Category Archives: Labor

In her Znet Commentary on the what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would tell the US Congress about valuing workers, Holly Sklar makes a compelling argument that the current federal minimum wage in the US is immoral. (See below.) While fighting for an increase in the minimum wage is certainly a worthy short term effort, let’s not forget that “one form of wage labor may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labor can correct the abuse of the wage labor itself” (K. Marx).

ZNet Commentary
King Would Tell Congress To Value Workers
February 01, 2006
By Holly Sklar

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on the brink of the Great Depression and died fighting for the right of workers to earn a decent living.

On March 18, 1968, days before his murder, King told striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN, “It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis…getting part-time income.” King said, “We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life.”

Two years earlier on March 18, 1966, King had called for Congress to boost the minimum wage. “We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage,” he said. “A living wage should be the right of all working Americans.”

King did not dream that in the year 2006, he would be remembered with a national holiday, but the value of the minimum wage would be lower than it was in the 1950s and 60s. At $5.15 an hour, today’s minimum wage is nearly $4 less than it was in 1968, when it reached its historic high of $9.09, adjusted for inflation.

The minimum wage has become a poverty wage instead of an anti-poverty wage. A full-time worker at minimum wage makes just $10,712 a year — less than $900 a month — to cover housing, food, health care, transportation and other expenses.

As Congressional Quarterly observed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, “In the Lower Ninth Ward and other impoverished neighborhoods of New Orleans, people have long waged battle to make ends meet… That was a nearly unattainable goal in a city where many of the jobs were in hotels and restaurants that paid around the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.”

A low minimum wage is a green light for miserly employers to pay poverty wages to a growing share of the workforce — not just workers at the minimum, but above it. In its 2005 Hunger and Homelessness Survey, the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 40 percent of the adults requesting emergency food assistance were employed, as were 15 percent of the homeless.

A low minimum wage is a green light for greed. Between 1968 and 2004, domestic corporate profits rose 85 percent while the minimum wage fell 41 percent and the average hourly wage fell 4 percent, adjusted for inflation. In the retail sector, which employs large numbers of workers at or near minimum wage, profits skyrocketed 159 percent.

With the federal minimum wage stuck in quicksand, a growing number of states have raised their state minimums above $5.15 — Oregon and Washington are highest at $7.50 and $7.63 respectively. Studies by the Fiscal Policy Institute and others have shown that states with minimum wages above the federal level have had better employment trends than the other states, including for retail businesses and small businesses.

Dan Gardner, commissioner of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, says, “Overall most low-wage workers pump every dollar of their paychecks directly into the local economy by spending their money in their neighborhood stores, local pharmacies, and corner markets. When the minimum wage increases, local economies benefit from the increased purchasing power.”

In the words of Joel Marks, national director of the American Small Business Alliance, “Fair wages are good for business.”

Congress has taken eight pay raises since 1997, while denying fair pay for minimum wage workers. On Jan. 1, congressional pay quietly rose to $165,200 — up $31,600 since 1997. And unlike minimum wage workers, members of Congress have good health benefits, pensions and perks.

Wages are a bedrock moral issue.

It is immoral that workers who put food on our table go without health care to put food on theirs.

It is immoral that workers who care for children, the ill and the elderly struggle to care for their own families.

It is immoral that the minimum wage keeps people in poverty instead of out of poverty.

King would tell Congress to value workers and raise the minimum wage. We need a wage ethic to go with our work ethic.

Holly Sklar is co-author of “A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future” and “Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us.”

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Z Magazine‘s January 2006 issue includes an article I wrote on the British Columbia teachers’ strike this past fall.

You can access the article online if you have a subscription to Z Magazine or are a Z Net sustainer.

Or you can read the full article below.

Z Magazine Online

January 2006 Volume 19 Number 1

Walkouts

British Columbia Teachers’ Strike

By E. Wayne Ross

back

In British Columbia 42,000 teachers walked out of the classroom and on to the picket line in October, demanding improved working and learning conditions from the government, as well as salary increases. The Canadian provincial government refused to negotiate with the teachers and passed legislation imposing a new two-year contract with no improvements of conditions or wages. Teachers defied the back to work legislation. In response, the BC Supreme Court froze the assets of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) and levied a $500 million fine against the union, the largest civil contempt penalty in provincial history.

Background

Poor relations between the governing BC Liberal Party and the BCTF can be traced back to August 2001, when the Liberals declared education an “essential service.” As a result, teachers lost their rights to take any action that significantly disrupted education. British Columbia is the only province in Canada in which education has been so designated.

