The advent of CERB and the hype surrounding the prospect of a Basic Income was never about replacing EI. CERB and its successor, CRB, was setup as distinct from EI not because of some overwhelming technical-bureaucratic problem, but because they were temporary measures designed to keep our shit-awful EI system untouched and intact once the temporary measures were gone and the height of the pandemic crash of spring 2020 was over.
It was a classic case of "things must change in order for them to stay the same". The same things happened with the grocery cartel's awarding and repeal of hero pay. It was designed to weather the pandemic crash and solve the labour force crisis, not fundamentally alter pre-pandemic balance of power and distribution of wealth.
The circumvention of any substantial and lasting EI reform during the pandemic has been one of the great triumphs of the Canadian elite, and is a window into how Canada's ruling class have conducted themselves on most critical programs. The major exception appears to be childcare, and now pharmacare, but these are the exceptions and cannot be reduced to the crisis of March-May 2020. We must look at "the rule" in detail, and EI is revealing in how this rule was followed under a Liberal minority government.
The political functions of CEWS and CERB
At the start of the pandemic there was a real opening to press substantial EI demands. Consider the rapid transformation of the political situation and mass consciousness around questions of collective health and safety, essential workers, and the recognition of labour as the underpinning of the whole edifice.
But the traditional vehicles of social change - organized labour and social democratic party - proved to be unwilling or incapable of pressing the advantage due to other priorities.
Rather than press for major EI reform, the three major private sector unions (UFCW, Steel, Unifor) joined with the NDP and the union-busting CFIB to lobby Trudeau for wage subsidies, resulting in the immensely corrupt CEWS.
Not only was this effort in lieu of EI reform, but the effort was also divided with the advent of CERB which cynical politicians like Rae and Singh argued was some kind of opening to a federal Basic Income program.
With even figures like Sid Ryan claiming EI reform was hopeless, the Liberals moved ahead with NDP and labour support to avoid EI through the creation of CEWS and CERB. EI, it was claimed, was impossible to restructure in these circumstances. These claims went unchallenged and by the fall of 2020 as CERB was superseded by CRB and there was growing evidence that the great bureaucratic hurdle of EI reform was a big fiction.
Labour disruption tactics
The iron was red hot in those first two months of the pandemic and it was the time to forge a new EI system. This would have required a real fight, and organized labour would have had to be relatively well-prepared to do so. But as the saying goes, "you go to war with the army you have", and the truth is organized labour is in quite a sorry state when it comes to fighting a war (labour can fight battles, but there is no sign it can fight a protracted multi-front, multi-union war).
The kinds of pressure required to push for reform in that uncertain time had to be highly disruptive. It is the kind of action we don't see anymore and died in the 1990s and early 2000s with the catastrophic defeats of labour at the hand of hard-right neocon governments but also the betrayals and co-options of the NDP governments, especially in the labour heartlands of BC and Ontario.
No fantastical general strike was needed. The war could have been waged through a very simple and I would think obvious approach: coordinating health and safety work refusals and moving towards flying pickets to expand the disruption. But neither the existing union leadership nor the left inside labour was in any place to do so. Divisions and dysfunction at the top of labour are deep. The strength of left networks in the middling and lower ranks of labour are extremely small and dispersed, and often concentrated around union staff, and not among workers on the shopfloor.
The iron soon cooled with CERB and CEWS in place by early April. The defeat really set in with the failure of any kind of job action in the meatpacking plants across the country (not just Alberta). With Cargill workers marching back to work in early May, the defeat had set in. It was really all over when the grocery cartel coordinated the pandemic pay cut in mid-June without the major grocery unions - UFCW and Unifor - having prepared and unrolled any campaign to defend the pay raise. A contract strike among Loblaws workers in Newfoundland in late 2020 was sold down the river by Unifor - a deal being "accepted" by the members without the results ever being revealed to members by either the union or the company.
Disruption through work refusals would have required a set of limited demands. PPE access, immediate (no penalty) EI access, and paid sick days might have provided a credible set of limited workplace demands to organize and act around.
The Politics of Paid Sick Days
With CERB and CEWS, there was enough political capital built up to ignore the demands for paid sick days which did, initially, come from organized labour in March 2020. However, as the defeat set in through May, BC's NDP was preparing to gamble on winning a majority government. Rather than take a lead an implement paid sick days and alienate business, Premier John Horgan proposed kicking paid sick days up to the federal level through the EI program (which, we were told, is impossible to reform!).
Singh soon declared in late May that he had secured paid sick days for all Canadians. These paid sick days were not delivered until the CRSB program came online in October 2020 and was correctly denounced by paid sick days advocates as insufficient and unresponsive to immediate needs. Horgan, meanwhile, won his majority.
