Rail Workers: Keep the Initiative!

24 August 2024—It is great news for the labour movement that rail workers defied the forced arbitration of the Trudeau government on 22 August. By pursuing strike action, the Teamsters made Minister MacKinnon look like a complete fool and threw a wrench in the plans of the supremely arrogant rail companies to impose their will on the country. A victory for rail workers would be a victory for the entire labour movement. With the anti-worker Liberal-NDP coalition government on the ropes and Poilievre lurking with more attacks, this is in fact an ideal moment for the unions to take back the initiative and impose their will.

But to do this, the union must break with the strategy of relying on legal maneuvers and the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB). In the first place such agencies and other courts are tools in the service of the employers and the government. And even if they do occasionally side with the union’s arguments, it changes nothing in reality. Take the infamous Saskatchewan decision of 2015 upholding the legal right to strike: are wages, working conditions, safety, living standards any better? No, things have only gotten worse!

The way to combat the inevitable back-to-work legislation and all other attacks by the bosses is not through lawyers’ arguments but by relying on labour’s own strength. This means preparing now, including through mobilizing the entire union movement in Canada and the U.S. (where a rail strike was crushed by Biden last year). Every union should back the rail workers with resolutions that they will strike against any back-to-work legislation. Crucially this includes the rail workers’ closest allies in the ports, transit and truckers’ unions.

Victory to the rail workers!