A home in the Lower Ninth Ward being rebuilt by Common Ground Relief volunteers. (Photo: Sara Falconer)

By Sara Falconer
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

It’s not easy getting a cab to the Lower Ninth Ward. Even now, with most of the former population cleared out, some drivers still won’t cross the Claiborne Avenue Bridge unless it’s to take a carload of tourists to gawk at Hurricane Katrina’s Ground Zero. So when the third cab stops, it’s with some impatience that I ask if he knows the way.

“Oh sure, sweetie,” he drawls. “Born and raised. Born and raised.”

Norman is a retired firefighter who now drives cab to supplement his pension. Four years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, he patrolled the flooded streets by boat to pull survivors from rooftops and attic windows. When he learns that my companion and I have travelled from Toronto to volunteer with a grassroots rebuilding project called Common Ground Relief, chatty Norman gets very quiet. He reaches over, turns off the meter and looks at us intently. “I want to show you something,” he says.

Although it’s late, he drives several blocks past our destination, his headlights occasionally framing the sagging ruin of a house or an exposed foundation, the structure either washed away or bulldozed by the city. He distractedly points out the levees where the water first broke through, just steps from these front doors. Finally he stops at a cheery bungalow, its porch light blazing, a tidy little oasis of normalcy in the darkness.

“This is my home,” Norman says, his gruff voice choked with emotion. “Volunteers rebuilt it for me.”

He hopes his return will encourage his neighbours to come back too but there is much that stands in their way. With their homes and jobs long gone, we wonder, what incentive is there for anyone to return? And how much of a difference can small groups of parachuted-in volunteers make when there is such substantial work to be done?

The jarring reality, we will soon discover, is that volunteers like us are, unwittingly, at least as much a part of the problem as a part of the solution. Real change in New Orleans - the kind that will give the rest of Norman’s community a reason to return - is going to require solidarity of an entirely different kind. It’s not the “thousand points of light” feel-good charity work that Bush (senior) championed. Rather, it’s the rebirth of a civil-rights-era approach that put thousands of activists on the front lines of struggles, in direct confrontation with the State.

Since 2005, much of the city has been rebuilt, particularly in the wealthy Garden District and French Quarter. The Lower Ninth Ward, though, remains a wasteland. Of the 19,000 people who lived there when Katrina hit, only 3,600 have come back. Many of the rest have been mired in red tape trying to access insurance or relief funds for so long that they can no longer afford the trip home. The city seems to actively discourage resettlement, routinely levying large fines against absent homeowners for infractions such as excessive grass length, eventually going so far as to expropriate and demolish the offending homes.

The intentional displacement of low-income communities from this area is nothing new, says Jay Arena, a long-time activist in the fight to defend public housing in New Orleans, both before and after Katrina. “The city had wiped out half of the public housing even before the storm,” he explains, from 14,000 to 7,000 units during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2008, under the guidance of the Bush (junior) administration, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) destroyed another 5,000 low-income apartments. Charity Hospital, providing care to tens of thousands of uninsured, was also shut down - all part of a push to replace public services with for-profit ventures.

“It’s about dismantling the public sector and letting charity groups address the ensuing social ills,” Arena fumes. “That has been the neoliberal agenda of the elite, local and national, post-Katrina.”

Arena is critical of the role of non-profits, foundations and universities in underwriting that agenda. With the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) poised to destroy public housing (which they label “concentrated poverty” to justify their efforts to eradicate it) across the country, New Orleans became the latest victim of an all-out offensive on the public sphere - a political and economic onslaught that swept the Global South in recent decades, under International-Monetary-Fund-imposed austerity measures, and that is now coming home to roost in the Empire’s backyard.

As Naomi Klein reports in The Shock Doctrine, only days after the hurricane struck, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank, released recommendations for rebuilding the city on a privatized model. Among 32 changes that were quickly implemented by the Bush administration, the Foundation urged a disinvestment in the public school system. Vouchers are now issued by lottery to allow a limited number of low-income children to enroll in private school, leaving other students on waiting lists or simply languishing in underfunded public schools.

Meanwhile, thousands of families who used to live in public housing now live in privately owned apartments, paying more than 30 per cent of their income towards the rent and utilities that HANO’s “Section 8″ vouchers fail to cover. “These were plans they had already drawn up,” Jordan Flaherty, a former union organizer and editor of Left Turn magazine, tells Briarpatch. “The storm was their opportunity.”

“What happened with Katrina is not just an attack on poor folks, but also an attack on black political power in the city,” he says. “Pre-Katrina, the teachers’ union was the largest and most influential in the city, and a source of middle-class black political power. After Katrina, everyone who worked in the school system, from janitors to teachers, was fired, and the union contract was cancelled.”

That shift in political power has also been evident in the changing demographics and political representation of the city, as the majority black city council was slowly replaced by a majority white council.

Arena suggests that despite the best of intentions, the thousands of student, faith-based and other volunteers who still flock to the city to gut and rebuild houses actually contribute to the neoliberal project of dismantling the public sphere. “We have Habitat for Humanity building a few private houses, while thousands of public homes are being destroyed,” he points out.

Similarly, Teach for America volunteers were brought in to fill the positions of unionized teachers who were fired, while volunteer health clinics now care for some of the thousands of patients abandoned by the closing of Charity Hospital. Describing the same trend in her native India, Arundhati Roy has called this phenomenon the “NGO-ization of politics”: “[Non-governmental organizations'] real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right” (Public Power in the Age of Empire, 2004).

Such volunteerism, Arena points out, is also a form of scabbing that drives down wages for workers. “These are jobs that could be performed by Katrina survivors who desperately need them,” he says. Louisiana’s unemployment rate, at six per cent, is still the lowest in the country, but is rising quickly, with 15,700 jobs cut in the last year as the recession began to take its toll on the state. Despite the potential jobs that construction could offer, most new houses are prefabricated out of state and shipped in, using local labour for only a few days at a time.

Meanwhile, the over 130,000 people who were displaced from New Orleans have had to seek work in other cities, particularly Baton Rouge, Gulfport-Biloxi, Mobile and Jackson. Many of these workers abandoned their skilled professions to work as cab drivers, short-order cooks and other low-paid positions. The “right of return” movement championed by grassroots community groups like C3/Hands off Iberville, with which Arena was previously involved, advocates the creation of jobs and the repair and expansion of public infrastructure to enable the displaced to come home.

Arena believes that some developers have been “icing out” black workers from what little construction is actually taking place, pitting migrant Latino workers against black locals. C3/Hands off Iberville is demanding the enforcement of Section 3 of the 1968 Housing Act, which stipulates that on HUD-funded construction work, at least 30 per cent of jobs must go to local workers. “This is by no means an anti-immigration campaign,” he says. “We’ve been fighting for a public works plan that would be open to all - documented, undocumented. There’s plenty of work to be done.”

The New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), an advocacy group formed in the aftermath of Katrina, echoes Arena’s concern that black workers were “locked out” of the rebuilding process while immigrant workers were “locked in” by companies that falsely promised them security and permanent status for their sacrifices. NOWCRJ aims to organize across race and industry lines to build political power, encouraging the inclusion of labourers, guest workers and homeless residents in campaigns against inter­national human labour trafficking, for the protection of day labourers engaging in dangerous work, and more.

Both Arena and Flaherty agree that such movement-based volunteerism, rooted in the civil rights tradition, is key to the solution. It is true solidarity, rather than the “thousand points of light” variety of volunteerism, that is needed, Arena says. “In the midst of this whole assault, we’ve had more than a million people come to the city [to volunteer]. We would have preferred to see people come down and support the struggles for public housing and public services.”

A failed attempt by the AFL-CIO to unionize hospitality workers several years before Katrina demonstrates the importance of taking cues from local leadership in establishing such solidarity, Flaherty adds. “If you’re not doing something with the guidance of those most affected, it simply won’t work.”

