LABOR

By MIKE PHILLIPS
TORONTO — The economy and aid
to the Third World were high on the
agenda at the Canadian Steelworkers
Policy Conference, May 29-31 but the
leadership of the country’s largest indus-

_ ~ trial union had little to offer their 160,000

members in the way of any alternative to
the crisis.

Highlighting the opening sessions
Were the decision to establish a union-
tun Humanity Fund for Third World fam-
Ine relief, and an economic policy paper
Which focussed on ‘‘collective bargain-
Ing (as) the key instrument in Canada for
€conomic justice.”’

The delegates unanimously adopted
the resolution setting up the Humanity
Fund and outlining possible language
which the union wants locals to negotiate
Into their collective agreements. It pro-

‘Poses a payroll deduction of one cent per

member per week and invites-the em-
Ployers to follow suit or match union
unds.

Canadian UN Ambassador Stephen

€wis, who prefaced his remarks to the
delegates by saying it felt good to be an-
SWering to the trade union movement
rather than the federal Tories, outlined
the UN’s work in organizing famine re-
lief and praised the Steelworkers’ de-
Cision.

Charles Nixon,_a Toronto area dele-
Sate, joined in the praise but drew the
Conference’s attention to the economic
Causes for hunger and starvation in the
world and the responsibility the transna-
tional corporations and the governments
which serve them have to bear.

The very cash crops produced in some
developing countries are dictated by the
Market and industrial needs of trans-
Nationals, he said, and pointed out that
Western capitalist governments only
trade with many of these countries in
Western, not domestic, currencies, thus

Stopping them from acquiring the ma-

terials, fertilizers and equipment they
need to develop their agriculture.

‘‘These kinds of political economic
factors are also relevant and I think that
when we are discussing some of the rea-
sons behind starvation in some parts of
the world we may get to ... these points
as well and we will be educating our-
selves as to some of the reasons for star-
vation,’ Nixon said.

The economic paper sketched the cri-
sis which is gripping the economy, par-
ticularly the mining industry, where it
was reported that USWA membership
dropped 33.1 per cent in coal, 44.7 per
cent in nickel and 47.7 per cent in iron
mining between 1980-84.

Economy of Numbers

The total union membership between
mid-1980 and the end of 1984 fell from
187,924 to 147,179, though vigorous or-
ganizing in the past two years has bol-
stered the union’s ranks back up to about
160,000 members.

The paper hit out at the current Tory
federal budget for its attack on univer-
sality by de-indexing Old Age Security
pensions, and shifting the tax burden
even more away from corporations to
individual Canadians.

The Tory strategy, the Steelworkers’
paper charged, ‘“‘will ... reduce pur-
chasing power, lower overall employ-
ment and reduce standards of living ...
The ‘economy of numbers’ will slide into
a more and more polarized society,
where corporations get tax giveaways
and workers get a downward spiral of
wage-bashing and ‘victim competition’
for scarce jobs.”

It also attacked the free traders by
pointing out “‘that ‘free trade’ means put-
ting our economic future into the hands
of the transnational corporations’’ and
pointed out that 70 per cent of Canada’s
current trade, “‘is merely transfers within
transnational corporations, as sub-
sidiaries of a conglomerate pass items
back and forth.”

Yet, the only conclusions drawn by
the policy document focussed on more
membership education, more union-

employer conferences like the recent
Canadian Steel Trade Conference jointly
sponsored by USWA Canadian Director
Gerard Docquier and the president of
Algoma Steel, better co-ordination at the
bargaining table on such items as tech
change and contracting out, and contin-
ued support for the NDP.

Fightback Urged

Peter Liebowitz, local 1005, called
himself ‘‘a casualty of the crisis’? who
has been laid off several times at Stelco
over the past four years. He called for a
campaign by the trade union movement
spearheaded by powerful unions like the
auto workers and the Steelworkers for a
shorter work week to tackle the unem-
ployment crisis.

Local 8030 president Larry Arsenault
praised the paper’s analysis of the crisis
but urged more dynamic conclusions to

Good analysis by Steel, but no action

include demands for an end to plant clo-
sures, no free trade with the U.S., stop-
ping governments from selling off Crown
Corporations, developing a Canadian
machine-tool industry, slashing the arms
budget, and launching a massive national
housing program to create shelter for
working people and create hundreds of
thousands of jobs.

