The next assertion was mentioned and authorised by members of the Ontario Training Employees Rank-and-File Committee (OEWRFC), which was established in August to struggle for the mass political mobilization of schooling staff in defence of public schooling and to cease COVID. To get entangled with the OEWRFC, emailontedrfc@gmail.com or fill out the shape on the finish of the assertion.
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The Ontario Training Employees Rank-and-File Committee strongly urges the 55,000 schooling help staff who’re members of the Canadian Union of Public Staff (CUPE) to vote YES within the strike authorization poll that started on September 23. A decisive vote for strike motion have to be made the place to begin of a political mobilization of all Ontario schooling staff and the working class as an entire to defend public schooling, defeat the hard-right Ford authorities’s wage-cutting and austerity insurance policies, and safe inflation-busting wage and profit will increase.
CUPE’s Ontario College Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) and the province’s 4 trainer unions are bitterly against mounting such a battle.
OSBCU has delayed a strike vote so long as it might with out frightening a rank-and-file explosion. OSBCU’s largest native, Native 4400, overtly acknowledged in a communication to staff that the intention of the strike vote is to “strengthen the bargaining committee” to succeed in a “negotiated settlement with out a strike.” This underneath circumstances the place the federal government has thrown down the gauntlet by making derisory wage presents of two p.c per 12 months for these making lower than $40,000 and 1.25 p.c for these incomes extra, and by all however publicly vowing to illegalize any strike earlier than it even begins.
The 4 trainer unions—the Elementary Academics Federation of Ontario, Ontario Secondary College Academics Federation, Ontario English Catholic Academics Affiliation and Affiliation of Franco-Ontarian Academics—which collectively have over 200,000 members, have indicated they gained’t even schedule strike votes till the late fall or winter, despite the fact that their members’ contracts expired virtually a month in the past—on August 31, the identical day because the CUPE staff’.
Academics enrolled in these 4 unions ought to collectively demand fast strike votes and make preparations to stroll out alongside their brother and sister support-staff staff in OSBCU. This may require the development of rank-and-file committees in each college and office throughout the province to grab management of the battle from the union forms, and get away of the collective bargaining framework utilized by the federal government and unions to paralyze and smother working-class opposition.
Above all, academics, caretakers, schooling assistants, early childhood educators, college bus drivers, and administrative staff should acknowledge that to defend public schooling and win their simply calls for, they might want to wage a working-class political battle.
Premier Doug Ford and Training Minister Stephen Lecce are threatening to illegalize a walkout from the outset, as a result of they know {that a} strike by schooling help staff might shortly increase to incorporate academics and the remainder of Ontario’s 1 million public sector staff. The purpose of this hard-right authorities of Thatcher and Poilievre admirers is to ram via large real-term pay cuts for schooling staff and austerity budgets for public schooling, as a part of their systematic drive to dismantle public companies and open up the general public sector to company profiteering. By imposing wage “will increase” effectively wanting rampant inflation—presently at ranges unseen in 4 a long time—Ford and his henchmen additionally intend to set a benchmark for the enforcement of comparable wage-cuts on hundreds of thousands of staff all through the non-public sector.
The schooling unions are usually not opponents of this anti-worker agenda, which is supported by the complete ruling elite. Fairly they provide their companies as authorities companions in imposing austerity and concessions on working folks. All 5 unions have performed a key function in suppressing the category battle throughout a long time of a sustained assault on public schooling, leaving faculties dilapidated and employees overworked. In 2019-20, they sabotaged employee opposition to Ford’s Invoice 124 and the 1 p.c per 12 months cap on wage “will increase” that it has imposed. Through the pandemic, which has formally killed over 14,000 folks in Ontario and greater than 45,000 in Canada, the unions smothered all efforts by schooling staff to withstand the Ford authorities’s “earnings earlier than life” coverage that turned faculties into vectors for mass group an infection.
Simply as they enforced Invoice 124 by imposing rotten sellout contracts within the 2019-20 bargaining spherical, the forms is holding schooling staff arbitrarily divided by career and faculty system. And it opposes any and all efforts to warn and mobilize staff in opposition to the federal government’s plans to undemocratically strip us of our proper to strike and impose wage-cutting contracts by authorities fiat.
When a rank-and-file caretaker requested OSBCU president and lead negotiator Laura Walton how the union plans to reply to a strike-breaking regulation, she proclaimed it “the million greenback query.” However she had nothing concrete to say about what CUPE, Canada’s largest union with over 700,000 members, intends to do. It is because the unions are getting ready to right away give up earlier than strikebreaking laws after which pin the blame on the rank-and-file. In the identical trade, Walton blamed rank-and-file staff for the 2019 sellout over which she presided, declaring that there was “not the organizing or employee energy constructed to struggle again.”
