‘Rights’ drive anti-union — Alberta Fed.

By K. CARIOU

CALGARY — The battle over
so-called “right to work’’ propos-
als in Alberta is heating up. The
“‘Right-to-Work Association of
Alberta’ formed in this city in
1978, recently announced plans to
pressure-MLAs to adopt legisla-
tion declaring all collective
agreements null and void except
“open shops’’. $.

In response, the Alberta Fed-
eration of Labor, at its February
convention resolved to oppose
with the strongest means possible
any amendments to the Labor Act
that would require that open shop
agreements be made.

‘This policy’, the convention
said, ‘‘is not intended to give any-
one the right to work, but is only
intended to diminish what
bargaining power the unions may
have.” Just as in British Colum-
bia, where this movement began
to emerge in Canada a few years
ago, the labor movement points
out, it is mainly construction
industry bosses who hope to gain.

Although Right to Work hasn’t

yet won wide support here, the
AFL is worried that the deceptive
name of the campaign, and the
determination of its backers,
could have dangerous results.
The . organization publishes a
magazine called ‘‘Choice’’, and
has also begun distributing a Bul-
letin this year. In its first issue, the
Bulletin claims 360 sponsors for
the group, and says that member-
ship grew by 80% in 1979.

The group presented a brief to
Labor minister Les Young in Oc-
tober 1979, and again this Feb-
ruary and further meetings with
Young are due this spring. Ac-
cording to the ‘‘Choice’’ issue of
fall, 1979, Young was pushed to
amend several sections of the
Labor Act. Section 58, which
Right to Work wants to eliminate,,

says in part: ‘‘A trade union...

shall not be deemed unlawful by
reason only that one or more of its
objects or purposes are in re-
straint of trade.”

Would Abolish Closed Shop

A closed shop union agreemént
is specifically allowed under Sec-

oe

viet and Quebec
teachers hold talks

MONTREAL — The Quebec
Teachers Union and _ their
counterparts from the Soviet
Union issued a joint statement
March 6 pledging to work to-
gether for the development of
education ‘‘based on mutual
understanding among the peoples
and in favor of peace and inter-
national détente.”’

The communique was issued
following a visit by a two-member
delegation from the USSR’s
Union of Teachers and Scientific
Workers to Quebec at the invita-
tion of the Quebec Teachers
Union, (la Centrale de l’enseign-
ment du Quebec-CEQ).

The Soviet delegation included
Yuri Nikiforov, general secretary

of the Soviet teachers’ union’s-

central committee, and Leonid
Khovanski, representing the
USSR’s department of post-
secondary education.

The Soviet delegation met with
various representatives and of-
ficers of the CEQ, and exchanged
views on a broad range of issues
in the most cordial atmosphere,
dealing with the realities of educa-
tion and the labor movement in

Quebec and the USSR. They also
visited a number of different types
of educational institution in

Quebec.

A special working session was
held between the Soviet delega-
tion and the top CEQ leadership
to examine relationships between
both organizations.

CEW president Robert Gaulin
and Yuri Nikiforov issued a joint
statement following the Soviet
visit. ‘In the face of extremely
fruitful results of this first visit by
an official (teachers’ union) dele-
gation to Quebec’’, the com-
munique declared, ‘‘the two par-
ties agreed to continue to rein-
force their relations in every
manner and to promote in particu-
lar, the largest possible exchange
of information and documenta-
tion; to collaborate on inter-
national initiatives (conferences
and symposia) bringing together
the most diverse trade union
organizations; and to expend all
necessary efforts in favor of
developing education based on
mutual understanding among the
peoples and in favor of peace and
international detente.”’

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 11, 1980—Page 8 :

7 ee

tion 98, which they also want to
abolish. Section 153 prohibits an
employer from discriminating
against an employee because of
union membership. Right to
Work wants this amended to pre-
vent ‘discrimination’ against
non-members of unions.

The issue came into the lime-
light in the province last year,
when the Alberta Court of Appeal
ruled that a 1973 amendment to
the Labor Act, to the effect that
no employer should fire a person
who has lost union membership
(except for non-payment of dues),
takes precedence over Section
98, which allows for closed shops.
The case concerned two workers
expelled from the Hotel and
Restaurant Employees for ac-
tions detrimental to the union.
After their expulsion, the two
were fired, but took their case to

, court.

They were represented by Tim
Christian, a young lawyer -and
former student activist New

Democratic Party candidate, and
won their case, much to the de-
light of Right to,Work.

Since its convention, the AFL
has drawn up a plan to expose

IT’S sels SEASON

ally represents.

Right to Work in the province, by
lobbying MLAs, publishing
information on the subject, and
using labor Councils to form an
information dissemination net-
work. Commenting on the prop-

osal as it works in the 20 U.S. .

states, where it is in effect, the
Federation points out that 1975
statistics showed that average
weekly wages of $195.97 in nor-
mal states dropped to $169.02 a
week in ‘‘right-to-work’’ states,

and also that social, programs
such as health care, and educa
tion and housing also lag behindin —
these areas.
AFL president Harry Kostiuk
says that the chairman of the AS
sociation, Robert Schuett, 2.
construction company execullVé, —
should. be shown for what he fe
‘*He’s ane
employer working on behalf of
employers who stand to benefitin
a substantial way if such Ametr
can anti-union shop laws and the —
problems they create are dumpe¢—
upon Albertans’, Kostiuk said.
‘‘Unions have represented work-
ers, and have been one of th
most important historical tools im |
correcting injustice and eliminat

ing poverty.