Make no mistake: volunteers are needed in New Orleans. Its poorest residents - and some of the most vibrant, warm and strong people you will ever meet - have been abandoned by a city and a society that is being deliberately rebuilt without them. But misguided efforts to help only mask the sources of their suffering. With “solidarity, not charity,” as a mantra, there is an opportunity for visitors who really want to make a difference to lend their time and skills to support grassroots groups that are taking a stand against a system of exploitation.

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Lin Shiu: “I will work as long as I can work.” (Photo: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours)

By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

The Hong Kong government has promised to look into introducing a statutory minimum wage, but so far, no concrete implementation plans have been made.

Lin Shiu, 65, walks into the small Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association office, still sweating from her morning shift.

Wearing a blue suit, baseball cap and fluorescent green mesh vest, she gratefully accepts a glass of water. In an hour, she must get back to work cleaning a luxurious Hong Kong mall.

“For my age, it’s difficult to find another job,” says Shiu, who works eight hours a day, six days a week, and makes $3,600 Hong Kong dollars ($505 CAD) each month.

“I will work as long as I can work.”

No minimum

Shiu is one of many female cleaning workers in Hong Kong who must deal with low wages, dangerous work environments and discrimination on a daily basis. She is also a board member and part-time organizer in a cleaning workers’ union, working to improve conditions in the sector. Shiu says that instating a minimum wage is the first, necessary step to improving the lives of cleaning workers.

“[The Hong Kong government] doesn’t really care about the workers. The policy is not for the people,” she says. “The minimum wage would help us.”

In 2006, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang introduced the Wage Protection Movement, a government program that encouraged corporations to offer cleaning workers and security guards wages at average market rates.

The Wage Protection Movement depended on voluntary participation, which was not forthcoming. The initiative shut down in 2008 due to insufficient involvement.

Today, the Hong Kong government has promised to look into introducing a statutory minimum wage, but so far, no concrete implementation plans have been taken.

Structural problems

In recent years, the number of women entering both universities and the workplace in Hong Kong has been on the rise. But according to Mei Lin Wu, the coordinator of the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association, although more women are entering the workforce than ever before, most fall into the “working poor” category.

“This means that their income is less than the minimum wage of grassroots work,” she explains. “The gap between the poor and rich is the biggest in Hong Kong’s history and the number of poor families is increasing.”

In 2006, Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient (GC), a measure of income disparity, reached as high as 0.533, surpassing that of Canada, the United States, and most Asian countries.

During this same period, the proportion of lower-skilled jobs decreased from 56.9 to 50.6 per cent.

“There is a structural problem,” says Wu, adding that the present economic downturn and age discrimination also make finding employment more difficult for women with little or no formal education.

“Having working skills doesn’t mean you’ll find a job. The opportunity for women is not much, and opportunities are not equal among women,” she says.

In 2005, 31.5 percent of Hong Kong residents aged 65 and over lived in low-income households.

“[Hong Kong is the] most free economy in the world, but what does that mean? Those that do not have money are not free. It means that labour, gender, human rights and just issues are not easy to raise,” Wu says.

An uncertain future

Soon after Mary Songsirisakul Malee fell while cleaning a glass window at a Hong Kong shopping mall, she was told she had to return to work or risk being fired.

The 50-year-old, who still has health problems related to the accident, now works part-time cleaning offices and earns $1,200 HKD ($170 CAD) each month.

Like Shiu, Malee believes that a minimum wage would greatly benefit cleaning workers who, she says, are often further disadvantaged by the subcontracting systems prevalent in the industry.

“The policy does not take care of the workers. That’s why the workers always become the losers,” she says.

She adds that in today’s economy, paying into her retirement fund has been a struggle, even though her son provides her with some financial support.

“I will go back to Thailand if I can retire,” says Malee, who came to Hong Kong 30 years ago from Bangkok. “But I can’t imagine my retirement. I would have no safety, no security. I can’t imagine it.”

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Illustration by Andrea Wan

By Andrea Crummer
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

It’s an unremarkable Tuesday evening in mid-October and I’ve just entered a second-floor meeting room at the Northern District Library in downtown Toronto.

I’m feeling optimistic. I’ve driven in from Brantford to attend my first Professional Writers’ Association of Canada event, which is supposed to help me decide whether I’ve got what it takes to become a freelancer. I’m putting my money - all $10 of the entry fee - on Writers Association member, writer and lecturer Paul Lima and his “(Almost) Everything you wanted to know about Freelance Writing” workshop.

I take a seat beside a young, friendly looking woman with a blond pixie cut. I peg her as a student who, like me, is hoping to break into the world of freelance, but it turns out she’s just back from England where she interned for a bioenergy research publication. She is now pursuing a freelance public relations career while working for the CBC on the side.

A few rows in front of me are two older women. One seems shy and almost grandmotherly; the other sports a black leather hat and Pink Floyd T-shirt. Looks can be deceiving: grandma has been published in Bikers Monthly, while the Pink Floyd enthusiast writes human interest features for her community newspaper.

The room is filled with community newspaper reporters, occasional magazine contributors, corporate tech industry authors, a self-help ghostwriter and, as I find out later at the pub, a few first-timers hoping to leave behind careers in acting, home inspection and real estate for a taste of what the freelance world has to offer. However varied their interests, their aspirations are the same: get published, build a reputation and earn a living.

That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

The problem, though, isn’t that freelancers are asking too much; it’s that they’re getting too little. Too little recognition, too few assignments and wages that don’t even come close to providing a decent living. The average freelancer in Canada today makes $24,000 a year.

Most accept the meagre wages in the name of pursuing a career in which they can take pride, all the while relying on part-time employment in other sectors or partners with full-time jobs and benefit packages to carry them through.

A few, though, take a more collective approach and look to the Canadian Freelance Union to get a better deal. Launched in 2006 by the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, the Canada-wide local has signed just over 500 members to date, a mere fraction of this unregulated and unquantifiable workforce.

The perks

Toronto freelance writer Margaret Webb spent seven years in senior editorial positions at magazines such as T.O. Magazine, enRoute and Vista before venturing out on her own. Although she acknowledges full-time staff positions have their advantages, she also says that being her own boss allows her the freedom to organize her work in a way that best fits her lifestyle. “I probably work longer hours than I did at a full-time job, but I don’t have to commute to work,” she says. “I can work when I want, and if I want to take an hour off at lunch, I can. My time is used more efficiently; it’s not just face time.”

The freedom to set one’s own hours and avoid daily office commutes is an undeniable perk in every freelancer’s career. Other draws include the variety of assignments, the freedom to be creative and some significant tax breaks. According to Artbooks, a Toronto-based accounting firm that caters to artists and independent types, freelance journalists can write off large portions of expenses such as office rent (including insurance and utilities), car expenses, telephone and cable fees, and travel costs, all of which can help sweeten the deal. “If I were to go to work full-time, I’d make more money,” Webb says. “But the taxes make the difference. It’s a major advantage.”

The tax incentives and flexible working hours aren’t the only pluses. Freelance journalist Paul Gains has covered sporting events around the world since 1983. Although he’s occasionally wondered where his next paycheque would come from, he says the range of stories he covers and the chance to explore the world make it all worthwhile.

“I turn assignments into vacations,” he says. “I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll sometimes tack on three or four days at my own expense at the end of a project. I’ve been to Japan six times, Morocco, and Libya, Lisbon, Rome, London - all over the place.”

For her part, Webb loves to write, but she also loves food and travel. By combining all three of her passions, she’s been able to land countless magazine articles in Toronto Life, Saturday Night, Chatelaine and several international travel magazines. Her latest project, a culinary travel book called Apples to Oysters, is a testament to what happens when a good idea and the enthusiasm to see it through come together.

