Articles & theory
6 September 2010
Stopping scabs: key to fighting concessions
by Michelle Robidoux
Ontario employers are using scabs to try to break workers’ will to fight concessions, and to bust unions. This is increasingly a key battleground for labour.
In strikes and lockouts across the province, bosses have brought in scabs and courts have slapped injunctions and lawsuits on workers who have tried to resist.
Vale Inco, St. Mary’s Cement, Infinity Rubber, ECP and the Sears warehouse are strikes and lockouts where scabs have been brought in.
Workers have resisted these attacks, despite heavy hardships. There is no lack of a will to fight.
But unless the labour movement can develop a strategy to push back against these attacks in a unified way, workers can be starved back as were the tenacious strikers at Vale Inco in Sudbury.
ECP: This is where we begin
In the face of this, a call has come from workers at ECP in Brantford—backed by the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Brantford and District Labour Council and several unions—to stop the scabs from going in.
From September 15 to 17, union activists are being asked to get bodies on the picket line at 369 Elgin Street in Brantford, to stop the scabs.
The workers at ECP—members of USW local 1-500—have been on strike for two years. The company has spent a lot of money on security and scabs, yet they have cried poverty to the workers and are demanding that they accept a 25% pay cut.
For two years, ECP workers have stood up against the company’s demand for concessions. Not a single striker has crossed the picket line.
But because they have been able to use scabs, there is no pressure on ECP to negotiate.
If we can successfully push back in Brantford, it can be the beginning of turning this situation around. So the stakes are high in this battle.
As one labour activist from Brantford said at a recent meeting, “We’ve started the war—we need the troops.”
What will it take?
What would it take to successfully stop scabs?
• It means individual activists in every union getting people to Brantford for one (or more) of the three days. The Brantford Labour Council has offered up space at the Labour Centre for people to stay overnight, to get to the lines before the scabs do.
• This has to become an issue for all unions, not just the private sector. Public sector workers face pay freezes and cuts, and employers and governments are relying on divisions to push through austerity everywhere.
• Thinking ahead: the next move by employers will be to get injunctions against picketing, and possibly lawsuits against individual strikers to scare us off.
No single group of workers can win on their own, when confronted with the courts, the police and the bottomless pockets of employers. But united, the labour movement can win.
Experience shows that union leaders get cold feet when the union’s resources are attacked by the courts. We need to hold their feet to the fire and demand that the fight be seen through.
This means raising the question now, what will our response be if ECP gets an injunction against picketing? This needs to be discussed—because we know the bosses are already preparing it.
• The argument has already been made by some union leaders that there is nothing to be done except to elect an NDP government so that anti-scab legislation can be brought in.
This counsel of despair needs to be challenged with the argument for the labour movement to escalate action by pulling broader sections of workers into the fight. This is what the March 23 demonstration in Sudbury was pointing to. In the face of Vale Inco’s intransigeance, the labour movement called on every union to send buses to Sudbury. Buses from CAW, CUPE, OPSEU, the ATU and Steel arrived in Sudbury from all over Ontario. It showed the potential when workers organize in solidarity.
But that willingness to fight was not matched by a call from the top of the unions.
Brantford is a chance to breathe life into the argument that a united labour movement can fight back and win. The bosses think they have the upper hand—but they haven’t faced a serious broad-based fight yet.
Ultimately, stopping scabs will mean mass picketing involving large numbers on an ongoing basis, until employers and governments get the message that if they abuse workers they are taking on much more than a single group of workers or a single union.
Employers are all agreed that workers need to pay for the crisis—by giving up 25% pay, defined benefit pensions and job security. Governments are attempting to push through a pay freeze in the public sector. And the media are backing them up 100%.
Turning this around means rethinking what strategies have worked in the past, when workers faced similar hardships.
In the 1930s, confronted by ruthless attacks by employers, workers developed new strategies to fight the scabs: occupying workplaces, setting up roving pickets to find scab trucks and stop them, and mass picketing to stop any scabs from entering or leaving workplaces.
These fights succeeded in rebuilding a dynamic labour movement after years of defeats and stalemates. This lead to the successful organizing drives in major industries like auto and steel.
We can look at this history for inspiration about what we can do differently in the here and now to make our struggles more effective.
One of the lessons from those battles is that workers need to organize to apply pressure on union leaders when they waver and when they argue that struggles can’t win.
Networks of rank-and-file workers within each union, prepared to answer a call for solidarity and to fight within their union to build it—are vital if we are to generalize from one struggle to another about what works, and what doesn’t.
Within that, we need socialists arguing that workers should not pay for capitalism’s crisis.
Workers have already paid enough for this crisis—with climate change, war and poverty condemning millions to misery. There is an alternative—a socialist alternative based on producing for human need instead of corporate greed. That alternative has to be fought for battle by battle, at ECP and in the upcoming fight against a public sector pay freeze.
