236 | Great Recession-Proof?: Shattering the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism Beyond the Economic Crisis: the Crisis in trade unionism — Sam Gindin1 The earlier contributions to this collection might be summarized as warning us that that things are going to get a lot worse before they get… worse.2 This is not just a matter of the sustained attacks on the labour move- ment but as much a reflection of the crisis within labour. For some three decades now, labour has been stumbling on, unable to organizationally or ideologically rebut the attacks summarized as ‘neoliberalism’. Though the Great Financial Crisis held out the promise of finally exposing the right and its supporters and potentially opening the door to a union offensive and possible revival, the attacks on labour in actuality intensified and labour continues to have no coherent counter-response. As a prelude to directly addressing that impasse in labour, it is useful to begin with some- thing that Greg Albo (2012) posed in his presentation to the conference forerunner to this collection: What is the larger historical significance of this particular crisis? Though cyclical downturns are common in capitalism, structural crises are of relatively rare occurrence, generally separated by a generation or so (30 years or more).3 Such crises reflect social and institutional barriers that block capitalism’s normal continuation, and the question for capital and its governments then becomes what, if anything, might take capitalism to a new stage that allows for the resumption of its drive. For example, the outcome of the crisis that began at the end of the 1960s and ran through the 1 Sam Gindin retired from the Canadian Auto Workers’ union in 2000 after 27 years on staff, the last 16 as assistant to the President. From 2001 through 2011 he was the Visiting Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University, Toronto. 2 See also the presentations from the conference: The Global Economic Crisis and Canadian Austerity: Perception Versus Reality available at http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/ pages/view/Video 3 It is common to identify three structural crises in capitalism before the latest one: the first occurring in the last quarter of the 19th century, the second introduced by the 1929 stock market crash and lasting through the 1930s, the third breaking out in the late 1960s and running through the 1970s. See Panitch and Gindin, 2011. Beyond the Economic Crisis | 237 1970’s was first and foremost that the earlier strength of labour was broken. As well, finance was liberalized, globalization was accelerated, and the state was restructured – not weakened or withdrawn - to the end of establishing more autonomy from popular pressures and therefore actually emerging stronger in terms of supporting private accumulation. The resolution of that crisis, in short, set the conditions and contradictions that frame the crisis we face today (Panitch and Gindin, 2012). Four aspects of this present crisis seem especially significant. First, in spite of the domestic and international turmoil there has been remark- ably little challenge to globalization and free trade. Contrast this with the last time we had a crisis this deep, in the 1930’s, when protectionist sentiments were strong and common, and capitalism as an international system seemed threatened. Yet today, no country has placed exiting global capitalism on the agenda.4 The issue, rather, is that with global- ization taken for granted, how can crises, particularly the financial crises linked to the expansion of global capitalism, be contained (i.e. managed). This brings us to a second facet of the crisis. In spite of a general understanding that private bankers and other financial institutions were responsible for the crisis, the solution to the crisis is not to weaken but strengthen them and to develop the state capacities to contain – not end - future volatility. We need to understand this not as a matter of stupidity or corruption (though both play a role!), but as a reflection of the struc- tural importance of finance to capitalism as a whole. We often separate finance from the rest of the system and describe it as a speculative parasite (Jim Stanford (2012, in an otherwise valuable presentation, tended to do this as well). But if that were the case, we should have expected divisions within the capitalist class with the rest of capital, suffering in terms of stag- nating markets, ready to join the attack on finance. Instead, there has been remarkably little evidence of splits between financial capital and the rest. This reflects the extent to which finance and industry are in fact tightly integrated. It is not so much that large industrial corporations need daily credit since they have more profits and cash than they know what to do with but rather the importance of credit to mergers and restructuring, the need on the part of global corporations for special- ized financial services to ease trade and limit exchange rate risks and other uncertainties, the discipline financial markets impose on workers, states, and capital itself to be true to the priorities of profits and private 4 Even in Greece, Syriza (the leading left opposition group) has emphasized the need to modify, not transform, Greece’s relationship to the international economy and has posed exit from the Euro not as a goal, but as a reluctant option if the counter-productive austerity pressures continue. 238 | Great Recession-Proof?: Shattering the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism capital accumulation, and - in the case of the US - its special access to the world’s savings. The contradiction lies in the fact that on the one hand all of capital would like finance to be less volatile and more orderly, but they don’t want to see it regulated to the point that they lose the advan- tages that global finance has brought them. A third aspect of the crisis is, as Greg Albo (2012) emphasized, the tendencies across countries towards a more authoritarian state. This has been most dramatic in Europe where external institutions have placed ‘technical experts’ at the head of government to carry out ‘reforms’ but is also seen in the legislation essentially trying to outlaw protest in the student strike in Quebec. This is part of a more general trend towards states gaining more autonomy from the electorate to do what’s neces- sary for capital accumulation. And it has especially emerged in regard to