The contract that time decreed a 2.5 percent per year salary increase over 3 years. However, that increase was not funded by the government, nor were other increases in costs fully funded. As a result over 2,500 teaching positions, nearly 8 percent of the teaching force, were eliminated by school boards that lacked funding.

The BC Teachers’ Federation began limited job actions in November 2001 and two months later the Liberal government imposed a contract on teachers that stripped away contract provisions on class size, composition, and the number of specialty teachers. Teachers responded with a one-day walkout, closing schools province-wide.
At the same time, unions representing teachers, nurses, college educators, health science professionals, and government workers all filed formal complaints with the International Labor Organization (ILO) challenging six laws pertaining to the right to strike and collective bargaining in the health and education sectors as a result of essential service designations.

After extensive investigation, the International Labor Organization concluded in March 2003 that six laws enacted by the BC Liberal government violated international conventions to which Canada is a signatory. The ILO ruling affirmed the right of public service workers to bargain collectively and, if necessary, to go on strike. It also confirmed that the BC Liberals’ essential services laws contravened international law.

The BC Liberal government ignored the ILO’s judgment. When the government imposed another contract on teachers through passage of Bill 12 in October, it contravened a directive by the ILO “to avoid in future having recourse to such legislated settlement.”

When BC government lawyers provided arguments to the ILO in 2002 about why it had legislated contracts, it invoked the logic of neoliberalism. At the time, the BC Liberal government told the ILO, “Any restrictions on collective bargaining or on the right to strike were exceptional measures, enacted in view of the difficult economic and fiscal situation.” None of these conditions used in 2002 exist today, yet the government has continued to violate international law, imposing contracts and refusing to negotiate working conditions with teachers.

Teachers and school boards began province-wide bargaining in 1993 and since then teachers have been subjected to government imposed contracts four times. In June 2004 the contract previously imposed on BC teachers expired and bargaining began between the BCTF and the British Columbia Public School Employers Association (BCPSEA), which is the bargaining agent for the province’s 60 public school boards. The BCPSEA takes its direction from the government and, during negotiations, the BCPSEA could not discuss improving learning conditions or any salary increases.

Teachers Take A Stand

The two major issues for the teachers are improved salaries and improved working and learning conditions. On the salary front, teachers have seen their earnings lag behind inflation by about 4 percent over the last 7 years. BC teachers also justified their demands for salary increases (which they pegged at 3 percent per year for 3 years) by arguing that teachers in Alberta and Ontario, with the same qualifications and experience, make $10,000 or more annually for the same work. Moreover, BC school administrators are the highest paid in Canada, according to a cross-Canada survey carried out by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. Not only do BC administrators make more money than administrators in other provinces, but the gap between teacher and administrator salaries in BC is the highest in the country as well.

Teaching and learning conditions in BC schools are the other main area of contention. In the past four years the provincial government placed budget restrictions on the schools and, as a result, school boards were forced to lay off thousands of teachers. While the government infused an additional $150 million into public education this year, the BC Liberal Party’s budget documents for 2005 forecast a two-year school funding freeze. This infusion of money will help improve conditions, but does not come close to restoring the learning conditions that existed prior to cuts to education funding, and this funding has no money set aside for salary increases.

Between 2001 and 2004, the provincial schools lost 2,609 teaching positions. About 700 of those can be attributed to declining enrollment, but 1,900 positions reduced services to students through larger classes and fewer support teachers. In addition, teachers are being replaced in some cases by education assistants without professional training. While 2,609 teaching positions disappeared, boards hired 265 more education assistants in 2004 than in 2001. They are projecting hiring another 507 this year.

The teaching and learning conditions, particularly the importance of class size and class composition, have been the primary emphasis of the BCTF’s campaign. Jill Barclay, an elementary teacher on Vancouver’s east side, said of the cuts to education, “I’ve been sitting in staff meetings where we’ve been told that there is not enough paper to last the entire year. So if you don’t stop using so much paper you’re going to have to start buying your own. So I think, excuse me, are nurses asked to go out and buy their own needles?”

At nearby Sir Richard McBride Elementary teachers tell similar tales of the damage produced by years of cuts to public education. Christy Wong says that McBride teachers have been spending thousands of dollars of their own money to buy supplies for their classrooms.

Heidi Gonzalez, an elementary teacher in Delta, says she has seen dramatic changes in her seven years of teaching, but that class size is not as big an issue for her as class composition. Support for teachers has diminished in recent years at a time when class composition has created more demanding conditions for teachers, especially as there has been an increasing number of special needs students without an increase in instructional support.

