Toronto Labour Council, the $10 Minimum Wage & Organizing the Organized
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The Toronto & York Region Labour Council, representing 195,000 unionized workers in the Greater Toronto Area, is throwing it’s weight behind the campaign to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour which has ebbed and flowed over the last six years. Their decision to do so comes as Ontario NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo had her $10 miminum-wage Bill 150 pass second reading. Third reading is set for March 19, and the provincial elections are coming on Oct 10, 2007. So, there are a couple upcoming political flashpoints for the Council to organize around.
I think a number of us are asking ourselves just what this is all about for the Council. True, Labour Council has been undergoing a reformation over the last few years, responding to calls from communities of colour for a more multiracial representation in the leadership. As the council gets on board this minimum wage campaign, they are also saying their goal is to ‘organize the organized’, to reach out to the 195,000 workers, who are indirectly represented by Labour Council via their unions’ membership, and, well, to do just that, to ‘reach down to the roots’. What remains unclear is just what the leadership wants to do with these workers they’re reaching down to, let alone how they’re going to do it.
Take the $10 campaign for example. The council has a whack of ‘town halls’ planned for different Toronto neighbourhoods over the coming weeks. According to the Labour Council President, John Cartwright, they are educational opportunities for community people, as well as a chance to have their voices heard. What’s not at all clear—to me or, as Cartwright admitted in a recent meeting, to him either—is how low-waged community people will become involved the campaign, in an organizied way that is not just symbolic but has the financial, political and admin support behind them so they actually direct and become the campaign leadership. In my experience in the early days of the $10 an hour campaign a number of years ago, low-waged workers don’t need a whole lot of education that their situation is unjust and untenable; they need a solid social movement behind them to organize to change it.
What is also not clear from Cartwright or campaign materials is how the links are being made between these town halls and the low-waged unionized workers that make up a chunk of the 195,000. Just imagine if efforts went into mobilizing any unionized worker in Toronto, hell, in Ontario, who makes around $10 an hour or less. Imagine focusing on those folks who are in bargaining right now or about to go into bargaining. The minimum wage campaign could be a powerful catalyst to those workers to actually go on strike, which could in turn make this into a street-level movement by bringing out community people to the picket lines to really threaten the employers in hotels, factories, grocery stores and other low-waged service-work. Active relationships could also be developed with the Workers Action Centre, a grassroots, non-unionized, low-waged workers’ rights organization. Then community-based meetings could have a tangible, material link between the low-waged unionized workplace and where people, unionized or not, live and/or work. Then those ‘town halls’ could be truly organizing meetings that Labour Council puts its resources at the service of.
There’s a fundamental challenge here for Labour Council with this kind of thing and I’m quite sure Cartwright is well aware of it: the union officials and staff who control bargaining, service provision and the whole union environment for most workers would not exactly be ecstatic about their memberships being so politically organized, about them taking control of negotiations, directing bargaining and actually going on strike. That is not generally the way the business of unionism is done these days, and it hasn’t been for a long time. So, if Labour Council were to take such militant steps to link their $10 online petitions, press conferences and town halls with organizing the organized, they could well find some very pissed off officials threatening to pull their support—that is, their unions’ dollars—from the Council.
But you can’t seriously change top-down functioning to bottom-up without taking such risks. And, while it is important that all our organizations have leaderships representative of our populations, if a few workers of colour are just being elected to council here and there, without the majority having real decision-making power in their work or community lives, then anti-racist organizing is stopping at much-needed yet quite limited anti-racist reforms.
And if we want to win this campaign—which we must—and we think it’s unlikely that the bill we be passed on March 19—which many of us probably do—it’s a bottom-up, community & workplace-based strategy that’s going to get us there.
This article appeared originally at Left Queries.
Here are some upcoming Town Halls in Toronto if you want to talk with folks or get involved:
· Etobicoke North Community: Saturday February 17th, 2007 @ 1:00 p.m.
Microskills, 1 Vulcan St., (corner of Martingrove & Vulcan)
· Thorncliffe Community: Tuesday February 20th, 2007 @ 7:00 p.m.
18 Thorncliffe Park Dr., Youth Centre
(behind the mall, Thorncliffe & Overlea Blvd.)
· Jane - Finch Community: Tuesday February 27th, 2007 @ 7:00 p.m.
San Romano Way Revitalization Association Community Centre
10 San Romano Way, ground floor, north wing
· Malvern - Scarborough Community: Tuesday March 6th, 2007 @ 7:00 p.m.
Malvern Youth Community, Scott Westney Community House
180 McLevin Ave.
Childcare is available. Please call a couple of days prior to the meeting to
advise if needed.
Contacts:
Julius Deutsch, Labour Council, (416) 441-3663 ext. 225 or
jdeutsch@labourcouncil.ca
Judy Vashti Persad, Labour Council, (416) 441-3663 ext. 224 or jpersad@labourcouncil.ca