“I just finished off this book, which allowed me to travel right across Canada, stay in places I would not normally stay in,” she says. “A shack in Alberta while I was rounding up cattle, a prospector’s tent in the bush at an organic veggie farm in the Yukon; I went fishing on a scallop and lobster boat. . . . I was able to work on a project I was passionate about, in a literary way, which allowed me to use my voice in a way I hadn’t before. It was a fabulous experience.”

For freelancers like Gains and Webb, it’s neither money nor security that drives them. It’s their passion for writing. Like many up-and-coming actors and scriptwriters to whom they’re frequently compared, freelancers are willing to make financial sacrifices and accept part-time employment in related markets to offset the often paltry living they squeeze out of their freelance pursuits.

Even well-established freelancers feel the push to look outside the industry for financial stability. Webb, for example, teaches a course in magazine writing at Ryerson University. She also supplements her freelance income by writing books. And if that’s not enough - and it isn’t - she relies on her partner’s benefits package to fill the gaps inherent in most freelance employment.

While the cost of living continues to rise, most freelancers are paid the same rate today as they were almost 40 years ago. “Most commercial magazines pay $1 per word, which is horrifying,” says Shelley Ambrose, executive director of the Walrus Foundation and co-publisher of The Walrus. “It’s been that way since 1970. It’s one of the only the jobs on earth that has not adjusted for inflation.”

Most publishers, especially those who work for newspapers, will claim they simply can’t afford to pay freelancers more. The industry’s operating margins have been squeezed to new lows recently, and someone somewhere has to take the hit. Because full-time staff writers tend to be unionized, unprotected freelancers make an easy target when times get tough.

Not only are freelancing rates outrageously low, but the contracts freelancers accept often give publishers the right to print and reprint a single article in as many newspapers and magazines as they please. Given the extent of Canadian media conglomeration today - just four of the 98 dailies in the country are independently owned - freelancers hoping to sell their work to more than one source are finding fewer and fewer doors to knock on.

Of course, contracts only become an issue after a writer has sold their story to an editor. For those new to the industry, the sale may be the hardest part. Many established freelancers say that getting editors to notice their work and give them a shot isn’t something that happens overnight. “Once you can wallpaper your bathroom in rejection letters,” says one veteran, “you’re ready to be published!”

Herding cats and other organizing tactics

While generating ideas, getting buy-in on stories and staying motivated are just a few of the challenges independent writers face, some have taken a more collective approach to dealing with the bigger obstacles of wages and copyrights by joining the union. But the numbers are telling. Canadian Freelance Union president Mike O’Reilly acknow­ledges that while forming a union to support the collective needs of freelancers is a great idea in theory, getting people to sign up hasn’t been easy. When the union was formed in early 2006, he anticipated a membership of 600 by the end of the year. To date, just over 500 have joined. A freelance writer himself, O’Reilly appreciates the hesitancy many independent writers have demonstrated so far. “Freelancers are busy people trying to make a living,” he says. “Most don’t have time for this kind of silly politics.” And then there’s the newness of it all. O’Reilly likens the process of organizing freelancers to the task of “herding cats.” “It’s never been done before because it’s a very hard thing to do.”

Something else that’s rarely been done is paying freelancers by the hour rather than by the word. But that’s something the union is hoping to change. O’Reilly disagrees with per-word payments for one simple reason: “A job that takes me four days to research and write could take someone else two hours.” In other words, no two freelancers work at the same pace and what might be a good rate for one freelancer, says O’Reilly, could be “utter junk” for another. “No other contract worker charges this way. It would be like plumbers charging per foot of pipe used. It’s a crazy way to think about running a business.”

Although wages and copyright problems have worsened in the last 10 years due to what O’Reilly calls a “through the roof” increase in media convergence, he says low wages for freelancers are a perennial problem. “Fundamentally, it comes down to a market issue. Publishers are big, freelancers are small; at the negotiation tables, publishers win. It’s a matter of balance and power, and unfortunately, the imbalance is just getting worse.”

The grim economics of freelancing, says O’Reilly, are making people realize that going it alone is not going to be a viable option for much longer. A 2007 freelance union newsletter states that in the past 30 years, freelance writers and journalists have seen their income drop 163 per cent. Based on actual income data collected in a 2006 Professional Writers Association of Canada survey, 61 per cent of freelancers now make under $25,000 per year. Forty per cent make less than $10,000. Just to have kept up with inflation, a freelancer’s annual income would have to be around $55,000 today. Instead, it averages less than half of that.

Nancy Sont, a former freelance travel writer who lives in the Ottawa region, says she gave up her freelance career after she filed her taxes one year and realized she had only made $8,000. Sont, one of the lucky ones not completely reliant on her freelancing as her sole source of income, viewed her assignments more as an opportunity to see the world and have a good time. She explains that her husband is a university professor who supported what many in the freelance realm refer to as their “dirty little secret.”

Today, Sont enjoys a slower pace. On summer days she can be found lying in her hammock, building teepees and listening to the stream that runs past her country home. The rest of the year she drives a school bus, a part-time job she took up because she “wondered what it would be like.” On the matter of joining a union for freelancers, something which may have helped Sont in her freelance pursuits, she’s skeptical. “I guess I would join,” says Sont, “but it probably wouldn’t work. Freelance writers, especially freelance travel writers, are very competitive and unfriendly to one another. Everyone wants something.”

On their own?

O’Reilly, on the other hand, believes that despite low union membership to date, the message of solidarity and support among freelancers is finally starting to gain traction. “Economics are driving people to realize that we need to join together,” he says. It’s either “float together or sink on your own.”

The union president is baffled by the fact that more and more schools have begun to offer journalism programs, given that there are fewer media jobs than ever before. He worries that students will be unprepared for what awaits them when they graduate. “The reality for most is that if they’re going to be working, they’re going to be freelancing.” As a result, O’Reilly believes, a union will make even more sense in the coming years.

So why have so many hesitated to sign up? Those who count themselves among the minority of freelancers making a decent living from their jobs may not see the value in it. In fact, some of the better-paid worry the $50-per-hour minimum rate the Canadian Freelance Union plans to set will force down their own rates should they agree to join.

Gains, for one, doesn’t quite understand how a union would work. “When I hear what some of these papers pay, $100 to $200 per story, if that’s going to be the norm, and I’m making three times as much, it doesn’t help.” But O’Reilly says setting a minimum hourly rate is intended to raise standards, not bring down individual rates. Freelancers who feel their work is worth more are still encouraged to negotiate a higher rate.

Setting the record straight on minimum rates and getting freelancers to work together haven’t been the freelance union’s only struggles. Making publishers listen and take action is another uphill battle. “Publishers continue to not give us the time of day,” O’Reilly says. “They won’t return calls, and won’t talk to us.”

He says independent freelancers have tried to argue for better treatment from many angles, including the ethical case and the need for Canadian creativity and content, but none of that seems to be working. “Doing the right thing doesn’t seem to be important” to publishers, he adds. What is important is the bottom line. “If they can squeeze harder, they will. Sadly the only way we can change their minds is to unionize, as labour has always unionized, by organizing and collectively saying no.”

But it’s that very word, collective, that seems to be the problem.

As the Professional Writers Association of Canada meeting wraps up and I head to the pub across the street with the Pink Floyd wallflower and Biker Grandma, I wonder how such a diverse group can even dream of working together toward a common goal. Driving home later with the city behind me, I can’t help but fear that freelancers, like the line of work they pursue, are truly in this on their own.

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Illustration by Ben Clarkson

By Robin Tennant-Wood
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

For over a century, we’ve thought of work as the use of human labour and technology to transform natural resources into tradeable goods. This economic model has brought us unparalleled prosperity - and exhausted the planet’s capacity to support us. Building a green economy, Robin Tennant-Wood argues, requires nothing less than a fundamental change in how we understand work and a complete overhaul of the global economy.