Gonzalez summed the reasons for striking by saying, “I used to believe that the more experienced teachers were generally resistant to change and longed for the ‘good old days.’ However, more and more I’ve realized that those ‘good old days’ collectively represented a time when teaching conditions were much more conducive to effective learning…. This strike is for our students. It is for improvement in learning conditions in the classroom. It is for future teachers in the profession who have no idea that the ‘good old days’ actually existed.”

An Illegal Strike

After working for a full year without a contract, on September 23, more than 88 percent of teachers voted to strike to achieve improvements in this round of negotiations. If there was no major progress in bargaining, BCTF president Sims promised a series of escalating job actions starting with no out-of-class student supervision; no meetings with management; no attendance reports; no communication with principals. This would be followed by rotating strikes two weeks later and a province-wide walkout two weeks after that.

In response, the BC government passed legislation (Bill 12), which imposed a two-year contract on the teachers that included no wage increases, no improvements for teaching and learning conditions, and which effectively negated the teachers’ right to strike or take other job actions.

Angry teachers then voted 90.5 percent in favor of walking out of their classrooms to protest the legislation and the attack on their rights to collective bargaining. After Bill 12 passed, the Labor Relations Board told teachers to resume their duties and work schedules and ordered them to refrain from picketing at or near schools. It also told the union to refrain from declaring or authorizing a strike.

Saying they would not be bullied, on October 7 teachers defied the government, the Labor Relations Board, and the courts and walked out of classrooms in what was subsequently declared an illegal strike. Sims and the BCTF continued to insist that they were ready and willing to negotiate, but BC Premier Gordon Campbell and Labor Minister Mike de Jong refused to negotiate with the teachers while they defied Bill 12.

On October 9, Justice Brenda Brown of the BC Supreme Court found the teachers’ union in contempt of court. Brown said her judgment was not based on whether the legislation teachers were protesting was fair or whether the teachers actions were justifiable. “It is the rule of law, in this case obedience to court orders, which permits us to enjoy rights and liberties in a civilized and democratic society,” the judge said.

Public Support for Teachers

Over the course of the two-week strike the labor movement and the public showed strong backing for the teachers. At the end of the second day of picketing, over 5,000 protesters gathered at BC Liberal Party offices in downtown Vancouver to protest Bill 12. Amid calls for a general strike, labor leaders from BC and across Canada delivered messages of solidarity with the teachers. The rally, sponsored by the British Columbia Labor Federation, included a strong showing of support from other sectors including CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees), Longshoremen, IBEW, Hospital Employee’s Union, BC Government and Services Employees’ Union, Telecommunications Workers Union (and others), as well many parents and students.

The Vancouver rally was the first of a series of coordinated protests by BC labor organizations, the largest of which shut down Victoria on October 17. An estimated 20,000 teachers and other union members, along with parents and students, gathered in front of the parliament buildings demanding that the government repeal Bill 12 and negotiate with the teachers.

Canadian Teachers’ Federation President Winston Carter said they wouldn’t stand idly by and allow a member organization to be attacked by what he called a wrong-headed government. “We are afraid, we are scared as a teachers federation that this is just a thin wedge and that other unions and all the public sector groups throughout Canada are going to be in the same boat the next time round if the government of this province gets away with this draconian measure that they’re employing at this point in time,” Carter said.

Thousands of union members in Greater Victoria and all CUPE members on Vancouver Island went off the job to protest the legislation imposed by the government on teachers. The Victoria protest was followed by mass solidarity walkouts across the province and by CUPE members in Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. The protests captured the attention of the BC business community. The president of the BC Business Council, Jerry Lampert, told the media that the BC Federation of Labor was leading the province down the “quick road to anarchy.” Kevin Evans of the Coalition of BC Businesses told the media he was concerned about this strike and the precedent being set as other unions approach deadlines in their own collective agreements.

In the days just before the strike, polls taken for the BCTF showed 56 percent of British Columbians supported the teachers’ position, compared with about 19 percent who backed the government. That support remained steady and even increased as the strike moved into its second week. An Ipsos Reid poll found that 61 percent of the public backed the teachers’ province-wide illegal strike.

While public support grew and the teachers and their allies protested across the province, the government and courts turned up the heat. Four days after Justice Brown found the teachers in contempt of court, she ordered the teachers’ union funds to be placed in a trusteeship as punishment for their continued strike. The decision prevented union members from receiving $50 a day in strike pay and restricted the union’s use of funds to continue its campaign of civil disobedience.

