Workers without work:
Building a unified low-income peoples’ movement
by JACQUIE CHIC
For low-wage workers in Canada and around the world, jobs are increasingly precarious. This is the reality of capitalist labour markets where workers are compelled to move from one short-term contract to another. Benefits are non-existent and often the work is dangerous. For the most part, it is women, people of colour, people living with disabilities, recent immigrants and Aboriginal people who are in this frightening predicament.
The statistics are sobering. Based on the latest Census data, Statistics Canada reports that in 2001, compared to the early 1990s, the proportion of high income earners making more than $100,000 rose from 1.8 to 2.7 per cent of all earners. At the same time, 41per cent of all workers and 17 per cent of all full-time, full-year workers made less than $20,000. Recent immigrants’ income significantly declined compared to the Canadian average between 1990 and 2001. The gender gap also stubbornly hung on with men making up 84 per cent of all high earners in 2001.
Those are the workers who have work. When work can’t be found, low-wage workers are forced to navigate an income security system designed to restrict eligibility for meagre “benefits.” A mere quarter of unemployed workers in Ontario qualify for Employment Insurance (EI) benefits. Unemployed workers denied EI turn to social assistance, where the rules are punishing and the rates unliveable.
The instability of the Canadian job market isn’t new. The reality is that, except for a brief period stretching from 1960 to 1990, contingent work and high rates of unemployment have been the norm.
The issue can be characterized as an increasing polarization between the wages and working conditions of those who have permanent full-time jobs and the growing legions of those who work in contract, temporary or part-time jobs.
The burgeoning growth of non-standard work arrangements is the result of conscious strategies invoked by private and public sector employers singing from the hymn book of the International Monetary Fund and other notable representatives of capital. At the core of the issue is a return - not just a shift - to a blatant reverance for the private market, which is seen as a more effective and therefore preferred social regulator than the state. This view of the state as inefficient and undesireable characterizes capitalism through the ages, with the partial exception of the welfare state period that was triggered by the 30 per cent unemployment rates of the Great Depression in the 1930s. The marginal gains workers made during those years are being steadily eroded.
Left without an income or eking out an existence at subsistence levels, unemployed or underemployed workers are exposed to the ongoing risk of losing their housing, their kids, their health and their sanity.
So where’s the resistance across Canada?
In Ontario, important campaigns have sparked interest and garnered attention in the community and beyond. Pay the Rent AND Feed the Kids was initiated by low-income activists in Ottawa. The singular demand was an increase in social assistance rates. Broader in scope, the Ontario Needs a Raise Campaign brings together community and labour activists around the twin demands of an increase in social assistance rates and the minimum wage. More recently, a third demand was added: an end to the clawback of the National Child Benefit Supplement from parents on social assistance.
Campaign leaders conceptualize social assistance recipients and minimum wage workers as related but separate constituencies. So far - perhaps for strategic reasons - there has not been an inclination to characterize both those who require a raise in social assistance rates or the minimum wage as being workers moving between or without work.
Outside the parameters of specific campaigns, there are also groups such as Toronto Organizing for Fair Employment, the Workers Information Centre and Justice for Workers that organize low-income contingent workers. But the organizing is Toronto-specific and has attracted the attention - but not the energy and focus - of the labour movement. Low-income workers’ organizations have not always actively sought out the support of organized labour. This is due to time and resource pressures as well as strategic considerations, but it is also a function of the labour movement keeping its gaze focused almost exclusively on the needs of its members, the majority of whom are not in minimum wage and/or precarious jobs.
In Canada, the reality is that community and labour organizers have preferred to focus on issue-specific campaigns - social assistance rates, the minimum wage, affordable housing - rather than on a more global approach that attacks the problem at its roots: the contest between labour and capital.
There are good and important strategic reasons for doing so. Resources are scarce and levels of impoverishment are so dire that there is a pressing need to respond to the emergencies that confront low-income people in their daily lives. Theorizing about what creates poverty may strike some as important long-term work but not a priority in the pressure cooker of responding to urgent need.
But is it necessary to choose? Unemployed workers rose up to resist the hideous conditions found in the “relief camps” established by Tory Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in the 1930s. Gruesome though they were, the camps were the only buttress against starvation at a time when unemployment insurance and social assistance for single unemployed workers was unavailable.
Unemployed workers forced into the camps formed the Relief Camp Workers Union. The RCWU was affiliated with the militant Communist-led Workers Unity League.
The RCWU went on strike in early 1935. The workers marched to Vancouver, the site of mass demonstrations. In an effort to bring their demands for more jobs and higher wages directly to the federal government, the RCWU workers marched to Ottawa. Over 1,000 strikers left Vancouver on June 3, 1935. Unemployed workers joined the trek along the entire route. By the time the march reached Regina on June 14, about 2,000 workers were on the road.
Increasingly anxious about the mounting resistance, Bennett ordered the RCMP to halt the march. On July 1, 1935 workers were arrested at a large public meeting. This sparked what was dubbed the Regina Riot.
In the wake of the uprising, it became difficult for governments not to at least appear to be responding to the needs of unemployed workers. For the first time, unemployment was spoken of in government circles as being the result of structural rather than personal failings. The unemployment insurance program was the direct result of the resistance as was the introduction of social assistance for single employable unemployed workers.
There is an important lesson embedded in the story of the RCWU. Capital and its public and private representatives felt they had no choice but to respond because the resistance squarely took on the contest between capital and labour.
Highlighting unemployment in our organizing efforts allows us to expose the frailties of capitalism. I offer some questions that I hope will spark discussion:
*How can we persuade the labour movement to organize among precariously employed workers? There is wide recognition of the impact the minimum wage has on bargaining unit salaries, but for the most part, there is an unwillingness to make organizing unemployed and precariously employed workers a priority.
*How can we introduce the significance of labour market conditions into campaigns focused on social assistance recipients, tenants and other more narrowly defined groups without losing the immediacy of demands centred on rates, the minimum wage, affordable housing, etc.?
*With or without a general strike, what should unemployed workers be demanding? A more reliable, accessible and adequate unemployment insurance program and, more broadly, a fair income security system are just the tip of the iceberg. Job creation and full employment are likely on the list, but what are the specifics of those demands? What else do we need to be talking about?
Social assistance recipients, people receiving workers’ compensation, Canada Pension and employment insurance benefits share a common identity as unemployed workers. Focusing on the commonality has the potential to unify and expand a low-income people’s movement. If our organizing efforts fail to focus on the core issue of the relationship between capital and labour, perhaps we inadvertently participate in the sham that capital so skillfully perpetrates. ★
Jacquie Chic is a low-income activist and lawyer in Toronto.