If you are the big tree,
we have a small axe.
Sharpened to cut you down,
ready to cut you down.
-Bob Marley

When the global financial system went in to a tailspin in September 2008, western governments, faced with the spectre of collapsing industries and rising unemployment, acted quickly and decisively to secure the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy. Emergency measures like the auto industry bailout in the U.S., massive injections of cash into the construction sector in Australia and similar support for the manufacturing sector in the U.K. were meant to protect jobs in the face of the potential collapse of these industries.

But massive cash injections can only sustain these industries for so long. Inherent in the concept of sustainability is a recognition that there must be limits to growth if we are to ensure that the present generation does not harm future generations by exhausting available resources. With global supplies of key resources such as oil, copper and steel tightening, we are rapidly approaching these limits, and may soon reach the point when continued expansion of industry becomes not just ecologically perilous but economically impossible.

The global economy has been built on the backs of industries that are neither environmentally nor, in the long run, economically sustainable. We are faced, then, with two unworkable options: allowing these industries and their massive labour forces to disintegrate, precipitating a calamitous increase in unemployment and widespread economic hardship, or continuing to pour vast amounts of public money into an economic model on the brink of collapse. Neither option is tenable, but a third option is emerging that involves rethinking not just the role of work in the economy, but the role of the economy in society.

The nature of work under scrutiny

The place of work in society, especially for the lower classes, has remained largely unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. Technology has dramatically altered many traditional jobs, rendered others obsolete and created new ones, but labour as the primary factor of production has remained unchanged, particularly in industries that rely on a large unskilled or trade-based workforce. These are the jobs that governments rushed to save in late 2008 and early 2009: the jobs of workers dependent upon a production system that uses human labour to transform natural resources into consumer goods. When this system was developed, natural resources were in cheap and plentiful supply. This is no longer the case.

As more people begin to recognize the unsustainability of our economic system, an alternative view of work has been steadily gaining traction. The purpose of work, according to this emerging paradigm, should not be subverted to the demands of a constantly expanding economy - growth for growth’s sake - but should be dedicated to enriching the social fabric, natural ecosystems and public infrastructure that sustain us.

Contemporary British philosopher Alain de Botton notes in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work that we have become completely distanced from the labour that goes into the things we use in our everyday lives, including our food. There is no acknowledgment of the Kenyan woman who picked the tea, the Philippine pieceworker who sewed the jeans, the Korean factory worker who spray-painted the car, the Egyptian farmer who grew the oranges or the Chinese teenager who assembled the plush animal that wears your football team’s jersey. Unrecognized, too, are the hundreds of pairs of hands that the goods pass through between origin and destination: forklift and truck drivers, commercial shipping and wharf labourers, baristas and retail clerks are all providing the labour that creates global capital.

This chasm between the production and consumption of almost everything we use is being challenged by a growing movement to source goods and services locally. This drive to localize helps foster a grassroots system of production-consumption-production that reconnects people with the pro­cesses that sustain them, puts minimum pressure on resources and reduces the ecological footprints of urban areas. It also is fueling the emergence of a new “green-collar” labour market consisting of jobs that are socially and environmentally useful and that contribute to a sustainable economy, rather than one based solely on the creation of wealth.

From blue-collar to green-collar

Green jobs focus on sectors such as renewable energy, food production, transportation and recycling and waste minimization, seeking to build healthier social and environmental systems rather than simply to promote economic growth. Retrofitting old buildings instead of demolishing them to make way for new ones, creating urban food forests, organizing the office carpool and bike fleet, or designing wildlife and biodiversity corridors in cities are jobs that didn’t exist 25 years ago. Now, they are part of a transformation in our understanding of labour and how it can contribute to sustainability.

Van Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy, and served recently as special adviser to the White House on green jobs. He is also the co-founder of Green for All, a U.S. organization that works “to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” Jones sees a green-collar workforce as the “upgrading” of blue-collar employment to “better respect the environ­ment: family-supporting, career-track, vocational or trade-level employment in environmentally friendly fields.”

Green-collar jobs encompass a wide range of skill sets. The Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Council of Trade Unions recently released a paper promoting green jobs. It included blue-collar areas of work, but also upgraded white-collar jobs such as procurement or purchasing officers, office managers and education officers. Far from the bucolic ideals of the back-to-the-land movement, these jobs are fully enmeshed in the urban, tech-savvy, 21st-century economy. If one thing unites them, it’s that they contribute to the economy not by exploiting natural resources, but by pursuing initiatives that conserve or rehabilitate natural resources.

Most local governments in Australia are already creating green-collar positions. As recently as five years ago, local governments saw environmental services as primarily concerned with regulatory aspects of planning and development. Increasingly these jobs are being geared towards educating and engaging the community.

Debra Bell is the sustainability officer for the city council of Queanbeyan, a city of 37,000 in southern New South Wales. One of Bell’s biggest recent successes was a two-day sustainability expo organized in response to community requests for information.

Does Bell see a future for “greened-up” white-collar jobs in local government? “Absolutely. This area is growing all the time. It would be great to see all [local government] positions sustainability-based and community-driven.”

Working out of the same office as Bell is Geoff Pryor, project coordinator for the South East Resource Recovery Regional Organisation of Councils (SERRROC). Pryor facilitates a co-operative venture to sustainably manage waste across a region consisting of 12 rural and regional councils that represent a population of around 170,000. The project is based on the premise that small local governments do not have the clout or resources required to reduce and divert waste cost-effectively. As a co-operative, the 12 councils share resources and programming and work with industry on measures to reduce waste. Pryor is optimistic that SERRROC can even have some influence on federal government policy regarding electronic waste, in particular.

From a national policy perspective, if green jobs are worth creating when the economy is good, why, when the economy goes bad, are national governments so fixated on protecting jobs in old resource-extraction and polluting industries? The green employment sector at the local government level is growing rapidly, but at the national and international level, governments continue to undervalue the environment as a resource in its own right and pour money into protecting jobs almost exclusively within industries that are contributing to serious environmental problems. Diverting that investment into retraining and education for displaced workers or creating jobs in areas such as renewable energy, information and communications technology, plantation timber production or recycling and resource management would have a far more positive long-term effect.

Looking to the grassroots

Rather than taking a linear view of labour as part of the conveyor belt that transforms natural resources and human labour into consumer products, the emerging view of green and local economies sees labour as cyclical: part of a system that directly addresses social needs from source to sale to disposal, building community in the process. Sustainable labour systems should be based on the same sort of cyclical processes that govern natural systems: complementary, overlapping, mutually beneficial processes. In much the same way as we are coming to see one sector’s waste as another sector’s valuable resource, labour in one field complements a need in another. In a grassroots sense, this view of labour is personal, direct and empowering: no job is without value.

Holistic approaches to work and the economy can take many forms. The mantra of the early green movement, “Think globally, act locally,” is reflected in the rise in popularity of such initiatives as Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), farmers’ markets, co-housing initiatives and power generation co-operatives. Within these operations, work is co-operatively managed to ensure that each participant is part of a process in which their contribution is visible and valued by all others in the system. In the case of LETS, for example, goods or services are traded directly rather than for money. Replacing the flow of capital with the direct provision of goods and services creates a sense of shared responsibility among traders, building both social capital and local economies.

The local food movement in particular has been gaining ground in recent years. Farmers’ markets are growing in size and number as city dwellers turn their backs on imported and processed foods and look for locally grown, fresh, seasonal produce. The biggest such market in Australia is held each Saturday morning in the national capital, Canberra, where up to 5,000 people buy fresh fruit and vegetables, wines and oils, bread, dairy produce, meats, patisserie and plants directly from more than 100 growers and producers. After only five years in operation, the demand for direct purchasing of food in Canberra has been so great that a second, Sunday-morning market has been established and is flourishing on the opposite side of town.