The day of the protest in Victoria, the attorney general appointed Vancouver lawyer Len Doust as an independent special prosecutor to determine whether criminal contempt charges were warranted. Doust told Justice Brown, “It has become apparent that some of the [BCTF’s conduct] displayed to date comes perilously close to criminal contempt of court,” but that he would proceed cautiously and wait for direction from the court.

At a news conference Campbell said there is “no excuse to break the law and show such flagrant contempt for the courts of British Columbia.” Campbell said he was willing to meet with teachers, but wouldn’t renegotiate the collective agreement. He said the union must order teachers back to their classrooms to avoid criminal charges.

As the job actions spread across the province and the BC Federation of Labor promised more shut downs, including Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, mediator Vince Ready stepped into the fray. Ready, who had been appointed to recommend a new system of bargaining for future contracts before the strike, began meeting with government and union officials on Tuesday, October 18. Ready is a legendary figure in BC, widely respected for his skills in mediating tough labor disputes and his involvement in the standoff was widely perceived as the equivalent of the government blinking.

Ready almost immediately declared an impasse, declaring that the parties were “just too far apart to come to a facilitated agreement or any kind of negotiated agreement.” Ready made his announcement after the BCTF publicly released their own proposals to end the dispute. Ready then issued his own non-binding recommendations, which included $100 million worth of provisions to improve salaries, benefits, and teaching and learning conditions. These included:

The government spends $40 million to harmonize teachers’ salaries across districts; this represents a 2 percent increase for teachers province-wide; teachers were seeking a 15 percent pay raise
The government makes a one-time payment of $40 million to the BCTF’s long-term disability trust (teachers were interested in having government take over payment of the premiums)
The government provides $5.2 million to raise teacher-on-call pay to $190 per day (current average is $165)
The government puts an extra $20 million toward improving class sizes and special-needs students supports now and considers doing so on an ongoing basis and consults with BCTF about changing the class-size limits in the School Act
The government increases the number of teacher representatives at the Learning Roundtable, where stakeholders in public education would meet and discuss problems faced by public schools
The BC Liberal government immediately and “unconditionally” accepted the Ready recommendations. The next day, Friday, October 21, the BCTF was hit with a huge $500 million fine for contempt of court for refusing to end its illegal strike. Brown noted the fine would have been “significantly larger,” but said she took into consideration the fact the province and teachers were close to reaching a deal to end the strike. She also warned the BCTF that additional penalties could be imposed depending on future developments in the teachers’ contract dispute.

The same day, Jim Sinclair, president of the Federation of Labor called off the federation’s involvement in rallies and job actions planned for Vancouver and Fraser Valley and demanded that the Ready recommendations be put to a vote by the BCTF membership. Many teachers were furious over Sinclair’s actions. CUPE BC did, however, follow through on its commitment to protest in solidarity with the teachers and over 10,000 CUPE members put their “tools down” for the day and attended rallies.

After a day of analysis, and in a surprise move, the BCTF leadership reluctantly endorsed the recommendations. “We are recommending that you accept the Ready report,” Sims told teachers at Burnaby Central Secondary School on Saturday, October 22. “I don’t want you to vote the way Jinny Sims wants you to vote, I want you to vote your conscience,” she said.

There were mixed feelings among the rank and file about accepting the Ready report, but teachers voted 77 percent in favor of ending the two-week wildcat strike. “Teachers have voted by a large majority to end our campaign of civil disobedience and to return to work tomorrow,” Sims said.

While many teachers were anxious to return to work, key goals identified by the BCTF were not achieved, including: full, free collective bargaining for teachers; return of contract language on working and learning conditions stripped from previous contacts; and a fair salary increase.

The $100 million worth of provisions in the Ready report amount to less than what was saved by the government on teacher salaries during the two-week strike. Some BCTF members were against returning to classrooms because the government did not provide a written commitment regarding class size and composition. A lack of trust remained as teachers returned to work and began participating in Learning Roundtable discussions. Contract talks are set to begin next spring

Sims and three other BCTF representatives attended the first meeting of the Learning Roundtable in Victoria on October 24. Sims said, “British Columbians support teachers’ speaking out for students, they care deeply about the learning conditions in their children’s classrooms, and they want the government to reinvest in a strong and stable public school system.”

E. Wayne Ross is co-editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (www.workplace-gsc.com) and lives in Vancouver, BC.

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From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES

Clinton Jencks, 87; Organizer Who Led Mineworkers Strike Later Taught at San Diego State
By Myrna Oliver
Times Staff Writer

December 23, 2005

Union organizer Clinton Jencks, who led New Mexico mineworkers in a McCarthy-era strike chronicled in the classic 1953 motion picture “Salt of the Earth,” has died. He was 87.