As the much larger second wave began to peak in December and January, a new push for provincially-mandated paid sick days was deflected by premiers like Doug Ford on the grounds that the federal program was in place. In other words, the Horgan-Singh-Trudeau effort to establish federal paid sick days became a cudgel through which the Ontario NDP's paid sick days bill was beaten back.
Ford didn't even flinch when the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and CFIB supported the ONDP's paid sick days bill. Explaining the business lobby's total 180 on paid sick days was the fine print in the Ontario NDP bill: paid sick days would be funded by the public, not employers. In other words, Ontario workers would be financing their own paid sick days.
Labour and the paid sick days campaigns
By the 3rd wave in spring 2021, some provinces brought in measly and temporary paid sick days programs. Only in BC did a permanent paid sick days program get implemented. It halved labour's demand of 10 paid sick days, allows employers to demand sick notes (despite medical professionals saying this is a burden on the healthcare system and counterproductive), and strictly limited to being sick (they are not PEL or Personal Emergency Leave days). And they are financed by the public - working-class taxpayers - not employers.
A critical missing element in the entire pandemic paid sick days fight has been that of job action, and organized rank-and-file worker involvement more generally. The public face of the campaign in Ontario was that of medical professionals. This played a significant role in securing support from sections of the mainstream media, notably the Toronto Star, as a broader liberal consensus around "trusting the experts" was being forged in response to the rising agitation of Ontario's anti-lockdown movement.
Where paid sick days were central to labour battles, as in the case of the February-July 2021 Fenner Dunlop lockout in Bracebridge, Ontario, there was no bridge between unions and the Toronto-based paid sick days campaign. Without visible union involvement and the labour muscle of rank-and-file workers, the paid sick days campaigns during the pandemic were contained to traditional lobbying efforts. Furthermore, if the campaign had been taken up by non-union workers, it would have opened up new possibilities in terms of action and effectiveness.
Assessments, resistance and rebuilding
What would the pandemic have looked like if there was some kind of sustained and strategic effort to use coordinated work refusals in the first weeks of shit kicking off? It is impossible to say, but we'd be drawing out some lessons based on experience as opposed to speculating what might have been. The labour brass would have also had far more leverage at the bargaining table for social program and labour reforms. Of course, this would have required a labour leadership willing to pursue this route of disruption in the first place. Clearly this wasn't going to "come from the top", and no leaders proved willing to seize on the work refusals that did happen and transform them into something coordinated, strategic and threatening to the employer class.
We are two years on in the pandemic and organized labour is still in disarray and flat-footed. We've seen very regressive political courting of the right in Canada, from the unions collaborating with the CFIB for a corrupt "wage" subsidy program (which labour has done fuck all about despite bankrolling union-busting efforts, like the 21-month CESSCO lockout in Edmonton), to Unifor, OPSEU and SIU cozying up to Doug Ford around some shitty labour crumbs. Hassan Yussuff's senate appointment and Dias's downfall is a massive black eye for labour. Outside the one-day AUPE wildcat in October 2020, there is no sign of a real fightback in healthcare and an effort to defy strike bans that unions should assert are a violation of Supreme Court rulings.
And so here we are. But there are many silver linings. There is a willingness to fight among workers, and where strikes and lockouts are happening, lines are solid. Inflation is likely going to add fuel to the subterranean fire of private sector strikes that has spread through Ontario manufacturing since early 2021, as well as the resource sector. There are new signs of life in organizing, with cleaners in Vancouver and new breakthroughs in retail in southern Ontario, and new commitments to organize food couriers and Amazon workers. Faculty strikes and agitation among education workers are signs that the public sector unions' freeze on job action is thawing.
There are many new young workers who have been radicalized in this process and have turned to unions as a means of fighting back, including young workers and radicals entering unionized sectors to fill job vacancies and bringing with them a healthy distrust of the status quo.
The progress of building up new rank-and-file networks inside workplaces is going to require building upon these new possibilities, while also taking a really sober assessment of how organized labour has largely abandoned an independent agenda during the pandemic and contracted out its demands to politicians and even collaborated directly and indirectly with union-busting business fronts. The left and labour needs to make sharp distinctions between job action and lobbying action and laying the foundations for the much more difficult task of training and executing what are essentially political job actions.
The NDP has to be understood as a party that has to be bargained with like any other duplicitous elite party, and bargaining "from within" the NDP has proven insufficient and incapable of arresting the party leadership's rightward direction and consistent and constant efforts to represent business interests. The few crumbs thrown to labour by the NDP during the pandemic should make this obvious.
The old leaderships and organizations have proven to be
paper tigers at best, but most often they've played the role of "left"
cover for a status quo of union-busting, privatization and plunder. The
groundwork we need requires new and independent organization for education and
training and the development of new analyses and strategies for action. We need
a new army to wage this old war.