the fourth aspect, downsizing social services and attacking public sector unions, generally the last standing bastion of trade unionism. In this regard, the story of labour’s defeat doesn’t go back just to the 1970’s but to the immediate postwar period when the left inside and outside the labour movement was marginalized. In spite of that defeat, trade unionism was able to make gains, real gains, for a while. But that defeat of the left came with a loss of capacities critical to understanding, strategizing, and mobilizing. And when capitalism changed and now identified past labour gains as a barrier to continued progress, labour no longer had the capacity to resist. So the second defeat of labour, taking place through the 1980’s and 1990’s, shifted from that of a small but influential left to trade unionism as a whole, especially the private sector. Today, capital is trying to consolidate and complete that defeat by going after the public sector and ensuring that it does not inspire any positive examples for private sector workers. A central aspect of this three decades long assault on the labour movement has been a profound lowering of expectations. The intensi- fication of competition from the Third World seems to have set bound- aries on worker demands, even though most of our trade is still with the developed countries and most workers are now employed in private and public services, sectors not directly limited by trade. Greater globaliza- tion seemed to place possible government responses beyond the reach of domestic politics, even though it was states that endorsed globalization (and can potentially also check it). The state-endorsed defeats workers suffered left many of them angry but still redefining what might be con- sidered ‘success’. The world we criticized so strongly a short while ago was now looked back on with nostalgia. Beyond the Economic Crisis | 239 Herman Rosenfeld (2012; this issue) captures this shift when he asks why responses that seemed so obvious in an earlier era are now so out of bounds (like rejecting a plant takeover at Caterpillar in contrast to the takeover, with less provocation, in the early 1990s). This shift in what is possible in terms of both goals and tactics highlights the cultural change in the labour movement. Talk to any worker and you don’t have to con- vince them that capitalism doesn’t work for them. They know that, but believe they just can’t do anything about it. Confidence in resistance, let alone change, is at an all-time low. Fatalism is now the dominant mood and the main barrier to fighting back. To some the stagnation of trade unions is often explained in terms of bureaucratization and the thin democracy characteristic of unions (even though relative to other institutions, unions democracy still compares very favorably). But as significant as such aspects are, they do not get to the core of the ‘union problem’. As Steve Tufts and Mark Thomas (2012) noted in terms of their discussion of populism, you can have a very militant and democratic movement but it can also end up being very particularistic (‘mil- itant particularism’, in the phrase used by Raymond Williams (1989) and elaborated by David Harvey (1996)). Workers can, for example, demand militancy but also insist that their union concentrate entirely and narrowly on defending the workers that finance its operations and not only ignore the plight of other workers such as the poor or new immigrants and even join in the attacks on them. Such sectionalism highlights the fact that though unions emerged out of the working class, they are not class organizations in the sense of representing the class as a whole. That sectionalism is directly tied to the issue of bureaucratization and limited democracy. If members see their unions as insurance agencies – instrumental organizations paid for by dues – they won’t be looking for more participation but only that they get the service ‘contracted for’. Correspondingly, leaders don’t see much priority in developing and mobilizing the capacities of workers – never mind raising expectations and putting more pressure on themselves – and so look to developing only that level of democracy, tempered by ‘loyalty’, to achieve a level of gains that doesn’t undermine their leadership. There was a time when that narrow solidarity of unions didn’t hinder unions all that much; they made gains and those gains even spread to other workers and the community. But that era is over. The notion that workers can survive and defend past achievements, let alone make new gains, through just looking after their own with no larger understanding of the common attacks all workers face and their mutual dependence 240 | Great Recession-Proof?: Shattering the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism on the rest of the working class, is now daily exposed. Absent a class perspective unions can today neither defend their members nor come to grips with how to renew themselves. Consider organizing. Only a broader sense of building the class will lead to the commitment of resources and voluntary energy to unionize in the present hostile climate. Moreover, making breakthroughs in the new sectors where the majority of workers are now employed is unlikely to occur without cooperation across unions. The present competition for union dues dollars blocks such cooperation and ends up undermining each union. It too can only come from recognizing that the issue isn’t the growth of any particular institution – Canadian Auto Workers, United Steel Workers, Canadian Union of Public Employees or Ontario Public Service Employees Union – but that of building the working class as a social force. And it is only when we start from the class perspective that other creative approaches, like bringing individual workers into a union culture whether or not they have a bargaining unit. 5 Or consider bargaining. In the 2012 round of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) bargaining with the city of Toronto, individual CUPE locals bargained with the municipal state. It was obvious enough that the bargaining had ramifications for all CUPE members and of course workers beyond CUPE. Yet there was no explicit acknowledgment that individual locals can’t win against the state and that coordination across the union – itself a step towards winning other workers and their com- munities over - was paramount. A coordinated strategy might have put the library workers, the workers with the greatest support, first out of the gate. It might have then contemplated selective tactical strikes, escalating to mass mobilizations and eventually bringing in the rest of the public sector while also mobilizing the community around the services provided. The point is that the only way union renewal can happen in the public sector, is to recognize what workers are up against, the extent to which the state’s focus is on isolating them, that it is the state itself and not ‘an employer’ the union is fighting, and establish itself as the leader in the fight to defend and expand social services. This is not easy; it requires a transformation of everything about public sector unions. It is not a matter of simply passing strong resolutions and putting up expensive billboards. The public is – understandably - too cynical to be moved by public relations alone. 