Jencks died Dec. 14 in San Diego of natural causes, according to his daughter, Linda O’Connell.

An organizer for a progressive union, Jencks led a 15-month strike begun in 1950 near Bayard, N.M., against Empire Zinc Co. by the Amalgamated Bayard District Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 890. The largely Latino strikers sought pay equal to that of white workers, improved safety conditions and healthcare — goals they eventually won with great effort.

When company officials obtained an injunction barring the men from picketing, their wives and children took their place. Arrested and jailed, the families made such a noisy clatter in the jail that a harried sheriff let them go.

Hollywood could not ignore such drama, and blacklisted producer Paul Jarrico, director Herbert Biberman and screenwriter Michael Wilson decided to make a movie about the conflict.

Because of the anti-Communist scare gripping Hollywood, the filmmakers had no financial backing and little professional help. They hired blacklisted actor Will Geer and Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who was deported for her participation.

Otherwise, they had the Mexican American mineworkers and their families portray themselves. Jencks, a tall blond man called “El Palomino” by the Latinos, played Frank Barnes, a character based on him, and Jencks’ first wife, Virginia, played Barnes’ spouse, Ruth.

The movie is one of 400 selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, and film historian Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide says: “This film is particularly impressive considering its history — made under difficult conditions (and on a shoestring), with many nonprofessional actors, by blacklisted filmmakers.”

When the movie came out, it was certainly no box office success.

Under McCarthyism pressure from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Screen Actors Guild and the International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees — not to mention a boycott led by Howard Hughes — the film was shut out of all but 13 theaters across the country.

Jencks, along with Revueltas and the filmmakers, suffered for the project. The labor organizer was convicted of perjury in El Paso in 1954 and sentenced to five years in prison. The charge stemmed from a requirement under the Taft-Hartley Act that union officials sign an affidavit swearing they were not members of the Communist Party — a document Jencks had signed in 1950.

Jencks said he signed the affidavit truthfully, but the federal government accused him of lying. It was relying on testimony by Henry (sic) [Harvey] Matusow, an aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). Matusow, who subsequently wrote the book “False Witness,” later recanted his testimony, but the Texas judge ignored his turnabout.

In 1957, however, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Jencks’ conviction in a landmark opinion that established the right of criminal defendants to obtain prior statements made to authorities by witnesses against them. The government opted not to retry Jencks rather than open its FBI files containing Matusow’s statements.

Despite the court victory, Jencks was dogged by rumors of association with Communists and had trouble getting or keeping jobs.

He was working as a mechanic in Albany, Calif., in 1959 when the conservative Woodrow Wilson Foundation awarded him a graduate fellowship to UC Berkeley. The foundation said it had found no evidence that Jencks was then or had ever been a Communist.

After earning a doctorate in economics, Jencks taught at San Diego State from 1964 until his retirement in 1988.

A native of Colorado Springs, Colo., he served in the Army Air Forces in the Pacific Theater throughout World War II. He later worked in a smelter near Denver, before he was sent to southern New Mexico as an organizer for the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.

In addition to his daughter, Jencks is survived by his second wife, Muriel; three stepdaughters; and three grandchildren. His son, Clinton, died in 1995.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

For more on “Salt of the Earth” see The Movie Hollywood Could Not Stop

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MR Zine: Western Canada Labor Battles Show Need for Solidarity

Roger Annis’s article for MR Zine describes what might be signs of a working-class social movement in Western Canada. Annis describes recent strikes—including B. C. teachers, hospital workers, telecommunications workers and meatpackers—and outlines issues that must be confronted if broader labor solidarity is to be achieved.

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From Z Net: ZNet Commentary: Joe Hill—The man who didn’t die

Joe Hill: The Man Who Didn’t Die
November 19, 2005
By Dick Meister

It’s Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud.

“Fire!” he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn’t miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, “ain’t never died.” On this 90th anniversary of his execution, he lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols.

Joe Hill’s story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors.

His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government opposition yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the IWW made “an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society,” laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind “a genuine heritage …
industrial democracy.”

Joe Hill’s story is the story of perhaps the greatest of all folk poets, whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them into a collective force. Songs like “The Preacher and the Slave,” which promises,”You will eat, bye and bye/In that glorious land above the sky/Work and Pray, live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
Ralph Chaplain, the IWW bard who wrote “Solidarity Forever,” found Hill’s songs “as coarse as homespun and as fine as silk; full of laughter and keen-edged satire; full of fine rage and finer tenderness; songs of and for the worker, written in the only language he can understand.”

