(Shunpiking Online)
7 April 2004 -- In the largest such mass action in its history, Newfoundland's
20,000 public sector workers went out on strike April 1st.
Up until negotiations
ended March 31st, the main union, the Newfoundland Association of Public
Employees (NAPE), supported by a sister public-sector union the Canadian
Union of Public Employees (CUPE), had been seeking a four-year contract
incorporating a wage freeze for the first two years, followed by four
three-per-cent increases in each April and October of the last two years.
With the failure to reach a new agreement, acceptance of the wage-freeze
concession was withdrawn. On April 1 over 4,000
workers marched onConfederation Building. Union members are demonstrating
daily outside the Confederation Building (where the provincial legislature
and head offices of government departments are housed), have set up dozens
of pickets at all the main government services depots, and withdrawn non-medical
staff from hospitals. The union leadership
earlier won a 91-per-cent strike mandate from the membership. Even the
blatantly anti-strike media admitted the strike enjoyed a 75-per-cent
level of support among all sections of the province's population. Clearly
this strike is absolutely just in the eyes of public opinion inside and
beyond the unions. It is "shocking" only to the province's premier,
Danny Williams, and diehard supporters of the government's line, that
the union is not ordering a vote on either of the government's contract
offers. These are both premised on an initial two-year wage freeze, followed
by either five per cent per year for two more years, or eight percent
for three more years. The breaking of the
social contract with the public sectors workers is not unique in Canada.
Industrial and public sector workers are under fire in every province.
Capitalists have unleashed an anti-labour offensive to increase their
claim on the social product. Part of the anti-labour offensive is ideological
and takes place in the mass media. The hyperbolic, overheated atmosphere
of hysteria from the government and the media went into high gear the
moment the workers established picket lines. As a blackmail pressure
against its own workers, the government brought down its budget two days
before the strike deadline, in which it announced it planned to eliminate
up to 1,000 positions across the public sector this year, and up to 6,000
positions over the next four years. In addition the Premier spoke of laying
off approximately 2 000 workers this summer. Retirees are also under attack.
The government told retirees that it intended to renege on its commitment
to contribute one per cent to the pension plan to help fund indexing for
provincial government retirees over the age of 65. By the second day
of the strike, the province's largest-circulation newspaper, The Telegram
-- part of the giant Transcontinental monopoly which laid off 100 workers
in Kentville and Yarmouth, NS, where it shut down two printing plants
on March 26 -- printed a prominent notice declaring that it would turn
over its pages to anti-strike stories. "Telegram reporter Barb Sweet
would like to hear from anyone who has been impacted by the province's
public sector strike in any way through such things as delays in health-care
service, cancelled surgeries, cancelled or delayed exams, transportation
problems, Just what have the
media sniffed out? The Premier they dubbed "Danny Millions"
relishes his buccaneer image as "King of Cable" (television)
in the province. He has no shame about owning shares in such fellow buccaneering
operations as Wackenhut. This is the private security outfit in the U.S.
that followed the path opened up by the notorious Pinkerton Agency in
supplying giant multinationals with labour spies and strikebreaking "replacement
workers", that runs private prisons for profit in several states
(in the mid-1990s it briefly entertained the possibility of operating
a chain of them for the Harris government in Ontario), and that has been
"consulted" by the U.S. Homeland Security department about "further
professionalising" airport security, and by the Defense Department
about the contracting of mercenaries for U.S. occupations in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The premier himself
has personally thrown down the gauntlet at the working class. For this
premier, and for the media who have uttered not a peep about these unsavoury
connections, there is no shame about manipulating information in order
to paint Newfoundland government employees as "terrorist" over
an incident in which, two days before the strike and hours after the delivery
of the proposed budget, his son was beaten up outside a bar by an individual
with no union connections. In full "independent entrepreneur"
mode, and pretending the workers have no organisation of their own, the
Premier appeared on Day One of the strike at one picket line, presenting
directly to the workers various negotiation "nuances", percentage
promises and other arithmetic sleight-of-hand that 'your leaders failed
to explain'." The budget with no
money and the strike with no solution unfolded on the 55th anniversary
of Newfoundland's entry into Confederation, the "great salvation"
(J.R. Smallwood's phrase) with no future. The rich and their system, represented
by the government and the media, have no solutions except to take more
and more out of the workers' hides for redistribution amongst their class.
The Williams script is as tiresome and predictable in its outcome as all
that preceded it: the saga of Smallwood in which the working people could
play mute walk-ons but suffer police billy-clubs and jail for daring to
organise, the morass of corruption under Frank Moores, the oil-soaked
pie-in-the-sky promises of Brian Peckford, the tale of the turbot starring
Tobin the tout followed by the outbreak of utter chaos in provincial finance
and its grim aftermath of Roger Grimes' massive social spending cuts.
No Newfoundland worker is in any doubt as to whether those arithmetic
lessons at the picket line will address how many thousands of Newfoundlanders
should be packing for Alberta or elsewhere in search of livelihood as
yet another premier gangster mounts the stage to further loot the people's
land, labour and resources on behalf of multinational corporations, Canadian
and foreign. This strike struggle
is a moment of reality not to be found anywhere on any television channel,
including Premier Williams' cable networks. Like the definition supplied
by a Bay Bulls fisherman of the "the upper crust" as "a
bunch of crumbs held together by dough", this reality is one that
is all too familiar among the working people. What has broken out in Newfoundland
is a moment in the class struggle that leaves no room for anyone to be
neutral. The workers are standing fast because they sense, correctly,
that concessions are not solutions!
Newfoundland public sector on strike since April 1
...
etc."
The Telegram was in full frenzy, inciting mass hysteria, editorialising
that "horrible things are about to happen ... Someone may die because
services are unavailable, delayed or diminished..." It advised people
against standing for what is just and opposing what is unjust and instead
do "whatever you can to make sure [horrible things] don't happen
to you, and do your best to make sure you don't add to the problems that
are clearly on the way". ("Hoping the worst doesn't happen",
2 April, 2004). The lurid and seamy propaganda demonising the workers'
"uncaring unconcern" for the fate of "the public"
began to churn. The claims of the government employees are depicted in
dark, negative terms as a drain on the economy and an impediment to future
growth and prosperity.
