British Columbia.”
The Monday morning quarterbacking with regard to how union should have responded to the contempt of court ruling is interesting, but for Mathew’s suggested strategies to have worked the BCTF would have had to be able to rely on 100% backing from the the BC Federation of Labor, which in the end it did not.
Barry O’Neil and CUPE seemed ready to go the whole nine yards on the teachers’ strike but BC Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair, clearly wasn’t interested in pushing too hard on the Campbell government. Sinclair’s lack of enthusiasm was evident from the beginning as he was ready to crawl under a rock when the 5,000 protesters at the Vancouver rally for the teachers (Oct 11) started chanting “General Strike! General Strike!”
[Actually, if you look at the video of the Victory rally (Oct 17) on WorkingTV.com you can see Sinclair raring back laughing while the crowd calls for a general strike.]
The other, more tangle sign of how far Sinclair was willing to go, was his handling of the Hospital Workers strike…and that is not very far at all.
Mathews puts it this way: “Seasoned observers watched Jim Sinclair of the B.C. Federation of Labour some months ago sell out the Hospital Employees Union by signing a bad contract the members were not permitted to ratify. The seasoned observers were waiting for Jim Sinclair to sell out the teachers.
And he gives every appearance of having done so.
In what seems to be a staggering double-cross of the BCTF union, he announced B.C. Federation of Labour was calling off a major teacher-support shutdown of Vancouver. And he announced – in a truly dirty blow delivered to the BCTF – that the BCTF members would vote on the Vince Ready proposals (before BCTF president Ginny [sic] Sims could speak).
That clearly took BCTF by surprise. We can only imagine how the phone lines burned in the next few hours as Jim Sinclair probably told Ginny[sic] Sims he was all-but pulling his support and she’d better crumble before the Campbell government.”
It’s an old story, the mainstream media, the government, the courts, and big labor all sleeping in one big bed, but it looks like it was the BCTF that was getting screwed.
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