‘‘The proponents of a so-called |
‘‘right-to-work’’ have never —
demonstrated that they have
sought these social aims;’”’ Kos
tiuk said, ‘‘if anything this newest -
campaign threatens to set back
social advances many years.”

~ CLC report falls

Short of real needs |

The Canadian Labor Congress
Executive Council met on March
4-6 in Ottawa and one of the items
on its agenda was a summary of
its ‘parallel campaign’”’ in the re-
cent federal election.

A special meeting has been cal-
led for April 14 in Ottawa in-
volving the main activists who led
and plotted the campaign, along
with key New Democratic Party
people. This meeting has the task
of drawing up the political educa-
tion statement and follow up
proposals for the CLC Executive.
A preliminary report to the
Executive Council has been pre-
pared and sent out to affilliated
unions for study in preparation for
this meeting.

If this report js any indication of
the final analysis of the CLC onits
parallel campaign, it will fall well
short of what is required. The re-
port completely fails to situate the
election in the all sided crisis grip-
ping the country. It is not even
mentioned. Election campaigns
in general, and this one in particu-
lar, are treated with the clinical
aloofness of academic algebra
with no reference to the class
struggle or the role of real events.

One would have expected the
CLC to discuss why, in the centre,
of its greatest strength, Ontario,
and in the face of the economic
and general crisis of that pro-
vince, the NDP vote went up a
mere .5% since the last election
and 2.4% since 1974 — far lower
than any other province in Cana-
da.

Considerable attention is given
to the electoral analysis of a John
Wilson who has discovered that
Canada’s voting patterns are to be
explained by religion, language
and ethnic groupings rather than
economic ones, and that further,
in Canada they tend to change on
a provincial basis. Thus a
working-class analysis of the elec-
tion, beginning with an analysis of
economic trends and their effects
on different strata of the popula-

tion, and the reactions of political
parties to these economic prob-
lems, is abandoned for.a non-
class mechanistic examination of
the election.

The results are quite pre-
dictable. The victories; increased

- seats in the west and an overall

increased vote, are chalked up to
the results of the parallel cam-
paign (along with the favorable
image of the NDP leader and its
campaign), and the losses are
charged against objective trends;
i.e. the anti-Progressive
Conservative trend which caught
them in the bind. —“

No attempt is made to discuss,
why, in the most favorable cir-
cumstances the NDP has ever
confronted in its history, it actu-
ally lost. seats in Ontario, the
centre of the organized trade
union movement.

When you come up against the
proposals of the CLC for follow
up_work, the purpose for omis-
sion of real politics from their
analysis becomes clear. What is
proposed is, almost exclusively,
organizational: Lining up the
troops and training canvassers for
the next election: Training consti-
tuency coordinators, zone leaders
and in-plant captains along with
gearing up shop stewards to go
into action at the drop of an elec-
tion date is the name of the game.

Avoided entirely is the concept

of mass struggle as the main train-
ing ground for independent labor
political action. Studiously ig-
nored it the need for organized
labor to get into high gear around
its own economic program to en-
sure that its own membership,
and everyone else it can in-
fluence, perceives ‘the relation-
ship between monopoly control
of our economy and the crisis we
are in and understands there can
be no solutions to these problems
which do not encompass funda-
mental change and a new political:
majority in parliament to carry
this change through.

However, even in the name of
solidarity, this cannot compel the
trade unions to gloss over the
programatic weaknesses of the
NDP, nor for that matter its re-_
cord in office on matters of crucial |
concern to unions. Nor can they»
support the NDP. penchant for
legislating workers back to work -
as in B.C. and more recently Sas-_
katchewan, or Ed Boadbent’s
remarks on the Patrick Watson
program that, confronted with a
group of striking workers whose
strike was ‘‘against the national
interest’, if he were governing he
would order them back to work.

In the recent federal election”
the NDP grossly betrayed the
working people of Canada, aban-
doning even its own program dur

“ing the election in the chase for

votes, and even out-did the Lib
erals in anti-Sovietism. 3
No trade union centre can ind
itself in a position where it iS
forced to tail along behind such
opportunism in the name ol
*‘political support’. e |
It is easy to recall a very perti-
nent and critical statement of the
present president of the CLC sev-
eral years ago when confronted —
by a series of opportunist man- —
oeuvres of NDP governments and
the Ottawa parliamentary group. —
The entire labor movement ob- —
viously faces the need to more
adequately spell out its program’
to take Canada out of its present —
crisis. A program which can unite —
all parts of*Canada in this strug-
gle. It must overcome its weak-
nesses in Quebec as well as ad-
dress itself to the problem of win- —
ning the working people of On- —

-tario and the Maritimes.

This will require a united effort —
by all labor in the area.of day to —
day struggle, as well as in the par- —
liamentry arena. The CLC can |
play a crucial role in this process »
and it is to be hoped sthat its —
deliberations on April 14 will be of |
help.