Fenner Dunlop workers in Bracebridge, locked out for 165 days in 2021.
Doug Ford's Bill 124 became law in November 2019. Even back then the law had imposed below-inflation wage restraints. There were already examples of long-term care workers getting screwed by Bill 124 before the pandemic hit.
With inflation now topping 5 percent, Bill 124 is even more brutal. Healthcare workers are taking big pay cuts as burnout is almost universal and labour shortages begin to mount.
The pandemic should have provided Ontario healthcare unions all the leverage they needed to crush Doug Ford's balls between walkouts and Bill 124.
Yes, walkouts in mid-contract are illegal. Yes, walkouts in Ontario hospitals and long-term care are illegal. But we saw AUPE pull a one-day wildcat in Alberta's hospitals during the pandemic in late 2020. It was a walkout against massive job cuts as well as privatization. Alberta's UCP government of Jason Kenney is hugely unpopular, and the AUPE strike played a major role in ensuring oppositional sentiment hardened.
What did AUPE do to prepare for illegal strike action against a right-wing austerity and privatization agenda in healthcare? Were any lessons learned in Ontario? Nope.
We're now a few months away from another Ontario election. If we can look back on the life of Bill 124, one might conclude that some of Ontario's union leaders never intended to fight Bill 124. They simply accepted it and put all their eggs in the electoral basket.
And these healthcare union leaders wouldn't be alone in doing so. Ontario labour leaders have really done nothing of consequence to fight Ford during these past four years.
Despite pulling in hundreds and hundreds of union activists itching to fight Ford, the Ontario Federation of Labour's Power of Many local assemblies in early 2019 accomplished almost nothing. They did, however, harvest a lot of data for the NDP.
Anyone who bothered to read the Power of Many documents distributed at these meetings could figure this out. Most of this was in fact laid out quite clearly and openly. The assemblies only happened where unsafe Tory seats were located. Resources would flow into these seats for an electoral challenge three years away!
The Power of Many strategy document also announced a 5-month truce in June 2019 because of the federal election. More electoralism! Nothing was planned during or after that election period. It was in fact the death knell of the Power of Many campaign. By the time the pandemic hit Ontario in March 2020, the Power of Many was non-existent and forgotten.
Despite Ford's open privatization and austerity agenda in the public sector, public sector union leaders have proven unwilling to fight. While some totally oppose Ford, others like Smokey Thomas of OPSEU have buddied up to Ford, praising him and appearing alongside him at labour-related legislative announcements.
Meanwhile, Ontario has witnessed a steady boil of inflation-driven private sector strikes through 2021 and into 2022 but this has not been recognized by organized labour or the Ontario left for what it is. It certainly hasn't been harnessed and developed into a challenge against the government's business class funders and backers that have been handed enormous sums of public pandemic money and pocketed much of it.
Where activism has emerged against the Ford government it has never moved beyond soft lobbying pressure. As a result, it has proven an almost total failure in moving the Ford government. For example, Doug Ford's three paid sick days are publicly-subsidized, limited to people with COVID-19, and temporary. These are pathetic, mouldy crumbs. But should we expect anything different from a do-nothing labour movement? This paid sick days campaign was not a labour campaign of any sort. It was led by a few medical professionals and NGO staffers and eventually boosted by elements of the mainstream media, like the Toronto Star. This was not a workers movement.
Even where paid sick days was part of workers' demands, they were ignored. In early 2021, there was a 5-month lockout in Bracebridge, Ontario at Fenner Dunlop that involved a series of issues, one of which was the rollback of paid sick days. The lockout of these Steelworkers began on February 15 - as the huge second wave was finally coming down - and ended in July just as the third wave was declining.
There was never any effort made on the part of the Steelworkers union, whose leadership is wholly wedded to the NDP, or on the part of the paid sick days campaigners in Toronto to build an alliance. It was a lost opportunity and it ensured that workers weren't part of the paid sick days campaign.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has seen the emergence of a Starbucks organizing wave in the United States, and the first major efforts to organize Amazon. Gig workers in Toronto have made important gains by challenging the employer class (recently undermined by the slavishly pro-NDP UFCW cutting a deal with Uber). Has the OFL tried to develop an organizing campaign for the province? No. Has there been any notion put forward by union leaders that fighting for above-inflation wage increases, workplace health and safety, and paid sick days will require union organization? No. We are in the midst of the first major stirrings of a new organizing moment, and the Ontario labour movement is aloof.
From Bill 124 to the Power of Many to paid sick days to organizing drives, Ontario's unions have done almost nothing to mobilize the membership towards a campaign of disruption. The far right damn well understands the centrality of disruption, and they've grown as a result and their disruption has escalated through the pandemic. But apparently the "progressives" atop Ontario's unions don't understand this. The results are catastrophic. Two years after Bill 124 became law, unions are at the lowly stage of delivering protest postcards to Queen's Park!
The Ontario Federation of Labour is gearing up for an Activist Assembly in early March. The goal is a big protest on May 1. The idea is this might shift the election result when we got to the polls on June 2. How this would happen is not explained, as these sorts of big claims often are. The Activist Assembly is too little too late, and, being over Zoom, will most likely be a stage-managed effort. What are the goals of the Assembly after the election? Is strike action, union drives on the agenda?
The power of labour is in the workplace. The base of both the PCs and Liberals is the business class. The direction we needed to go is obvious. It's always been obvious. However, there's a total slavishness to electoral strategies, whether channeling all resources and energies into another hopeless NDP campaign (aka: contracting out labour's political agenda to the NDP), or cozying up to the ruling party for favours.
The rot is deep. It is everywhere. The Ontario labour "movement" has to be transformed root and branch.