Joe Hill’s story is the story of a man who saw with unusual clarity the unjust effects of the political, social and economic system on working people and whose own widely publicized trial and execution alerted people worldwide to the injustices and spurred them into corrective action.

It’s the story of a man who told his IWW comrades, just before stepping in front of the firing squad: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize!”

Hill’s comrades aimed at nothing less than organizing all workers into One Big Union regardless of their race, nationality, craft or work skills, calling a general strike and wresting control of the economy from its capitalist masters. The revolutionary message was presented in the simple language of the workplace, in the songs of Hill, Chaplain and others, in the streetcorner oratory and in a tremendous outpouring of publications, including a dozen foreign-language newspapers which were distributed among the many unskilled immigrants from European nations where unions had similar goals.

Workers were told again and again that they all had the same problems, the same needs and faced the same enemy. It was they who did the work, while others got the profit; they were members, all of them, of the working class.
To aspire to middle-class status, as the established labor movement advocated, would mean competing against their fellow workers and chaining themselves to a system that enslaved them.

Organized religion also was a tool of enslavement, to keep the worker’s eye on that “pie in the sky” while he was being exploited in this world. Patriotism was a ruse to set the workers of one nation against those of another for the profit of capitalist manipulators.

IWW organizers carried the message to factories, mines, mills and lumber camps throughout the country, and to farms in the Midwest and California.

The cause of radical unionism to which Joe Hill devoted his life was lost a long time ago. The call to revolution is scarcely heard in today’s clamorously capitalist society. Labor organizations seek not to seize control of the means of production but rather to share in the fruits of an economic system controlled by others. Yet Joe Hill’s fiery words and fiery deeds, his courage and his sacrifices continue to inspire political, labor, civil rights and civil liberties activists.

They still sing his songs, striking workers, dissident students and others, on picket lines, in demonstrations, at rallies, on the streets and in auditoriums. They echo his spirit of protest and militancy, his demand for true equality, share his fervent belief in solidarity, even use tactics first employed by Hill and his comrades.

Hill emigrated to the United States from his native Sweden in 1902, changing his name from Joel Haaglund, working as a seaman and as an itinerate wheat harvester, pipe layer, copper miner and at other jobs as he made his way across the country to San Diego, translating into compelling lyrics the hopes and desires, the frustrations and discontents of his fellow workers.

In San Diego, Hill joined in one of the first of the many “free speech fights” waged by the Industrial Workers of the World against attempts by municipal authorities around the country to silence the streetcorner oratory that was a key part of the IWW’s organizing strategy.

Not long afterward Hill hopped a freight for Salt Lake City, where he helped lead a successful construction workers’ strike and began helping organize another free speech fight. But within a month, he was arrested on charges of shooting to death a grocer and his son and was immediately branded guilty by the local newspapers and authorities alike. Ultimately, Hill was convicted on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Hill had staggered into a doctor’s office within an hour after the shootings, bleeding from a chest wound that he said had stemmed from a quarrel over a woman. The prosecutor argued that the wound was inflicted by the grocer in response to an attack by Hill, although he did not introduce into evidence either the grocer’s gun or the bullet that allegedly was fired from it.
He did not introduce the gun that Hill allegedly used and did not call a single witness who could positively identify Hill as the killer. But he easily convinced the jury that the murders were an example of IWW terrorism and that since Hill was an IWW leader and had been arrested and charged with the crime, he was guilty.

As Hill’s futile appeals made their way through the courts, Gov. William Spry of Utah was swamped with thousands of petitions and letters from all over the world asking for a pardon or commutation. But he would not even be swayed by the pleas for mercy from the Swedish ambassador. Not even by the pleas of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

The governor paid much greater attention to the views of Utah’s powerful Mormon Church leaders and powerful employer interests, particularly those who controlled the state’s dominant copper mining industry. They insisted that the man they considered one of the most dangerous radicals in the country be put to death.

Joe Hill’s body was shipped to Chicago, where it was cremated after a hero’s funeral, the ashes divided up and sent to IWW locals for scattering on the winds in every state except Utah. Hill, with typical grim humor, had declared that “I don’t want to be caught dead in Utah.”

Even in death, Hill was not safe from the government. One packet of his ashes, sent belatedly to an IWW organizer in 1917 for scattering in Chicago, was seized by postal inspectors. They acted under the Espionage Act, passed after the United States entered World War I that year, which made it illegal to mail any material that advocated “treason, insurrection. or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.”

The envelope, containing about a tablespoon of Hill’s ashes, was sent to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It remained hidden there until 1988, when it was discovered and turned over in Chicago to the men who preside over what little remains of the Industrial Workers of the World, shrunken now to only a few hundred members.