These lies cowl up the unions’ decades-long complicity in authorities strikebreaking and the suppression of the category battle. The principal political mechanism via which the unions have achieved that is their partnership with the pro-austerity, pro-war Liberals and New Democratic Celebration. In 2012 and 2015, when a union-backed Liberal authorities outlawed strikes by tons of of 1000’s of schooling staff, the unions stood their members down and meekly accepted the federal government decrees. At this time, the unions again the minority Trudeau Liberal authorities to the hilt. They’re the most important supporters of the “confidence-and-supply” settlement the NDP struck with Trudeau final March to maintain his minority authorities in energy because it spends tens of billions of {dollars} to wage struggle with Russia and imposes “post-pandemic” austerity and inflation-driven actual wage cuts at house.
The Liberal/NDP/union alliance’s help for utilizing society’s sources to wage struggle on behalf of Canadian imperialism and enriching the monetary oligarchy gives the important thing to understanding why Ontario’s schooling unions are working tirelessly to maintain their members divided and weak. They’ve all insisted on bargaining individually and pursuing their “personal” technique, with the 4 trainer unions planning to let help employees staff struggle the Ford authorities alone. Like they did in 2020, the trainer unions hope to make use of an OSBCU-engineered sellout of the low-paid help employees staff as a sample for the concessions-laden contracts they may then search to push onto their very own members.
Not one of the unions have raised a single demand associated to defending schooling staff from the COVID-19 pandemic, the best well being disaster to hit Canada in over a century. Up to now, not less than 62 kids underneath the age of 20 have died of COVID-19 in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of kids and tons of of 1000’s of schooling staff have caught the illness in faculties, with untold numbers affected by the debilitating well being results of Lengthy Covid.
This state of affairs is insupportable and should turn out to be the place to begin for a political counter-offensive by schooling staff in Ontario, throughout Canada and past.
The Ontario Training Employees Rank-and-File Committee (OEWRFC) proposes the next plan of action to all Ontario schooling staff, no matter your union membership, pay grade, skilled designation, or every other arbitrary distinction:
1. Vote “Sure” within the strike poll if you’re an OSBCU member and demand that the overwhelming vote for strike motion, that everybody is aware of staff will ship, be acted upon forthwith. Should you belong to a different schooling union, demand a right away strike vote so you may stroll out along with OSBCU members.
2. Demand a right away halt to all secretive bargaining between prime union bureaucrats and the Ford authorities. All bargaining should happen within the presence of representatives of the rank-and-file and ought to be livestreamed for all schooling staff to comply with.
3. Talk about the OEWRFC’s program together with your work colleagues. Convene conferences at your college or different work location to ascertain rank-and-file committees exterior of the stifling management of the unions. These committees ought to make preparations to defy back-to-work laws by making the schooling staff’ battle the spearhead of a mass mobilization of working folks to safe pay and profit will increase, and the funding of billions of {dollars} in public schooling. To this finish, delegates from the committees ought to contact mother and father of scholars and different staff to clarify why their battle have to be supported.
4. Be part of and construct the OEWRFC because the political and organizational management schooling staff have to safe victory. The OEWRFC insists that staff can solely defend public schooling and put an finish to the lethal pandemic by waging a frontal assault on the huge wealth monopolized by the monetary oligarchy, which holds sway over all elements of social and political life. The OEWRFC is affiliated with the Cross-Canada Educators Rank-and-File Security Committee and the Worldwide Employees Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees as a result of we firmly consider that this battle might be waged solely via the unification of schooling and all staff throughout Canada, the USA, and internationally. The prospects for such a battle have by no means been so promising, as proven by the battle of rail staff in the USA, and the marketing campaign of Mack Vehicles employee Will Lehman for the presidency of the United Auto Employees (UAW) on a program of abolishing the forms and inserting management again within the arms of the rank-and-file.
What schooling staff confront within the Ford authorities is the rule of Bay Road, which is bleeding the working class dry to pay the total prices of the pandemic, the US-NATO struggle in opposition to Russia and rampant company profiteering. Employees should reply with a political counteroffensive, uniting schooling staff with the broader working class, on the premise of a socialist program that can place public schooling on new social foundations. Fairly than subordinated to the capitalist drive for revenue, public schooling and all social choices have to be oriented to serving the wants of the overwhelming majority.