One of the Canberra market founders, Dave Pentony, has seen a huge shift in the way people are thinking about their food purchases. Pentony and his family have a small farm on the outskirts of Canberra and sell organically grown salad greens at the markets on Saturdays and Sundays. Pentony has also opened a direct outlet for local growers in a suburban shopping centre. Based on the Japanese tradition of farmers selling directly to consumers, his store, Choku Bai Jo, which translates as direct selling place, has created five jobs in retail and provides a point of sale for up to 20 local urban, peri-urban and rural growers.

In Europe, power co-operatives have provided local communities with access to power from renewable energy, particularly wind power, through co-operative ownership of the infrastructure. On the Scottish Isle of Gigha, for instance, three wind turbines generate about two-thirds of the local community’s power. The net profit of the venture goes into improving the energy efficiency of the local housing stock, which is owned and operated by the Gigha Heritage Trust, itself a co-operative arrangement that gave ownership of the once privately owned island to its residents. The upgrading of the housing stock is creating local employment in a small community where unemployment and poverty are common.

Taking control of work

At a time of upheaval in the traditional labour and capital markets, there is surprising resiliency in local economies, where individuals have relatively more control over their economic well-being rather than being locked into a linear and hierarchical labour system. Within the traditional capitalist labour hierarchy, each participant in the workforce is dependent upon the level above for decisions and the level below for implementation. The higher the level, the more abstract the decisions and the greater the distance from their implementation and consequences. Each worker has less autonomy to direct their energies to responding to the needs of their community or the environment.

Workers in a local economy, on the other hand, can better assess what they need to get from their job, their contribution to their community, the needs of those around them, the wider social or environmental benefits of their job and its long-term impacts and consequences. This greater responsiveness helps to ensure that each participant in the local economy is able to meet his or her own needs while contributing to the common good.

The green economy is gradually emerging as a true alternative, but real change is coming much more slowly than the urgency of our situation demands. For substantive change to really take hold, governments must recognize that socially useful and environmentally sound work will also be economically viable, and invest and regulate accordingly. Local communities and local governments are already beginning to do so.

If the global financial crisis has taught us anything, it should be that, to paraphrase Einstein, problems can’t be solved by using the same kind of thinking that created them. The nature of work and how we organize it must be in accord with the nature of the society we wish to build. The hardship that accompanies economic recession can be greatly reduced through creative investments in green labour and local economic initiatives.

For more information, please see “Resources to fuel the shift to a green economy.”

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Conrad Schmidt helped found the Work Less Party as a way to spark a discussion about the value of work.

By Anna Kirkpatrick
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

Work is a blessing and a curse. At its best, work gives our lives meaning and purpose. Many of us derive our self-identity from our work. More than just a means to an income, work can provide an opportunity to contribute, interact and connect with others.

Yet at the same time, work can be demeaning drudgery. Meaningless employment can sap us of dignity and creativity, leaving us drained and diminished. British economist E.F Schumacher was well aware of this dual nature of work, advising in his book Good Work that young people “should be taught that work is the joy of life and is needed for our develop­ment, but that meaningless work is an abomination.”

What, then, makes work meaningful? What is good work and how do we find it?

Some see moderation as the key. Back in the 1930s, British philosopher Bertrand Russell complained that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.”

Vancouver-based writer and activist Conrad Schmidt agrees. Schmidt, author of Workers of the World, Relax, helped found the Work Less Party as a way to spark a discussion about the value of work. Among other things, the Work Less Party advocates a reduction of the standard work week from 40 hours to 32 hours.

Schmidt points out that countries with a shorter work week tend to have a higher quality of life and to be more egalitarian. “When you have a society where people are empowered and have more time to think, more time to read, more time to communicate with their neighbours, you create a more empowered society that is better able to challenge social injustice like the income gap,” Schmidt told Briarpatch.

Schmidt thinks a shorter work week would have both social and ecological benefits. Less time spent working means that fewer consumer products are manufactured and less garbage and pollution are created. Schmidt suggests that some of the time that was once devoted to paid employment could be re-directed to self-improvement and community development. “People need time to get involved in community and create a healthier, stronger society. The more we work, the more we produce, the more junk just ends up in a landfill.”

Schmidt thinks the popular definition of work is far too narrow. Our understanding of work, Schmidt believes, should include all the diverse and important tasks needed for a healthy community, including raising children, meeting neighbours and engaging in political activism. According to Schmidt, we need to redefine our concept of work to include a much broader spectrum of activities. “Everything we do is work. Our definition needs to be more than heading off to offices and trying to fill up landfills with junk that we don’t need. Essential work that creates a stronger society is just not happening because, as far as we’re concerned, it’s not work.”

Schmidt clearly is not advocating sloth. Instead, he calls for a more rigorous, thoughtful approach to work. And he’s not alone.

Peter Blanchard, founder of GoodWork Canada, the country’s largest environmental job board, is also reimagining employment, though from a slightly different vantage point. Blanchard started GoodWork Canada after becoming disillusioned with his own career path. Blanchard believes that any work that is personally meaningful can be good work, but is quick to add that finding good work is about more than fulfilling personal ambitions. “I would say a vital determinant of good work is that it is to some degree for the greater good. If you have a job that is great for you but you are working for an evil corporation that is really doing less than environmental things, maybe that is not truly good work,” says Blanchard.

Good Work Canada provides an online listing of environmental jobs in both the private and public sectors. A wide range of careers are represented, including entry-level and highly skilled positions. Blanchard maintains that it is fully possible to find paid employment that is meaningful and socially beneficial, but admits this may require stepping beyond the boundaries of the conventional job market. “If people tried harder to find meaningful work for organizations that are doing good things, I think we would see some fundamental changes in society,” Blanchard says.

For Schmidt and Blanchard alike, persistence and creativity are the keys to finding meaningful employment and to building healthy communities. For those willing to go off the beaten path and live on less, the opportunities to contribute are numerous.

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By Erinn White & Dayn Gray
Briarpatch Magazine
November 2008

You arrive at an annual meeting with other union members from your industry. It includes representatives from every university in Ontario that has a Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) presence. They hand you a name tag and two drink tickets, and escort you to a room with no chairs. There are no prepared documents. There’s no agenda. Your job, along with the other hundred front-line members of the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC), is to set priorities for the sector for the next three years, to tackle obstacles to that work, and to look for concrete ways to build the group’s capacity.

No small feat, but this particular group seems to have pulled it off at their meeting in February.

The Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee steers a voluntary association of CUPE locals totalling more than 20,000 members working in the university sector. The committee’s activities include coordinating university bargaining and province-wide campaigns, political action on university issues, and facilitating information sharing between locals. It is made up of elected representatives from each campus as well as staff support and representatives from constituency groups.

The group used a facilitation process called “The Art of Hosting.” The process relies on conversations rather than structured agendas, allows participants to identify key issues of interest or concern, and emphasizes relationship building as part of the work. It’s a process that invites diverse perspectives and outside-the-box thinking. Teams of CUPE staff and members who have been trained in the method hosted the meeting.

“People realized very quickly that they had complete control over where it was going to end, and the power to identify the issues they see as important,” says Dave Michor, the national union staff person who supports the work of the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee. The Art of Hosting “gave people the opportunity to talk about issues, target methods of finding solutions or developing an action to help them find the solution.”

What flowed from that planning conference in February 2008 set the course for CUPE Ontario’s university sector until 2010. The OUWCC is working to develop the capacity of every local and to increase their strength at the bargaining table.

What the OUWCC is proving is that taking risks and thinking big are powerful ways to organize from the bottom up - relying on the expertise and strengths of rank-and-file members. These members are developing their own skills and abilities as labour leaders. Maybe more importantly, they are seeing the results of working together towards common goals.

