LABOR —

‘Moral responsibility to educate’

Labor Council stands tough
against Zundel and naziism

TORONTO — Mike Lyons’
13-vote victory over Ken Sig-
noretti, March 7, in the race to be
president of the country’s largest
labor council, signaled a signi-
ficant development in the Toronto
council.

The by-election to replace
former president Wally Majesky,
who last November was elected
secretary-treasurer of the Ontario
Federation of Labor, reflected
growing unity in the council
around policies that will mobilize
ihe trade union movement into
action to fight the drive by big
business and governments to
Make working people shoulder
the burden of the economic crisis.

Most of the activist core of
Council delegates and the left
United around Lyons’ campaign,
Which promised to extend the
Council’s program to fight for
Jobs, peace and disarmament, and
Strengthened political action,
both at the ballot box and through
lobbying and mass action be-

_ Ween elections.

_ Signoretti, not particularly
identified as a right winger, never-
theless lost the vote because the
Majority in the council didn’t
Want to return to the older

conservative style of unionism his
campaign suggested.

Lyons was identified with the
generally progressive leadership
Majesky had brought to the coun-
cil, and his campaign was greatly
assisted by the support from the
left unions such as CUPW and
UE, as well as by the growing
influence and increased participa-
tion in the council by progressive
organizations like the UAW,
Communications Workers, OP-
SEU, the PSAC, CUPE and
others.

In other business, the council
collected $705 for the Eaton’s
strikers, and in an executive
board statement urged all-out
mobilization by its affiliates to
make the March 16 rally at Scar-
borough Town Centre an out-
standing success.

The delegates also endorsed a
brief recently presented to the
Newnham Commission studying
the means of implementing the
Ontario government’s decision to
extend public funding to separate
schools to grade 13.

The council endorsed and
adopted CUPE’s eight proposals
aimed at ensuring no employees
in either the public or separate
systems are laid off or discrim-

inated against as a result of the
decision. CUPE also is demand-
ing that all transfers be made on
Metro-wide seniority and that no
workers be hired until current
workers on transfer lists are as-
signed jobs.

They also want the province to
set up a special fund for retraining
displaced school board workers
who need new skills for job open-
ings at other boards. In addition,
CUPE is demanding that all
appropriate school boards be re-
quired to negotiate all staffing
changes with the unions involved.

The capacity delegate turn-out
on March 7 also overwhelmingly
endorsed an executive board
statement condemning Ernst
Zundel’s nazi denials that the
holocaust ever took place or that
millions of people were exter-
minated in fascist concentration
camps during the last world war.

The executive called on the af-
filiates to ‘‘take advantage of the
OFL’s Anti-Racism Cam-
paign ... and step up their pro-
grams in educating members to be
mindful and aware of how ex-
tremists like Ernst Zundel are
prepared to undermine and turn
people against one another.”

wu

have been sprung

If we were war criminals we would

ten years ago...”

The statement also warned of a
potential ‘‘for a latent backlash of
anti-Semitism in our community,
especially among young people’,
and said the labor council de-
mands to know what the federal
and provincial government are
ready to do about strengthening
laws against the spreading of hate
literature.

Asa minority group in this soc-
iety, the labor movement has *‘to
be very concerned that an attack
on one group in society is an at-
tack on all of us’’, the executive

statement warned.

‘The issue of racism and bigo-
try in society must be confronted
head on. Our experience has
shown that there is little dif-
ference between a racist and a
concentration camp killer,’ the
executive said.

The statement went on to de-
clare that trade unionists have *‘a
moral responsibility to inform and
educate (their) members to speak
out against any form of discrim-
ination or attempts to distort the
frithes

Lessons to be learned from miners’ strike

It is only fitting that the heroism of the British miners
through a year of sacrifice, privation and barbaric at-
tacks should be matched by an equally courageous
leadership which recognized the need to lead strikers
back to work with their union intact, to deal in yet other
forms with the issues of job security, pit closures, and
Saving the mining communities.

A tactical, united retreat in battle (in order to regroup
to win the war) is one of the most difficult maneuvers of
the class struggle, and the British miners pulled it off with
the same effectiveness as they prosecuted their strike
against overwhelming odds. To the swirl of the bagpipes
in Scotland, amidst the thousands of carnations distri-
buted by them in Wales, and behind the brass bands and
Union Jack in England, the miners marched as one,
clenched determined fists, back to work to carry on the
struggle with an added task — to rid Great Britain of
Maggie Thatcher.