‘*‘What the labor movement must do
— the CLC leadership and particularly
the Steelworkers as this country’s larg-
est industrial union — is to start a
fightback by Canadian workers and the
Canadian public to get at all the things
that have to be changed in Canada to
provide jobs and security during our in-
fancy, our educational years, our work-
ing lives and in our retirement’ ’, he said.

““We are entitled to that. We've
worked for it. Why should they take it
away from us?”’

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The long-awaited Wilson budget is not a job crea-
tion budget. It is not a progressive budget. It is a
big-business budget, which takes away from the
workers and the poor to give to the rich.

It is a budget which strikes at indexing and univer-
Sality of family allowances and pensions. It increases
taxes on those least able to pay while increasing loop-
holes to expand the numbers of rich corporations and
Individuals who pay little or no taxes. ;

It is a budget which increases arms expenditures
while cutting social programs. It hands over Crown

Orporations to private enterprises.

Private Sector — No Engine

The budget is sold by the Tories on the discredited
theory that the private sector is the engine of job
creation, when in reality the private sector (and in
Particular the large transnationals who dominate our
economy), invests where it can make the most profit,
not where it can create jobs.

Bulging corporate and bank profits over the past
Couple of years, contrasted with more than two mil-
lion unemployed, is stark evidence that the private
Sector is not the engine of growth.

Often, big business lugs its ill-gotten gains ob-
tained from Canadian workers or from the Canadian
budgetary trough, outside the country where capital
€arns a higher rate of profit.

It has been estimated that every billion dollars
which government spends, has a multiplier effect as it
Works its way through the economy two-and-a-half
times. This means that every billion dollars in
80Vernment spending adds two-and-a-half billion to
the economy.

Similarly, one billion dollars taken from govern-
Ment spending means a subtraction of two-and-one-
half billion.

Stop the Wilson budget— labor must

Labor in action |

500,000 Jobs Lost

In the next two years the Wilson budget will shrink
the Canadian economy by ten billion dollars. Now, if
(as the economists “‘constructively”’ predict), every
billion dollars expended adds fifty thousand jobs to
the economy, and a billion dollars removed from the
economy causes the loss of 50,000 jobs, then the
Tories are budgeting the loss of half a million jobs in
the next two years, despite their hopes for the private
sector to pick up the slack.

Rather than ‘‘jobs, jobs, jobs’’, promised by Brian
Mulroney in the last election, Canadians are going to
see the reality that, ‘“Tory times are tough times’’.

But the worst is yet to come unless the Tories are
stopped now. Michael Wilson is prescribing even
tougher medicine in future years.

While he didn’t tamper further with UIC benefits,
he has frozen U.I. premiums awaiting the outcome of
astudy which is the justification for a wholesale attack
on Unemployment Insurance as we have come to
know it.

Furthering his theory that the private sector is the
motor of growth, Wilson also proposes a second
major study which will reduce corporate taxes even
further.

Labor Must Lead

The combined strength of the Liberals and the NDP
within the House of Commons is insufficient to stop

the massive Tory majority. But combine the opposi-
tion within the House to a massive extra-parlia-
mentary struggle of all Canadians affected by this
budget, and the Tories can be compelled to retreat or
face the wrath of an aroused and united population
who are getting a lesson in Tory duplicity.

This is where labor comes in. By virtue of its size,
(Canada’s predominant people’s organization), in-
fluence, organization and position in society, the
Canadian Labor Congress, in co-operation with the
other labor centrals such as the CNTU, CEQ, CCU
etc., can and should be pulling the forces together to
launch an all-out fight against the Wilson budget and
the legislation which surrounds it.

This is the essence of the Nine-Point Action Plan
adopted last year in Montreal by the CLC. Women,
seniors, students and youth, the churches, welfare
recipients, small business, the unemployed, single

_parents, tenants, and all others adversely affected by

the budget can be mobilized against it, to force Mul-
roney to retreat.

Finally, to maintain the credibility of labor among
its rank and file and its allies, Brother Baldwin, the
CLC representative, should resign from the federal
task force chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Erik
Nielson.

How many times do we have to sit down with
Tories and the representative of big business before it
sinks in that their interest in labor is for us to seek
better ways for labor to slit its own throat.

Similarly, if participation in the Government-
CLC-sponsored National Productivity Centre ever
had any merit (which it never did), now would be
a good time to bow out.

The Government, having labor participate in dis-
cussions on productivity, manpower requirements
and competitiveness, is like the cannibal having the
missionary over for dinner.

tacts

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JUNE 5, 1985 e 7