The OUWCC is one of five industry-based sectors in CUPE - its others are municipalities, hospitals, school boards and social services. Each has an elected leadership charged with the task of improving working conditions and building better public services. The leaders of the OUWCC have been talking about coordinating their bargaining for ten years in the belief that combining their efforts would give them stronger bargaining positions than going it alone. Although the goal has been clear for a long time, transforming it into action has been a slow process. Weighed against the possibility of failure is the possibility that members will embrace the project and move forward with new energy.

Eggheads and scrambled brains

CUPE’s university sector has about 23,000 members. They do every job on campus from teaching courses to washing floors and fixing the plumbing. The two branches of the union affectionately refer to one another as “eggheads” (the academic workers) and “scrambled brains” (the tradespeople and support staff).

The diversity within the sector is a strength and a challenge. Fifty-five per cent of members are academic workers - teaching assistants and sessional faculty. The other 45 per cent are support workers. Bringing so many different classifications of members together and meeting their needs is ambitious, to say the least.

The leaders of the OUWCC know that using The Art of Hosting, a process that’s entirely directed by members, is a huge risk. “It’s a process of self-awareness and self-development, and it can very quickly fall flat. If there’s no buy-in, it will fall flat. We had a serious concern about that. We thought that academic workers might be intrigued by that challenge, but 45 per cent of the members have a more traditional local structure, and could have said they didn’t want to participate,” says Michor.

Action plans developed by the steering committee are sent back to individual member locals for approval - and so far, there’s been widespread buy-in. Each campus has a representative participating in the planning process, helping members see their personal issues addressed in the action plan. Priorities like wages, health and safety and protections against violence in the workplace were among those chosen this year as target areas for locals to negotiate improvements.

The great divide

A number of years ago, the geographic separation of university workers posed a challenge for organizing the sector. It was hard to provide members from all across Ontario with meaningful opportunities to communicate. Increasingly, though, members are making effective use of technology to stay connected. Regular conference calls, email lists, and social media like Facebook have helped shrink the province and keep everyone informed and connected.

Trying to deal with geographic challenges has always been difficult for unions in Canada. But the OUWCC has seemingly found a balance between centralization and the silo effect that plagues many other labour movement organizations. That’s why involving and motivating rank-and-file members is so important to the OUWCC. Membership in OUWCC is voluntary - locals choose whether or not to belong and contribute a voluntary levy to financially support the group’s work. Currently, 92 per cent of university locals have chosen to affiliate themselves with the group and its goal of provincially coordinated bargaining by 2010.

CUPE’s structure is based on the concept of local autonomy, where locals are given space within the larger organization to develop their own cultures and priorities and to negotiate their own collective agreements. Coordinating over 20 different locals within that environment has obviously been challenging. But the high rate of affiliation shows that it’s possible to work alongside and within existing structures to organize for concrete improvements to both the working conditions of members and the learning conditions of students.

Common issues

OUWCC members have common work environments - a link to each other that helps to make coordinated bargaining practical. Coordinated bargaining can take many forms - some unions have a common bargaining table. In this case, the OUWCC chooses to identify target issues, and locals can tailor their approaches to best meet their needs.

The OUWCC hopes that their pooled efforts will convince the government that the trend of funding cuts for universities needs to change. Their workplace conditions are also dependent on how much public funding is put into the system. The funding to universities, like most public institutions, is controlled by the provincial government.

“The shift toward neo-liberal public policies and the reorganization of government apparatuses has had major effects on working conditions across the province - indeed, throughout the country. In every sector it’s reduced the quality of public services,” says Dan Crow, the university sector’s vice-chair.

This is most immediately visible on campuses in the forms of increased tuition fees and growing debt for students, deferred building maintenance, contracting out of “non-core” functions such as food services and research, and the casualization of work. These changes have had major negative effects on the overall quality of education at Ontario’s universities.

Meanwhile, for non-academic and support workers, job security is taking a hit. Fewer new workers are hired to replace those who retire, which both increases workloads and allows universities to contract out services.

“Universities have the ability to threaten further contracting out and restructuring as a means to pressure locals on campuses to accept concessions in bargaining,” says Crow.

For academic workers, the results of underfunding are largely the same. As faculty members retire, universities are replacing them with sessional instructors who work on a contract basis. Sessionals do much of the same work as faculty: lecturing, marking, meeting with students, running seminars and preparing materials. For this, they receive a fraction of what their counterparts on faculty receive.

“This is forcing sessionals to piece together short-term work across departments and often across universities. For sessionals, job security is virtually non-existent,” says Crow. “Coordinating our bargaining efforts across the province is the key to reversing this trend. The Ontario government needs to put resources toward making our working and learning environments work for us again.”

Coalition building is becoming central to this union campaign. For a labour movement that can no longer afford to address its issues in isolation, part of the group’s strength is working with community partners and student groups. Compelling the government to act is a difficult task for any one union or community group to achieve on its own. Raising public awareness is one way to put pressure on the government to increase funding for universities and reverse the privatization trend.

Members’ voices, members’ power

Members say that one of the best things about being a part of the OUWCC is the new energy and empowerment that it gives to activists. These activists are tradespeople, support workers and teachers. As part of the committee, they sit on working groups, direct and implement campaigns and run province-wide outreach tours of campuses.

Lianne Dubreuil, support staff at Carleton University in Ottawa, speaks of the personal change she has experienced since becoming involved in 2007. When she thinks about the goal of coordinated bargaining, she says: “It’s really exciting, but it’s really scary. I have to learn how to motivate my executive and membership. We’re on the cusp of a history-making moment. It’s challenging, but I feel proud, and honoured, to be a part of it.”

“Gaining knowledge is a key reason for doing this. When we coordinate our bargaining, we’re banding together. The issues that are important to us on our campus are important on all campuses. It empowers all of us,” Dubreuil adds.

Promoting coordinated bargaining - where various locals negotiate on common timelines and focus on a fixed set of priority issues - is important to the OUWCC’s success. But it isn’t an automatic sell. Across the province, there are some significant disparities between collective agreements. Graduate teaching assistants at Brock University, for instance, are paid a considerably lower rate than those at larger comprehensive schools.

Where locals have managed to negotiate strong collective agreements, coordination has been less attractive to members because it’s more difficult to see what they can gain from their participation. But in true social-unionist style (and thanks to the hard work of both the eggheads and scrambled brains), almost every local has seen the advantages of coordinating efforts.

Long road to go

The group of activist members that make up this sector know that they’re making progress, but there’s still much more work to be done. Choosing central issues that matter to members is key to getting buy-in, especially from members who have felt disempowered by traditional representative structures of trade unions. The OUWCC knows that they have an uphill struggle to convince individuals that it’s worthwhile.

“There’s somebody reporting to the locals, so people are starting to understand why coordination is an advantage,” says Ajamu Nangwaya, an OUWCC member. “But there’s still a lot of work to do involving membership at our base level.”

Building solidarity among members who aren’t a part of the steering committee or working groups is a goal that the OUWCC will have to keep squarely in their sights if they’re going to succeed, Nangwaya adds.

In the long term, empowering individual members and locals and democratizing union structures engenders higher expectations for working conditions and a better connection to fellow workers and communities. The OUWCC is about building working-class power. Through coordination and solidarity, workers aim to win gains at the bargaining table. Whether or not they succeed in doing so, the time and effort invested in developing the capacity of activists, union locals and communities will undoubtedly produce dividends in the future.

Erinn White is a co-producer of the Labour Show on the rabble.ca podcast network. She’s also a member of the OUWCC steering committee and an active member of the Guelph and District Labour Council. Dayn Gray is a health and safety activist and a member of the OUWCC steering committee. He currently works as a union organizer.

John Peters is a political scientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He is currently studying the impacts of globalization on labour movements and public policy in North America and Western Europe.

Standing in a crowd of a few thousand auto workers, their families, and union and community allies rallying outside General Motors’ Oshawa truck plant in June, I couldn’t help but think, “Way too little. Way too ineffective. Probably way too late.”

