Labor Briefs

Support Nova Scotia nursing home workers

HALIFAX — The name has changed but the 72 nursing home workers who’ ve

€n on strike. for more than a year just to win a first contract are intent on winning
their battle at Glades Lodge. Glades, formerly Keddy’s Nursing Manor refuses to
Negotiate with the members of Local 1259 Canadian Union of Public Employees
and claims the union’s fight was with the old management.

CUPE counters that the sale of Keddy’s was a ploy to try to escape the
Tesponsibility of negotiating decent wages, job security and benefits. The workers
€arn $3 an hour less than other nursing home workers in the area and the Glades

Management has refused overtime pay, sick leave, job security and union recogni-

tion. {

Canadians are urged to protest this injustice to the Nova Scotia Government
demanding it act to bring a fair settlement to Glades Lodge. Donations and
Messages of support can be sent to: Rita Eastman, Secretary Treasurer, CUPE
1259, 7071 Bayers Road, 213 Starlite Gallery, Halifax, N.S., B3L 2C2.

Alliance protests gov't propaganda

OTTAWA — The Public Service Alliance of Canada is urging its 165,000
members to cover their government pay cheques with stickers demanding “‘free
egotiations’’. The cheques, emblazonned with the phoney slogan — ‘‘6 and 5
Working together’’, — will have the three-quarter inch sticker placed right over the

- Slogan so that when the pay slips are returned to Ottawa the government can see

Ow the workers feel about having their living standards restrained and their

Collective bargaining rights taken away. The Alliance is supplying each of its locals

with one sticker per member and the leadership expects the 6 and 5 slogan to be
Contradicted in a big way.

Retail Workers’ Union target Simpsons next

TORONTO — With union certification already achieved at Eaton’s stores in St.
eoetines and Brampton, drives under way in Kitchener-Waterloo, and applica-
tons either before the board or ready for presentation for 530 workers at two other
€tro Eaton’s stores, organizers for the Retail Wholesale and Department Store
nion announced last week they are now trying to organize Simpsons downtown
Toronto flagship store. Union spokespersons say about 300 Simpsons workers
turned out to an RWDSU meeting April 24. The company has some 14,000

_Workers on the payroll in 23 stores throughout Ontario, with about half of those

Stores in Metro Toronto.
- The downtown store is the largest in the chain*with 2,500 employees.

Tt

Hotels lock out strikers

By MIKE PHILLIPS

TORONTO — Not content with the
millions in profits they sweat out of their
over-worked and under-paid employees,
the Hotel Employers’ Group has decided
to keep the 3,500 strikers on the streets to
deny them retroactive pay.

The strikers, members of the Local 75
Hotel Employees and Restaurant
Employee Union, were ready April 21 to
overwhelmingly accept the offer that was
produced from intensive mediation meet-
ings with the employers and the pro-
vincial government, April 19, and draw
their 12-day strike to an end.

Despite a local executive recom-
mendation to reject the three-year pact,
the strikers decided 900 to 163 to settle
for a contract providing five per cent
wage increases for the tipping staff, and
increases of 9.6 per cent, five and eight
for the workers who don’t collect gratui-
ties. The first group earn $4.20 an hour
while the second group’s raise will bring
the average pay to $6 an hour, from $5.50
and $6.75 by 1986.

While there was no change in the own-
ers’ offer to those depending on public
generosity to make up a decent wage,
they did move from their original posi-
tion of eight, seven and five per cent,
over the three years for the other
workers.

This shift, and pension improvements
were seen by the strikers as a modest
victory and they were prepared to return
to work united, assuming the contract
would go into effect, Feb. 1, the expiry
date of the old agreement. '

The retroactivity issue means a lump
sum payment of $160-$200 per worker —
a much needed assist to hotel workers

struggling on poverty-level wages, but a ~

mere pittance to corporations such as
Sheraton, Westin, Ramada, Westbury,
Plaza, etc., most of whom are linked to
the richest and most powerful corpora-

tions on the face of the earth.

But spokespersons for the 10-hotel
employers’ bargaining group last week

separately.

were firmly refusing to show any class in
the matter. While the proposed contract
refers in several places to the terms of
agreement taking effect Feb. 1 the actual
reference to the retroactivity of wages
was left blank in the proposal the union
took to its members.

Compton Marshall, the union’s execu-
tive secretary said the owners neither
confirmed nor denied whether they
meant the pay increases to take effect
Feb. 1. ‘‘ All they said was that their posi-
tion was spelled out in the contract
offer’, he recalled. A

Marshall and the executive say a deal
is a deal, the workers have accepted the
hotel owners’ offer and they should be
recalled to their jobs. As the Tribune
went to press, April 26, management
wasn’t showing any signs of motion, the
union and the hotel owners were meeting

eSheraton

TRIBUNE PHOTO — MIKE PHILLIPS

Workers at 10 Toronto hotels are kept on
the streets as Hotel Employers’ Group re-

: fuses to pay retroactive wages.