5 The Canadian Auto Workers and Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, in preparation for their merger, recently announced their enthusiasm for such an approach. See CAW-CEP, 2012 Beyond the Economic Crisis | 241 Rather, it means rethinking union strategic priorities, rethinking the role of staff and their subsequent training, and coming to see union mem- bers as potential organizers for moving the public and shifting research and education to that end. It means not just defensively insisting that the public sector is ‘good’ but also being at the forefront of criticizing its bureaucratization and waste through acting as whistleblowers actively defending the public. And it even means moving to place the level, quality and administration of social services on the bargaining table (in the last municipal strike, for example, might not the municipal workers have emerged more successful, with greater protection for their mem- bers, if their primary bargaining demand – the one they might strike for – was keeping garbage services public rather than handing them over to profit-hungry and service-poor multinational corporations?). Finally, it means creatively addressing the contradiction that traditional strike tactics now isolate workers from the public while it is so crucial to win that public over: e.g. dumping garbage during strikes not in parks but on Bay street to make the connection between austerity and finance; con- tinuing bus service but not collecting fares; delivering, as CUPW did in the 1990s, pension and welfare checks even though on strike.6 A class perspective is likewise central to union renewal in the private sector. Here the fundamental issue revolves around jobs. The function of unions is to negotiate the sale of labour power yet the greatest concern of workers is something unions have little or no input into – the existence of jobs in the first place. Unless unions can deal with workers’ prime concern, union renewal can’t happen and even the bargaining posi- tion of unions will be further eroded as workers, facing the alternative of indefinite unemployment or a very much inferior level of pay and benefits, end up vulnerable to making concessions in a vain attempt to protect their jobs.7 A number of things follow from any emphasis on seriously dealing with the jobs issue. Toby Sanger (2012; this issue) flagged one of them in noting that in not adequately reinvesting its profits in decent jobs, the private sector is openly admitting that it can’t provide decent jobs 6 For a discussion of such an alternative strike tactics, which at least set the stage for when traditional strikes become necessary, see Hurley and Gindin, 2012. 7 One particular concession that reflects the logic of thinking instrumentally and under- mines even the internal solidarity in unions is passing concessions on to future workers by agreeing to lower wages for new hires (as recently occurred at the Lear Siegler plant in Kitchener). This not only undercuts the union principle of equal pay for equal work but open the way for the next generation of workers using that ‘lesson’ to in turn betray retirees. And since the very first experience of the very workers on whom union revival will critically depend is to see unionism at its least solidaristic, it virtually guarantees its failure. 242 | Great Recession-Proof?: Shattering the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism for everyone. Jobs must therefore depend on an expanded public sector, including into spaces that were formerly seen as inherently private. That is, it’s not just a matter of keeping health care in the public domain and not outsourcing it, but also thinking in new ways about sectors like auto. For one thing, we can’t build new alliances if we’re calling for subsidies for GM and the rest of the industry while social services are being cut. Moreover, those subsidies won’t, as we’ve seen deliver jobs because pro- ductivity in the auto industry keeps rising while the market is limited – and a push for far ‘more cars’ is also not a viable strategy given the already overwhelming traffic congestion and environmental concerns. On the other hand there is enormous productive capacity in all of those facilities and worker skills; they can make the widest range of things that we do need. What needs to be placed on the agenda, by unions above all, is the waste of closing them when they could be converted to producing socially useful goods, starting with the environment. Taking the environmental crisis seriously means the entire material foundation of society will have to be changed: the transportation and communica- tion infrastructure, the machinery and tools in every factory, the con- struction of homes and appliances, offices and equipment - everything. This means explicitly talking about preserving our productive potential not GM and Ford, planning instead of competition, asking about social utility not profit. We obviously can’t win this right now, but it poses the question of how we organize today so this becomes a real option down the road. As radical as this sounds it’s worth remembering that in the Second World War, Canada and the US demonstrated a aston- ishing capacity to convert facilities in a remarkably short time and then reconvert them again after the war. As fundamental as internal changes are to union renewal, this is only a step to changing the external environment facing workers. And in this regard, we can’t just lament the power of the financial system over our lives and occasional shale our fists at them. We need to question why, in an allegedly democratic society, they stand above us – profiting enor- mously in