In my more pessimistic moments, I wonder if this isn’t true of the situation facing the labour movement as a whole. Canadian labour leaders and activists will need to be proactive and creative in the coming months and years if they hope to avoid the fate of those Oshawa auto workers.

The auto workers’ rally followed a valiant two-week blockade by CAW Local 222 of the automaker’s head office after GM announced the plant would close, putting 2,600 people out of work. Local union leaders speaking at the rally railed against their double-crossing employer, which just two weeks before had inked a new contract that included wage, benefit and other concessions from the CAW on the promise of new investment in the Oshawa plant.

But despite much tough talk and the well-publicized rally, the union was never able to make the blockade anything more than symbolic. A court injunction filed by GM ended it, and the ordeal left the majority of workers frustrated, bitter, and angry - hardly results that anyone in the labour movement could spin as positive.

Lacking the militancy that empowered auto workers in the past, and now with an all-too-often compliant relationship with employers - in addition to far too few organizing gains in an increasingly non-unionized auto sector - the CAW has lost much of its ability to maintain industry wage standards and has forfeited a good deal of its clout with the big three auto employers; Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

What CAW members are learning the hard way is that their recent embrace of concessions, labour-management co-operation, and political lobbying for subsidies and competitive business supports does not add up to a winning approach for working people.

The CAW’s troubles, though, are only symptoms of much bigger problems for organized labour. Throughout North American and Western European labour movements today, unions face an ever-growing list of challenges, from increasing financial globalization and industrial competition, to ever more frequent lay offs in unionized manufacturing, to the expansion of low-wage, non-standard, non-unionized jobs. Unfortunately, the outcome is always the same: organized labour loses the battle. Now, the movement is in serious retreat.

Even if there are small victories - and there are some - unions in Canada and abroad have given up many of their best means for protecting workers. Organizing - the hard work of bringing the benefits of unionization to unrepresented workers - has fallen off the map. Militancy is more often than not spoken of as ancient history. Partnership deals with employers are now regularly sold to members as the only solution. Too often, unions are now using concessions as the default position in their efforts to keep companies from closing workplaces entirely.

As a result, workers perpetually find themselves on the losing end of an economic conflict that sees business reap record profits in boom times while workers feel the pain in times of crisis.

Many things will have to change. But the basic facts are clear: unless unions tack in a different direction and begin making changes to everything - how they organize to the focus of their education programs to how they mobilize politically - rolling defeats like the one in Oshawa will continue to lay the groundwork for even greater losses in the future.

How bad is it?

How bad is it? For unions and working people here in Canada, pretty bad. It’s even worse in countries like the United States and Great Britain. Over the past 30 years, the rise of global finance and the spread of shareholder capitalism into ever larger transnational corporations has forced labour into retreat.

Twenty years ago, business used to finance itself from commercial bank loans. Now with governments reforming financial and corporate governance systems, business has taken the bulk of its financing from bond and stock markets - the new “shareholders” in global capitalism.

The results have been disastrous. Focused on driving down costs and maximizing the flow of profits to stockholders, multinational corporations have sought to put the brakes on labour rights, and to push back any and all gains labour made in the post-war period.

International operations like General Motors have used debt to finance takeovers the world over, and then engaged in massive cost-cutting through shutting plants, laying off workers, and cutting wages, all the while opening more non-union operations in cheaper regions around the globe.

Other multinationals such as Mittal Steel, the world’s largest steelmaker, under pressure to meet market expectations for better profits and burdened with heavy financial obligations because of their thirst for global mergers and acquisitions, have sought to restrict union organizing and strikes in many countries or sought to bypass unions altogether, using lay offs, short-term contracts and outsourcing to maximize profit.

Unions have not been able to put up much of a fight. If weighted for size of the workforce across North America and Western Europe, union coverage of workers has declined from some 33 per cent of the workforce in the early 1980s to less than 21 per cent today.

In the U.S. and the U.K., the numbers are even more abysmal. American unions lost more than nine million members over the past 30 years, with union density slipping to 12.5 per cent overall and a measly 7.4 per cent in the private sector. In the U.K., meanwhile, unions saw their numbers decline by over six million and union density fall by almost half to 29 per cent over the past 25 years. In both countries organizing is at a standstill, with certification of new workers at less than 20 per cent of the number required even for unions to maintain their current numbers.

In Canada, while officially unions do not appear to be in a similar crisis, the situation is far from rosy. The loss of hundreds of thousands of unionized manufacturing jobs, along with manufacturing restructuring, lay offs and outsourcing, has driven private-sector union density over the past few years to Depression-era lows of 15 per cent - less than half of the 34 per cent reached in the early 1970s.

In auto manufacturing, primary metals, forestry, and textiles, plant closures and workforce reductions have ravaged unionized workplaces. In Ontario, the manufacturing sector eliminated 32,000 jobs this past July alone. Since November 2002, a total of 375,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared, the majority in unionized manufacturing.

If not for organized labour’s public-sector expansion in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia, the prospects for organized labour in Canada would appear even more dismal, as unionized jobs in education, health, and social services jobs accounted for close to 70 per cent of all growth in the unionized workforce over the past decade.

Unsurprisingly, as organized labour has lost ground, working people have seen their economic fortunes decline as well. Today in Canada, 51 per cent of workers are either in non-standard jobs or in low-paid full-time jobs.

The majority of immigrants today earn less than a third of what most white workers make, and most Statistics Canada estimates of “low income” status (i.e. serious poverty and really bad jobs) for recent immigrants exceed 40 per cent. Young workers face similar obstacles. In 2005 in Ontario, for instance, 94 per cent of all jobs for workers between the age of 15 and 24 paid less than $20,000 annually and 90 per cent of jobs for young workers were part-time, temporary, or non-standard.

Schooled by the public sector

What has organized labour in Canada done to stem these reversals? In the public sector, quite a bit. Throughout much of the private sector, not nearly enough.

Selectively using strikes to win and preserve principles essential to their collective agreements, some public-sector unions have galvanized their memberships to engage in widespread public advocacy for better public services, community-sustaining public-sector jobs, and publicly accountable management. In doing so, they have often garnered broad public support.

Last fall, for instance, city workers in Vancouver rejected contracting-out and refused to back down on demands for pay equity. Five thousand CUPE-represented workers went out on strike for three months and avoided major concessions.

Similarly, in 2004, after the Campbell government ripped up collective agreements and contracted out work, the B.C. Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU - a division of CUPE) launched a week-long strike with over 40,000 health care workers. Supported by many other trade unions, they too used a strike to garner wide support and then challenged the Campbell government in court - and recently won. Indeed, nurses across the country have also regularly used strikes, both legal and illegal, to protect jobs, wages, and working conditions.

In the face of these attempts, governments have legislated public-sector unions back to work, frozen wages, forced workers to accept privatization of public infrastructure and public jobs and arbitrarily extended contracts. Provincial governments from Newfoundland to B.C. have also threatened public-sector unions with further draconian actions such as essential service legislation that removes the right to strike and bills like B.C.’s Bill 29 and Saskatchewan’s Bill 5 that removed the right to unionize for thousands of workers.

Yet the numbers suggest that such public-sector workers have been better able to fight back than have unions in the private sector.

Sticking to a form of unionism that combines militancy with bargaining, and public advocacy with member education and mobilization, public-sector unions have been able to stave off concessions and in many cases make steady gains. Public-sector unions have also continued to work with a host of community groups to advocate against the privatization of services from health care to water, social work to pension financing - something that most private-sector unions are not doing.

Many such public campaigns, as in Hamilton, Edmonton, and Nova Scotia, have even reversed earlier privatizations of water utilities, recreation facilities and schools. Meanwhile, in Montreal on May 3, 50,000 workers came out in protest of planned further privatizations of Quebec health care.