_ May Day 1984 in Canada bears witness to the sharpen-
ing of the class struggle: the struggle of the working
People for the maximum return of the fruits of their
lal T, vs. the drive of the owners for the maximum
Possible expropriation of the fruits of the workers’ labor.

t must be. recorded that in spite of the struggles of
working people the big corporations have been winning
the battle over the past decade. Most of the big increases
1 profits recorded by the capitalist class in the past year
arise from the intensification of the exploitation of the
workers, The actual rate of profit has shot up as a result
of lower real wages, higher productivity, less taxes and

igher export prices. None of these represent any sig-
nificant increased capital investment, just raw and brutal
creases in the exploitation of working people. :

It is precisely this contradiction between the need
and aspirations of working people, and the needs and
aSpirations of the corporations which generates the class
Struggle and makes the eventual end of the system of
exploitation inevitable. In the meantime however the
Struggle has a life of its own. The owners of this system,
with all our stored up unpaid labor, realizing this, do
€verything within their command to stop workers from
Seeing and fully understanding their interests as a class in
the same manner that, they, the owners do.

Deflecting the workers

It is for this Very reason that, precisely as the struggle
between workers and bosses sharpen for the fruits of the
workers’ labor, as happens in a period of crisis, the
ideologues of capitalism are set the task of deflecting
workers from drawing ideological conclusions which
match their economic and political needs. The ideo-
logical struggle, in other words, becomes very much a
part of the daily lives of the people.

A massive campaign is now underway to try to con-
vince workers that their interests lie with the economic
system of state-monopoly-capitalism, even as the sys-
tem daily demonstrates its inability to meet these in-

Labor in action
4 ‘i William Stewart

terests at almost every level. This campaign operates at
many levels. It is first designed to fool the most gullible,
middle class people and inexperienced workers, stu-
dents and homeworkers, — all those with little ex-
perience in the class struggle. To convince them that this
is the best of all possible systems and they have a real
stake in doing whatever is required to make it work.
Even if this includes accepting big cuts in living stan-
dards in all spheres.

Suppressing the Alternative

For the more experienced workers, the core of the
trade union movement, the best elements in the NDP,
they do not try overly to conceal its weaknesses. They
know this is not fully possible. Rather they try to create
the illusion that while they may have problems there is
no real alternative. The weaknesses after all, do not rest
in the system itself, but in people. All attempts to correct
the weaknesses, other than those undertaken in the
name of capitalism itself, bring people to an hideous end.

It is here that the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, anti-
real socialism drive of monopoly-capitalism in general
and its most belicose variety in the form of U.S. imperial-
ism come into play. Their aim is to demoralize the work-
ing class, to leave it convinced that there is no alternative
to the very system which is cheapening, and yes,
threatens their very existence.

Anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism are the main

_ ideological weapons of imperialism in its drive against

the working class of our country as in every other capital-

Anti-communism is bosses’ ideology —

ist and developing country in the world. this is so be-

cause it seeks to rob workers of the ideology they require

to arm them for the day to day struggles against their

class enemy and prepare them to wrest the country from

their hands and place its entire wealth at the disposal of

the people.
: Bosses’ Ideology

By denying workers access to working class ideology,
monopoly strives to subordinate workers to their own
ideology. It already penetrates the minds of workers
through a million invisible threads of communication,
and it ties in everything they think and do to the system in
a bid to destroy their political autonomy. By finally
walling them off from the only comprehensive ideo-
logical alternative, they seek to prevent workers from
joining their economic and political struggles against the
system, with the essential ideology that alone can lift
them from the level of day to day endless guerilla strug-
gles against a hostile economic system, to the level of the
struggle to change the system itself.

The very depth of the crisis today, however, is pushing
workers to seeing through the propaganda of hatred
pushed by the monopoly media and its ideologists,
against the Soviet Union and Communism. Logic, after
all, has a life of its own, as does truth and reality. Anti-
Communism and anti-Sovietism are a poor substitute for
either. , ’

The present difficult struggles facing Canadian work-
ers will not be surmounted without a strong Communist
Party, nor by a working class movement hostile to its
most important allies, the workers and parties of the
world socialist community.

.The struggle for the unity of the Canadian working
class and labor movement, so imperative for the struggle

_ against the present monopoly offensive and for world

peace, calls for rejection of anti-Communism and anti-
Sovietism.
It is the bosses ideology, not that of the workers.

~

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 2, 1984 e 11