May Day 2009: Their Crisis and Ours

As we mark International Workers’ Day this year, an economic crisis is sweeping the world. It promises to be the deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s and it has major implications for workers and oppressed people.

For the minority of wage-earners organized in unions, the limited protections won by past efforts are being eroded. Many corporate employers will try to use the concessions extracted from auto assembly plant workers by the Detroit 3 to pressure workers into opening up contracts in the name of “competitiveness.” Public sector workers will be told that they must give concessions, just like private sector workers. The majority of workers not in unions are in an even worse position, with no protection but pathetically weak employment standards laws.

Workplace pension plans – funded by workers’ deferred wages – were already suffering from employer contribution holidays and have been hit hard. Over 400,000 jobs in Canada have been lost already and the official employment rate stands at 8%, a 7-year high, and rising. For young workers, it’s a staggering 14.8%. The Bank of Canada estimates that another half a million jobs will be lost this year. Since the Bank has consistently underestimated the depth of this crisis, we can bet that the numbers will be higher still.

Faced with this onslaught, resistance is difficult but vital. Unions and community groups must organize and support each other in fighting back against layoffs, demands for concessions, racist scapegoating, deportations of undocumented people, public service cuts, and other regressive attacks.

The economic crisis provides an opening to build support for progressive reforms like meaningful improvements to Employment Insurance, social assistance and CPP and the creation of universal public child care and prescription drug coverage. Mobilizing for upcoming rallies and actions called by the Canadian Labour Congress to demand action on the economic crisis is one way to do this.

But a round of rallies is clearly not enough. To begin to rise to the challenge, unions and social justice groups need to start becoming much more active, militant and democratically member-run. They also need to be explaining how the economic crisis is caused by a profit-driven system and why working people shouldn’t pay for it.

Unfortunately, capitalism’s crisis exposes another crisis: in Canada , supporters of this kind of response have almost never been weaker in numbers and influence than we are at the moment. It’s high time that people who agree on the need to build serious mass struggles for radical social change and who recognize that capitalism is responsible for today’s ghastly social and ecological crises start to come together. Supporters of the New Socialist Group are committed to working with others to help make this happen.

Executive of the New Socialist Group