Moreover, this past spring, a recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal challenge launched by the HEU declared that provincial governments do not have the right to exclude workers - like those in health and community social services - from constitutionally protected rights to freedom of association and to form unions, and ordered the provincial government in B.C. to pay $75 million for compensation and retraining.

By holding to traditional tactics like strikes, mobilization and advocacy, a number of public-sector unions have protected and improved wages and working conditions. In health care, long-term care, and nursing, many provincial public-sector unions have gone even further, using coordinated and centralized styles of bargaining to lift all members to the best level possible.

By way of contrast, the gains won by private-sector unions have been smaller. Few have systematically combined organizing, militancy and effective public advocacy in order to win concrete victories.

A good example of effective private-sector union activism has been the United Food and Commercial Workers’ decade-long fight to improve the conditions of foreign agricultural workers, most notably in southern Ontario. Through a court challenge on the constitutional right of farm workers to unionize and the founding of migrant worker support centres as well as provincial advocacy, the UFCW has forced industrial farmers to provide basic necessities like clean water and bathrooms. The union has had some success in making the Canadian, Mexican, and various provincial governments uphold the bare minimum of standards, and has recently launched organizing drives on four farms. Just this past June the first contract for 14 migrant agricultural workers was certified in Manitoba.

But for all the UFCW’s efforts, though, foreign agricultural workers in Ontario still only have the right to “associate” - not unionize - and across Canada, agricultural workers are still exploited with impunity. Many face daily threats of firing and deportation, while working on farms that do not extend even the basic provision of drinkable water and adequate shelter. But major improvements in the situation of migrant farm workers in Canada will require both renewed energy by the UFCW and a strategy of broad coalition building across and beyond the labour movement.

The same is true for the growing thousands of low-paid workers in precarious employment. In Toronto, some of the largest public- and private-sector locals in Toronto have chipped in to support a Workers’ Centre geared to helping and educating workers about their rights at work. Led by one of the toughest, streetwise organizers around - Deena Ladd, a one-time UNITE organizer and long-time community activist - the centre has had some success not only in mobilizing workers to bring bad employers to heel, but also in bringing much-needed media attention to the extent to which low wages and poor working conditions are prevalent throughout the greater Toronto area.

But for the six million plus workers across Canada who are stuck in bad jobs, this is little more than the proverbial drop in the ocean - good intentions to be sure, but hardly strong or effective enough to shift the balance of power in favour of workers.

Retaking the initiative

The facts are pretty plain: within Canadian unions today, there is too little organizing, too few strikes, too many management-partnership deals, and little strategic thinking or member mobilizing.

Despite much talk and countless resolutions over the past decade, the majority of Canadian unions have failed to make organizing a priority. Attempts to organize new workers have fallen by 25 per cent over the past decade. At the same time, new certifications of workers have fallen to record lows of 40,000 per year, down from 100,000 plus in the 1990s.

During the last national survey in 2001, it was discovered that only 6 per cent of Canadian unions spent more than 20 per cent of their revenues each year on organizing new workplaces that lack union representation. Over one-fifth did not spend anything at all, and almost half spent less than five per cent on organizing. If this were not bad enough, approximately half of Canadian unions have no dedicated staff organizers exclusively responsible for organizing, and set no specific organizing targets.

Even more disturbing is the fact that internal numbers at two of the largest unions reveal that fewer than half of new certifications are actually new union members. Rather, these certifications are simply the result of representation votes among competing unions in the wake of sector or employer restructuring or mergers - the labour movement effectively cannibalizing itself - or simply due to internal growth in a bargaining unit within a workplace.

The effective use of strikes to make real gains is also on the wane. In the 1960s and 1970s, union leaders along with rank-and-file militants were hardly afraid of using strikes to spur union growth and win organizing drives. This is no longer the case.

Work stoppages due to strikes and lockouts in Canada fell from an annual average of 754 in the 1980s, to 394 in the 1990s, to 319 in the 2000s. Workdays lost from strikes have fallen from highs of 11 million in the late 1970s to 5.5 million annually in the 1980s, to no more than 2.6 million over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s. Where close to 20 per cent of workers would be involved in at least one strike a year in the mid-1970s, at best no more than one per cent are today.

Such a reversal is part of a larger shift in unions. Leaders and staff have moved from an offensive to defensive posture, focusing less on expanding the frontiers of labour’s power in the workplace and simply trying to defend what has already been won. When doing so appears impossible, unions are then resorting to concessions. Union after union has abandoned the selective use of strikes to make gains or to preserve things once thought essential to collective bargaining, and instead seeks simply to sign agreements with employers, while doing no public advocacy at all.

On top of this, some in union leadership are promoting new business-oriented strategies - employer partnerships - ostensibly to bolster declining numbers and to protect jobs. The CAW’s recent joint labour-management agreement is the most well-known of these. The Magna agreement signed away the right to strike and the shop-steward system for the promise of an arbitration system and further organizing in Magna’s plants.

Such agreements are, in fact, increasingly common throughout the private sector. In everything from long-term care to low-end manufacturing and forestry, Canadian unions have signed partnership agreements that impose wage and benefit concessions with the hope of holding onto unionized jobs.

Early results show the risks of this conciliatory approach to be far higher than the rewards. For in adopting partnership strategies, too many union leaders have sold collective agreements to members on the basis that the interests of union and management are the same - when they are not, as manufacturing plant closures like that in Oshawa have emphatically showed.

Wake up? Stand up?

The easy response to all this would be to say that union leaders need to stand up and lead, and workers need to wake up and take action before a century’s worth of victories are swept away.

But things are not so simple. Many leaders are old, as are their memberships, and too few are willing to change direction and take the high-stakes risks necessary to move forward. Too few union staff have the educational opportunities required to learn how to deal effectively with global consulting and law firms that now regularly advise transnationals and governments alike.

Too many unions lack the basic talent to weave bargaining with sophisticated communication strategies and political advocacy. And outside of some labour councils - such as in Toronto and Montreal - there are simply far too few activists in positions of leadership. Within unions, there are even fewer with the gumption to make substantive changes.

Politically, the problems are just as large. Traditionally, unions have tried to influence elections, legislation and policy through backing social democratic and, in Western Europe, socialist parties.

In Canada, unions joined the political left and formed the NDP in 1961 to fight for basic universal rights and equality. Added to this were Quebec unions that formed the Parti Québécois and pushed for public-sector unionism, universal public services and provincial control of finance and industrial development.

But over the past 20 years, union enthusiasm for the NDP and the PQ has given way to frustration and ennui.

Few unions have been happy when the political parties that are supposed to be the “friends of labour” turn to “third way” politics that say little about regulating finance and protecting working people, and have too often led to accommodating business interests at the expense of better wages and jobs.

The majority of unions remain affiliated with the NDP and the PQ. But NDP support for back-to-work legislation and public-sector cutbacks, and PQ support for free trade, has led unions like the CAW to break ranks and turn to strategic voting and issue campaigns in lieu of political support and the political education of members on the importance of parties of the Left.

Today, only roughly a quarter of union households vote for the NDP in federal elections (only slightly better during provincial elections); in Quebec, only a bit better than a third do so. The large majority of workers vote for the Liberals and the Conservatives and in Quebec today, the Action Démocratique du Québec.

If nothing else is clear, an agenda for change is more necessary than ever for the labour movement. But what any agenda for change requires is a template for how to make reforms within unions themselves as well as how to move forward politically.

Putting class and capitalism back into the equation would be one good place for unions to start. More education and social movement mobilizing for global equality and environmentally sustainable politics are two others.

The problems beg for solutions. One can only hope that activists and union leaders will begin to take the necessary steps to go beyond “far too little” and “far too ineffective” before it is, in fact, far too late.

John Peters is a political scientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He is currently studying the impacts of globalization on labour movements and public policy in North America and Western Europe.

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