By Alex Grant, Editor of L'Humanite
May 27, 2000
After 2 days of illegal strike, 10,000 licensed nurses, support staff and mental health workers have defeated the Tory provincial government. They gained a 16% raise over 2 years in the largest strike in Alberta’s history. What is more, workers have struck back and won in the traditional heartland of Canadian conservatism.
This victory comes only weeks after 6,000 people in Edmonton and 2,500 in Calgary marched against Bill-11, the Alberta government’s plan to privatize healthcare. More and more we are seeing a backlash by public sector workers across Canada who are sick of taking the brunt of right-wing cutbacks. The banks and the monopolies are making billions of dollars in profit and yet we are told that there is no money for wages or benefits.
In Alberta all industrial action in healthcare is illegal with penalties of fines, union decertification, and even imprisonment. Even in Canada, "the best place to live in the world" according to the UN, the basic democratic right to strike does not exist for many workers. In this case the government was forced to give an amnesty to the rank and file strikers, they did not imprison Alberta Union of Public Employees president Dan MacLennan for fear of making him a martyr, but they did fine the union Can$400,000. Having been defeated on the picket line the bosses representatives seek to destroy the union by political and legal means. This shows us that the fight for decent pay for working people doesn’t end with trade union struggle; we must meet their attacks on the political field also.
Most importantly, the health workers showed that anti-union legislation is not worth the paper it is written on when faced with a solid movement. All trade unionists must take note; last month 20,000 school support workers struck in neighbouring British Columbia, giving a holiday to 350,000 students. After a week on the picket lines they were legislated back to work by the BC New Democratic Party government. Unfortunately the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ leaders did not defy the order, while on the line workers said they could easily have struck another week. This was a betrayal by the NDP, Canada’s Labour party, and a setback for all public sector workers. If the Tories can be defeated in Alberta then the right-wing leadership of the BC NDP could easily have been overturned by pressure from below. The CUPE leadership is right to call on workers to take back their party but when it mattered most they also let down the movement.
Workers looking to learn from these struggles inevitably come to the conclusion that isolated struggles can only bring temporary results. Governments of all stripes attack our standard of living because they follow the rules of capitalism. Therefore we need a united movement against cuts in public services. We need a united movement against the privatization of Medicare. We need to take back the NDP from those who have betrayed the movement and must ensure that it fights for a workers’ agenda. If capitalist laws can be broken by thousands of organized workers, so too can capitalist society.