good times, blackmailing us to bail them out in bad, and always insisting that what is good for banks should frame public policy. If they are in fact to be treated as having the weight of essentially being ‘public utilities’, they should be taken over and become democratic public utilities. This is not just a matter of ideology; it is a practical issue. If we really want to convert industry, if we really want to defend the public sector, if we want to chart what kind of society we want to have, controlling finance is a precondition. Otherwise, we’ll remain in the Beyond the Economic Crisis | 243 trap of catering to them and being disciplined by them whether it’s in the workplace or in terms of government policy. Here again, taking on such a fundamental part of the Canadian power establishment is not something that will happen just because we assert its need. But unless we begin to talk about it now, educate around it and mobilize for it, it will always be out of reach. In criticizing the labour movement for its failure to change, it is vital to understand this as being as much a failure of the left itself; the crisis of labour and that of the left go hand in hand. There’s a strong case to be made that we will not see a renewal of the labour movement unless there’s also simultaneously a renewal of the left. It seems clear enough that in spite of some positive developments, the leadership of the trade union movement has neither the inclination nor capacity to radically transform their organizations while the membership is too fragmented and too overwhelmed to sustain anything but the occasional sporadic rebellion. For rank and file workers to do more will require the resources and support from a left with feet both inside and outside unions that can link workers across workplaces, clarify what workers face and why a class response is critical to what workers now face. What, more specifi- cally, might be done? One initiative that came out of the crisis was the establishment of the Greater Toronto Workers Assembly. It was inspired by two realities. First, that the formation of a new socialist party was simply not on the agenda until a stronger labour base was laid. Second, the fact that, as noted ear- lier, out of the last comparable crisis – the Depression of the 1930s - a new form of working class organization was born and this pointed to the challenge today. The craft unionism that dominated working class organization at that time was inadequate to what workers faced and in a remarkable act of working class creativity, industrial unionism emerged as a dynamic alternative. Today we need to think just as honestly and creatively about whether unions in their present form are adequate. It’s not that unions are going to disappear; they will continue to soldier on and occasionally demonstrate their potential, but on their own unions are simply not enough to deal with what workers face. The Greater Toronto Worker Assembly was an attempt to think about a form of working class organization that could support union renewal but also act beyond unions.8 It was anti-capitalist, not a coalition but organiza- tion of individuals looking for another kind of politics that was class based. It defined class very broadly to include not just the minority of 8 See www.workersassembly.ca 244 | Great Recession-Proof?: Shattering the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism workers who are unionized, but the unemployed, the poor, and low- wage non-union workers. And it included all the dimensions of our lives that reflect class outside of the workplace. One especially important goal of the Assembly in terms of union renewal – one it remains a long way from achieving – was to establish networks of activists across workplaces. This might take the form of fight back committees in every local that are focused on educating their own members, establishing links to the community, and engaging in joint solidarity actions.9 The role of the Assembly would be to facilitate the formation of such committees, contribute to organizing the cross- workplace educationals and training, hold forums where experiences could be shared and generally support the development of groups of activists who, among other things, would also fight to inject a class per- spective into their unions (Gindin, 2012). Let me conclude with three observations. First, the argument that ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) is actually true in the sense that moderate options simply can’t stand up to what we today face in capitalism. Options have been radicalized and we need to recognize and confidently assert is that the radical is now the only thing that’s practical. Directly related to this, we now have to think bigger even to win small. Even if we just hoped to defend what we have, the lesson of the past quarter century is clearly that tinkering around the edges or being modest will protect us. Either we think more radically and bigger or things will continue to get worse. Finally, what we face is an organizational barrier. If we understand the inactivity of workers as reflecting their fatalism, their sense that nothing can be done, then this can only be addressed by concretely demonstrating the potentials of organized collective action. Workers aren’t inherently radical and they’re not inherently conservative; they adapt to the structured options they face. Once they are con- vinced that organizations exist that hold out some confidence that struggle can change things, even if that will take time, workers will be there. It’s in this regard that the socialist Left has failed over the last quarter-century, and it is this organizational challenge that identifies the principal current challenge for the left. 9 A group of locals in the airline industry in Toronto (including locals from the Interna- tional Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the CAW and CUPE) have been working together with some other non-airline locals (particularly in the municipal sector) to support each other in conflicts, do joint educationals, and strategize. Beyond the Economic Crisis | 245 REFEREnCES Albo, G. (2012, March 23). The State and Exists From the Crisis. Conference Presentation. The Global Economic Crisis and Canada Austerity, Alternate Routes, Ryerson University. http://www.alternateroutes.ca/ index.php/ar/pages/view/Global%20Economic%20 Crisis%20%26%20 Canadian%20Austerity CAW-CEP. (2012, August). 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