The state-led crackdown on workers’ rights underscores the ruling elite’s embrace of authoritarianism to enforce its class war agenda of austerity and war, and that to defend their jobs, workplace benefits, right to strike and public services, workers in Canada and around the world confront a political struggle over which class controls society’s resources and to what end.
If the postal workers are to prevail, the working class throughout the transportation and logistics sectors, and across all other economic spheres, must be mobilized and the strike made the spearhead of a working-class counteroffensive against the capitalist elite’s class war agenda of austerity and war.
The CUPW leadership has issued no call for postal workers to defy the impending, patently anti-democratic government-order illegalizing their strike. As for the Canadian Labour Congress, it hasn’t so much as bothered to issue a press release denouncing the Liberal government's strikebreaking.
The Trudeau government has used the CIRB and a cooked-up “reinterpretation” of Section 107 of the Labour Code to break a series of strikes, and now threatens to use them against the 55,000 striking Canada Post workers.
Now more than ever, the central issue is to mobilize the social power of the entire working class. Every worker has a stake in our struggle and we must make them aware of that.
Our strike is in grave danger, because the CUPW and Canadian Labour Congress are systematically isolating our struggle, and refusing to make it the spearhead of a working-class counteroffensive against capitalist austerity and the dismantling of public services.
Speakers, including postal workers from Canada and the United States, called for strikers to sieze control of their struggle from the hands of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ bureaucracy and appeal for support from broader sections of workers to make it the spearhead of a working-class counteroffensive against capitalist austerity.
Instead of participating in a race to the bottom against low-paid, precariously employed delivery workers, we must turn to these workers and fight to rally them alongside us, for a joint struggle, based on our common class interests for well-paid and secure jobs for all.
