Strike levels show mood to fight

If you look at the state of class struggle over the past four years, the bright light is the remarkable return of the strike. 

 

In Canada, we’ve seen some massive strikes. It is worth looking at this more closely to see what it means for ongoing struggles on various fronts.

 

Throughout the early stages of the COVID pandemic, hundreds of thousands of workers were forced to go to work while managers worked from home. 

 

Suddenly, the lowest paid workers in society - from Amazon workers to retail shelf fillers and janitorial staff, all were told they were COVID heroes. But as time went on, slogans of solidarity with bosses wore thin.

 

Coming out of COVID, we watched the exponential growth of pandemic profiteers making billions of dollars while people sacrificed their lives to keep working and had their wages frozen at the same time. These two things came together, generating anger. Then there was the explosion of inflation, creating an incredibly combustible situation.

 

We went from an extremely low point of people fighting back at the beginning of COVID, because of this idea that ‘we’re all in this together’, to a situation where as we came out of COVID that notion crumbled when your boss wasn’t at work. It crumbled again when the landlords jacked your rent. And it crumbled again when you were told your wages wouldn’t go up to match inflation.

 

So we’ve seen a response to that, whether it’s conscious or not. And it is remarkable when you look at the numbers.

 

Since 2022, 1.4 million workers in Canada have gone on strike. That’s an incredible figure. The overwhelming number of those strikes were not defeated. People may not have won everything they wanted, but it is hard to think of a single strike where employers’ concessions actually made it through to the vote. And quite often a strike occurred because a bargaining team came back and said, “This is the best contract we’ve negotiated in 25 years” and workers said it’s not good enough.

 

Just to break down what these numbers represent, there were 1,100 strikes in that time period. In 2021, there were 158 strikes – that means each week 3 groups of workers decided they had enough of what their employer was putting on the table and decided to stand up and challenge the whole market edifice we’re raised with. You’re challenging the bosses and saying no, this is not a one-sided fight.

 

In 2022, there were 150 strikes. And in 2023, there were a whopping 730 strikes – just as inflation hit its peak.

 

So far, in 2024 there have been 71 strikes, up to the beginning of June. This doesn’t include the WestJet mechanics strike, the rail strike and others. Still, that is 2.5 strikes per week.

 

And some of these strikes have caused real shifts in workers’ confidence. If you look at the Ontario building trades strike in 2022, about 40,000 workers walked out. It opened up the floodgates for more people to start to demand more. Then the education workers led an illegal walkout in the fall of 2022, which while it didn’t win everything, did beat back Doug Ford’s anti-union legislation and electrified everyone in the labour movement. 

 

In the spring of 2023, the federal public sector workers went on a massive strike, rebuilding in that workplace.

 

Recently, at WestJet, a heroic group of 700 mechanics, challenged the federal government to save the democratic right to strike. And the Courts backed off in the face of it. The union called the employers’ and government’s bluff, watched the employer demands change overnight from 2, 2 and 2% to massive gains, and won that strike. 

 

WestJet workers punctured the dirty deal between Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau that may have played the key role in signing that deal.

 

And the level of struggle is not letting up. Montreal Ports went out on strike during COVID, and were legislated back to work by Trudeau. They've now followed that up with a three-day rotating strike. Grain workers at the ports of Vancouver struckt, postal workers are moving into a strike position soon, as are college faculty. There are big strikes coming down the pike that socialists have to pay close attention to, because this is where workers get a sense of their own power.