; And lest anyone think that the miners’ return to work
is a defeat, we should remember that nothing in this
World is absolute, and Maggie Thatcher and all she
Stands for took a tremendous pounding, at the hands of
the miners. State monopoly capitalism in Great Britain
has been stripped bare.

_ What started out as a fight forjob security, escalatec to
involve the entire community, and has now forced an
€xamination of the class nature of the British state which
arrested over ten thousand, injured thousands more, and
(when it appeared that working-class solidarity would
Prevail) sequestered union funds to starve the miners
into submission. oe

That Maggie Thatcher was out to humiliate, if not deal
a death blow to unionism in Great Britain is obvious by
the five billion pound price tag the strike cost the British
taxpayer — far more than enough to keep the coal indus-
try going for years without cutting a single job. It is not
the miners who stand humiliated, but Maggie Thatcher
and those who wittingly or unwittingly aided and abetted
her. Unionism in Great Britain on the other hand has
Sained valuable time to re-group and organize.

Lessons For Canada

_But what are the lessons for Canada? Given the Cana-
dian response to miners Brian Dakin, Frank Clarke and

Labor in action

le George Hewison

Ian Fergusson, it’s obvious that workers here knew that
the miners’ cause was their cause; that job security or
unfettered management rights as espoused by the
‘‘nouveau’’ right (Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney) is
every bit a cause for concern by the Canadian worker as
for the British miner.

So Canadians dug deep, along with the international
working class. But there were those in the international
labor movement, who, history will record, were de-
tractors of the miners; who were befuddled by the issues
of the strike; who were won over to the age old bosses’
squeals that the labor movement was being taken over by
a Marxist madman; or, who were just plain terrified at
the unveiling of massive naked state power.

Whatever the reason for the failure to act and to
mobilize all of the forces behind the strikers, the miners
and those who support them now fall back, intact, having
made no concessions on the pit closures, and prepared to
fight in other ways to save their jobs and communities.

This is a much different outcome than the Air Traffic
Controllers dispute in the U.S. where the union was
smashed. No doubt, part of the job in Britain will be to
use the time back on the job, to re-oriert those who failed
to respond this first time around and to build an even
broader base of support for the miners and against Mag-
gie, in the fight that goes on.

The Fight Goes On

And the fight will go on, for as Arthur Scargill has said:
‘‘Britain is in a deeper crisis than at any other time in its

- industrial history. .. . The very foundations of our indus-

trial future is being decimated — our steel, engineering,
machine tools, car and textile industries are being sys-
tematically destroyed.

Decades of accumulated skill and human investment
are being discarded without thought, valuable social and

economic resources are being wasted indiscriminately
and we are imposing the tragedy of unemployment on
over three million workers as well as affecting the living
standards of millions of others as a direct consequence.

There is no solution in sight. Tory policies are ac-
celerating the decline and destruction; our whole future
is being sacrificed for the sake of monetarist political
dogma. :

Our freedom to take collective action is being curbed
by the Employment Act and this is but a prelude to a
much wider attack on our traditional liberties. Our bank-
rupt economy, which resembles a lunar landscape, is
being steadily taken towards the ultimate holocaust of a
nuclear war. There are elements inside the Tory leader-
ship who are hell-bent on protecting private enterprise
and the present system, even if it entails the sacrifice of
the human race.”

“Only in Britain, You Say?”

In Canada, the Mulroney government has already laid
down the gauntlet to labor. It intends to surrender our
jobs and independence on the altar of free trade, so that a
handful of corporations can get a chunk of the U.S.
market. It intends to gut our social programs like UIC,
pensions, and family allowances in order to feed its
corporate friends at the trough.

As corporation profits soar to 45 per cent above last
year’s levels, while workers’ real earnings and jobs di-
minish, it intends to continue its assault on workers’
rights. Labor here like labor in Great Britain has two
options; it can opt for a series of love-ins such as cooked
up by Mulroney for March 23 and end up like the labor
movement in the U.S. — greatly reduced in size and
influence — or it can follow the mandate of the last CLC
Convention in Montreal and mobilize around the nine-
point Action Plan adopted there.

The guarantee that one or another Canadian trade
union, and ultimately the whole trade union movement,
does not have to face the wrath of the employers and the
employers’ state alone is an aroused, united trade union
movement at the head of a vast people’s coalition —
equal to or greater than the Tory majority in parliament.

The time to start building ‘such a coalition is now!

ene

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MARCH 20, 1985 e 5