The Post Office apparently had objected to the caption beneath a photo of Hill on the front of the envelope. “Joe Hill,” it said — “murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915.”

Or maybe the authorities objected to Hill’s Last Will, which was printed on the back of the envelope:

My will is easy to decide,
For I have nothing to divide,
My kin don’t need to fuss or moan ­
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

My body? Oh if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flowers then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will,
Good luck to all of you,
Joe Hill

Copyright (c) 2005 Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based freelance columnist. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

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UBC Roundtable on the Teachers’ Strike

WHEN: Wednesday November 9th at 4:30 pm
WHERE: Chemistry Building, room 126. CHEMISTRY BUILDING EAST WING; Also called Building C. For map, click here

SPEAKERS:
Jinny Sims, President BCTF
Catherine Evans, President BC Society for Public Education
Paul Orlowski, Vancouver Secondary Teacher
Kevin Millsip, Trustee Vancouver School Board
Larry Kuehn, Director of Research and Technology, BCTF
Charles Menzies, Parent Advisory Council member
E. Wayne Ross, Professor, Faculty of Education, UBC

THEME: A roundtable discussion on the significance of the teachers’ strike and struggle for public education in British Columbia.

FORMAT: A panel of presenters representing teachers, parents, and researchers will each speaker for 5 to 10 minutes each. This will be followed by a moderated discussion of the significance of the teachers’ strike.

Download flyer here.

SPONSORS:
UBC Department of Anthropology and Sociology
UBC Department of Curriculum Studies
UBC Department of Political Science
UBC Centre for Research in Women’s Studies and Gender Relations
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
New Proposals Publishing Society

This event is being organized by Charles Menzies, Stephen Petrina, and E. Wayne Ross, for further information please feel free to contact any of the organizers.

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John Cameron has some fantastic photos from the picket lines during the BC teachers’ strike and from the massive rally in Victoria, which shut the city down for a day.

Check them out here.

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In his article for MRZine (BC teachers go back to work—Who won the battle?), BCTF activist Bob Rosen says that the strike resulted in a “big victory for teachers.”

After seven legislated agreements in the public sector by the Campbell government, the BCTF’s courage in being willing to take on an illegal strike forced the government to appoint a mediator and to accept a mediated settlement, which broke the pattern of passive acceptance of unilateral imposed contracts. The enormous public support for teachers throughout the illegal strike was itself a very important achievement. It signaled that the public agreed that there are real problems in the schools and teachers’ concerns to have a say in how to improve learning and working conditions is valid. It strengthens the hand of the BCTF enormously in future negotiations and in the roundtable discussions, which have already begun.

I agree that these are all important outcomes from the strike, but the fact remains that teachers did not get the three main items they were fighting for [as the Surrey Teachers Association pointed out in their statement “Nine Reasons to Vote ‘No'”, which by the way, seems to have disappeared from their web site—read on for the full text of the STA’s “no recommendation.”] The goals being: (1) full, free collective bargaining for teachers; (2) a return collective agreement language on working and learning conditions; (3) a fair salary increase.

Rosen also indicates that the CUPE and the BCTF are ready to challenge Jim Sinclair’s leadership of the BC Federation of Labour after he double-crossed the teachers (and CUPE) by pulling the BCFL out of the regional walkouts in what turned out to be the last days of the strike (and while public support for the teachers was growing); butting in to announce that the teachers would vote on Ready’s recommendations before he (or anyone else) had actually seen them; then not showing up for the big rallies in Vancouver and Surrey the last day of the strike.

Eugene Plawiuk’s take on the strike is worth a read. In B.C. Teachers Grab Victory from the Jaws of Defeat he argues

“The teachers had no choice but to compromise, given the weight of the State and its Courts against them…this is a lesson for the whole labour movement, that workers rights are not given by contracts or the State, they are taken when we walk out and take the streets or when we seize our work places and put them under direct worker and community control. Such situations not only challenge the government but the very nature of capitalism.…That they mobilized mass picketing is the least they could do, given the fact that the workers in B.C. have faced over four years of neo-liberal attacks by the Campbell neo-liberal Government. But they failed again, as they did with the nurses strike last summer, to go all the way to a General Strike. At the eleventh hour they once again capitulated to the State.…ONCE AGAIN THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN CANADA HAS SHOWN THAT IT IS THE HAND MAIDEN OF CAPITALISM AND NOT A WORKERS MOVEMENT.”

