FREEDOM
OF
ASSOCIATION AND THE RIGHT TO STRIKE
(The
following article is from
the February 1-15,
2008
issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles
can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in
Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per
year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to:
People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502,
Hamilton,
ON, L8P 2H3.
By Sam Hammond
In everyday life we tend to throw language around pretty loosely.
That's OK because language is a very creative medium. However in the
areas of analyses or research, the more articulate, precise and
definitive the language, the more creative is the result.
Often on contract negotiating committees, one
of our members would tell the people on the other side, "we're not
slaves you know !" Of course they knew this very well, perhaps with a
sense of historical loss, because a slave would never be sitting across
the table debating the sale of "labour" and "labour power" or its rate
of enumeration.
By definition, the slave is a wholly owned
production unit kept and maintained to produce, and disposed of when no
longer able to do this. Owned outright by the master, the slave is
controlled under the law of the state. The slave can be bought and
sold, and any offspring are the property of the master.
The journey from the first slave society,
through feudalism, to the present capitalist form of exploiting society
has been a relatively short one when compared to the long evolution of
human social development. No matter who we are descended from, there is
almost certainly slavery in our past. Like most phenomena, there are
still unpleasant leftovers and attitudes that have clung to us and will
until we get rid of exploitation entirely.
That is why we must be careful when throwing
around words like freedom and democracy, because very little is
absolute and most things come in degrees. Of course the degree of
freedom or democracy is extremely important, and its use as a measuring
device tells us where we are in this journey to emancipation and how
far we have to travel.
In capitalism, workers seek to sell their
labour. A stated oral or contractual exchange is reached: so much
applied labour for a stated reward. The capitalist, on the other hand,
seeks to purchase not the worker's labour, but his or her labour power,
which is an open ended grab at their entire physical and mental ability
to produce at a fixed rate.
This is at the heart of most labour disputes -
press manning in the printing trades, speedup in the assembly plants,
the right to ownership and patent in the research and creative fields.
Any contractual partnerships or contractual recognition of corporate
agendas effectively give up the workers' side of this equation, and
allow open-ended access to their labour power. Usually this means
speed-up and increased work load under the guise of efficiency.
A workforce that cannot withdraw its labour at
will is either enslaved or oppressed. Free people have this right to
strike, to campaign for support and to give it to others of their
class. We do not have this right unqualified, but we are not slaves, so
we are definitely oppressed.
The right to withdraw labour is enshrined in
Charters and Statutes where they exist internationally as "Freedom of
Association and the Right To Free Collective Bargaining." These
documents can be found in the United Nations, the International Labour
Organization, The Charter of Fundamental Rights (European Union),
Article 19 in the Constitution of India, the program of the South Asian
Human Rights Documentation Committee and on and on. Most of these are
Charters and not Constitutional Rights. They reflect a universal demand
of workers everywhere that reflects degrees of success or failure. This
struggle for the right to strike has a history and must have a future.
Canada has been a major participant in the
United Nations since 1945, and since 1919 in the International Labour
Organization. Of the ILO's 185 Conventions, Canada has only ratified
30. Of the thirty Conventions developed since 1982, Canada has ratified
only three.
Since 1982 provincial and federal governments
in Canada have passed 175 pieces of legislation restricting, suspending
or denying collective bargaining and the right to strike for Canadian
workers. Since that year, unions in Canada have filed more complaints
with the ILO's Freedom of Association Committee than labour
organizations from any of the other 178 ILO member states.
Freedom of Association is the right to conduct
unified concerted action and/or support unified concerted action.
Without this ability it is almost impossible to organize. Who would go
to the bother of creating a labour organization without the ability to
conduct struggle or campaign for social improvement?
This is the most fundamental challenge facing
labour. Research for future articles is uncovering evidence of major
looming assaults on the right to association and the right to strike,
both in Canada and the USA, especially under the guise of so-called
"war on terror", "national security", and "necessary public services".
Teachers, medical workers, transportation, longshore and warehousing
workers are all being targeted. Each of these areas, and others, has
its own peculiarities and applications, thus the need for research.
Pending future articles, let us close with an
excellent quote from a brother named Hashubhai Dave of the Indian
Workers Union, reprimanding the Indian Parliament: "Strikes and
demonstrations are a democracy's hard fought weapons against
oppression. They cannot be wished away by a Supreme Court, which has
hitherto supported their disciplined use. What is at issue is democracy
itself. Strikes empower the disempowered to fight injustice in
oppressive cases when no constructive option is left. It took one and a
half centuries to discipline strikes into responsible governance. This
cannot be wiped out in a few sentences which should not have been
written." One class, one universal language.
(Hammond is
a former labour activist and
currently chairs the Communist Party's Central Trade Union Commission.)
Found at:
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint11/01_FREEDOM_OF_ASSOCIATION_AND_THE_RIGHT_TO_STRIKE.html