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Most of the public-sector contracts expire in March of 2006 and the maneuvering has already started. George Heyman, head of the BC Government and Service Employee’s union says the teachers have inspired public sector unions and as a result there will be no more imposed contracts. CBC reports that “Heyman says unions are in no rush to break the law. But he says if the government tries again to impose a contract on any union, it can expect labour to protest.”

According to Finance Minister Carole Taylor, the government is promising money for public workers next year (she won’t say how much) and in the wake of the teachers’ strike says it is looking to improve the bargaining process with public-sector workers. Finance Minister Carole Taylor says that

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From The Tyee:

TEACHERS’ STRIKE NEWS AND VIEWS: THE WRIGHT WAY TO DEAL WITH TEACHERS’ ANGER—Premier ignored report assigned by his own minister. By David Schreck

SCHOOL STALEMATE: HOW WE GOT HERE—Nearly two decades of wrangling in the Legislature. By Will McMartin and
David Beers

IMAGES FROM ‘A DAY OF ACTION’—Teachers and supporters rally in front of the legislature. Photos by Nick
Westover

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Meanwhile in Quebec, talks have broken down between the Charest government and teachers. The 80,000 teachers iin Quebec have been without a contract for two years and Francoise Stake, head of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers asked after the talks broke down, “Aside from striking, what other action is there?”

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The Terrace Standard ran a story today (Oct 26) on the CUPE walkout in Northern BC on October 18, which reports that while Northwest Community College wasn’ picketed, “a number of instructors there who teach university credit and other programs and who belong to CUPE didn’t show up for work” and joined striking CUPE workers at locations around the city.

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Video of the Victory march and rally (Oct 17), which shut down the city, is available on the web at WorkingTV.com.

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The Ready recommendations can be found here.Vince Ready’s Recommendations: Nine Reasons to Vote “No”
Surrey Teachers’ Association

The STA Executive is recommending to the membership that we vote “no.” There are two questions that you need to ask yourself. Did we achieve our three goals?

The goals being: ï Full, free collective bargaining for teachers ï A return of our stripped collective agreement language on working and learning conditions ï A fair salary increase.

None of these goals have been achieved. The next question is ìIf we stay out longer will we get anything better?î We canít gaze into the future. We donít know. Will the parents and community still be with us given the bombardment from CanWest and Global, that these are recommendations that
teachers should accept. We also have been advised that the BCTF may face criminal contempt charges on Monday, if teachers are not back at work. Each member should read the recommendations from Ready. They are available on our website at www.surreyteachers.org Each of you will make your own decision. Whatever you decide will be respected.

Please find below nine reasons to vote “No.”

1. The recommendations contain no guarantees for class size and composition limits. The one-time $20 million dollar infusion will mean 330 teachers added province wide.

2. The proposed changes to the School Act do not include any guarantees for actual limits. Nothing prevents Campbell from amending the School Act with a limit of 40.

3. Parent support was predicated on our fight for learning conditions. The public may perceive us to be ditching class-size and composition in exchange for money.

4. The $40 million for harmonization represents only an average of a 2% increase for teachers province wide. This is understood to only affect locals below the average income. We need an increase for all members. Teachers in locals above the provincial average will not receive an increase. Teachers across the province have been out for 2 weeks. We all need an increase. An injury to one is an injury to all!

5. The total money included in the recommendations ($105.2 million) is close to what we have lost in salary during job action. In Surrey, we have given up $10 million in salary over the last 2 weeks. Thus, even the small monetary gains are simply reassigning our own salaries within the school system.

6. Some of the recommendations are one time only. This includes the extra $20 million for learning conditions and the $40 million for Long Term Disability (Salary Indemnity Plan). The greatest costs of our Salary Indemnity Plan are the short term benefit costs. Teachers will continue to fund the total costs of the short term (maximum of 120 days) plan.

7. The recommendations include no improvement to our bargaining rights. Bargaining rights were one of our three principle goals in this political protest. Bill 12 stands and we have imposed working conditions, not a negotiated settlement. The Essential Services legislation stands.

8. The Learning Round Table is not a decision making body, and the increase in teacher representatives still leaves us in a small minority. We cannot expect this body to address
learning conditions meaningfully. Ready notes in his recommendations that the Round Table does not have a mandate to deal with collective agreement issues. The BCTF has been a member of EAC(Education Advisory Committee) for 15 years. This group is comprised of every education
stakeholder group, including government. The BCTF has hammered away on class size, class composition, non-enrolling specialists for years to no avail. The Round Table is nothing new!

9. Non-enrolling ratios are not addressed at all. This was one of our primary bargaining objectives: ratios to ensure adequate teacher-librarians, counselors, learning support teachers, speech and language pathologists and integration support teachers.

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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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