How to Lose a Winning Strike

The strike by Air Canada flight attendants put the government in a vise. CUPE was in a position to make real gains, win a livable wage, put an end to unpaid work and land a blow against government strikebreaking under Section 107 of the Labour Code. The strike was wildly popular, with workers across the country cheering for a union victory. But rather than squeeze the bosses and the government to get as much as possible, the union leaders wasted this position of strength. Instead, they signed an agreement that maintains most unpaid work and includes wages that don’t make up for a decade of losses due to inflation, not to mention the junior positions that are still below the poverty line. The question is: why did this happen?

To understand how the CUPE leaders could go from ripping up a back-to-work order to pushing a rotten deal in less than 48 hours, it is necessary to contrast their strategy to one based on the class struggle. Their starting point was never about posing a real challenge to Air Canada or Carney. In fact, they opposed this, since a victorious strike in defiance of the law would have meant a crisis for the government. Rather, their strategy was, and still is, rooted in establishing “labour peace” in collaboration with the bosses and government. That is why they cut the legs out from under the strike.

This bankrupt outlook was laid bare by CUPE national president Mark Hancock during the town-hall style union meeting on the eve of the settlement. In 2015 the CUPE leadership saddled flight attendants with a ten-year contract that rolled back wages and pensions. Hancock described this sellout as the product of “generous” unionists “helping the company” during “tough times.” In return, he implored, Air Canada’s “good financial position” today means it should “give a good contract to members” and stop seeking binding arbitration from the government.

This idea of mutual respect and reciprocity is a dangerous illusion. It is part of a framework of coexistence with the bosses that leads to conciliation at every stage of the struggle. The results came just hours later, when CUPE leaders scuttled the strike in favour of a rotten deal. For them, defying the government order was only about getting Air Canada back to the bargaining table. So, they caved as soon as the corporate execs made the tiniest move.

Flight attendants were angry and bewildered by the tentative deal. They didn’t even get to vote on the whole agreement, only the wage portion. And to make matters worse, their leadership blocked any kind of fightback in advance, warning that if they voted it down there would be no strike, and outstanding issues would go to arbitration!

In contrast to the dead-end of conciliation, a class-struggle strategy starts with how to advance the interests of workers against the counterposed interests of the bosses. It means fighting for immediate gains by employing tactics that can maximize partial victories while strengthening the labour movement to better face the battles ahead. In a 17 August WT supplement distributed to strikers, we warned against “backward steps or rotten compromises,” and called for active solidarity from the entire union movement: “In the first instance, this means that the other thousands of unionized workers at the airports must honour the flight attendants’ picket lines!”

It was necessary to maximize the confluence of factors that made the strike popular and clearly winnable and make things difficult for the weak minority government. Both the bosses and the Liberals expected this largely female workforce to bow down when they snapped their fingers to order up a back-to-work ruling, and when the union didn’t comply, they had no back-up plan. Continuing the strike until Air Canada met the flight attendants’ demands would have created a crisis for Carney, making it harder for the government to carry out a counteroffensive not only against this union but in other strikes as well. This would have strengthened the position of labour overall, posing the need to push aside leaders who are getting in the way.

Rather than looking to cause Carney trouble through determined union action, the CUPE leaders paralyzed the strike by accepting the framework of the capitalist government and its arbitration and other boards. One top union official put it baldly, claiming the union faced a “dilemma” because of the government’s threat of forced arbitration and that the only way forward was to negotiate on wages “in isolation” from other issues, including unpaid work, so members could vote on the deal. What a load of garbage! The striking workers had the edge, but they were stabbed in the back by their leaders. Flight attendants have massively voted down the agreement. Now it is necessary to wage a fight against Air Canada in opposition to the misleaders who have led them down a blind alley.

Militancy is Not Enough: For a Revolutionary Strategy!

The Air Canada strike did land a blow against Section 107. But given the way the union leaders directed the struggle, this partial victory will do nothing to advance workers’ strategic interests. The fundamental contradiction of the strike was that the union leadership adopted a militant tactic—an illegal strike—while holding firm to a class-collaborationist strategy.

This was also the case during the 2022 CUPE-led Ontario education strike, when workers defied a back-to-work order only to end up with a sellout deal. It is common practice for governments in Canada, Liberal and Tory alike (and sometimes the NDP provincially), to use laws to break strikes. And on occasion union leaders are forced to stand up to the government. But their aim is to channel struggle back into the safe confines of institutionalized play-fighting where the labour leaders make noise, blow off steam at the base, and then return to being “reasonable” at the bargaining table. They turn the weapons of class struggle into spectacles.

In the short term, Carney will think twice about invoking Section 107 to break a strike. But he will use other means to reassert authority over the union movement, likely by returning to the old days when back-to-work legislation had to go through Parliament. This delayed things slightly while the NDP grandstanded as a defender of the workers, but the net effect was the same: broken strikes and a continued deterioration of wages and working conditions. Rather than prepare workers for this, the union leaders are doing the opposite. They will continue to channel opposition to strikebreaking into lengthy court battles and impotent PR campaigns, fueling illusions in rights supposedly guaranteed in the constitution while complaining about “excesses” like Section 107 or Ontario premier Ford’s use of the notwithstanding clause against CUPE in 2022.

Worse yet, the union leaders are chaining the labour movement to the Liberal government. The Canadian Labour Congress gathered the heads of all the major unions purportedly to stand with the flight attendants, but the central message to Carney was get back to the business of “national unity” to fight Trump. The CLC is doing the dirty work for Carney, whose measures to shore up the economy come at the direct expense of the workers and the oppressed (see article). In fact, CLC president Bea Bruske used the popularity of the Air Canada strike to declare that the importance of unions in this period is in negotiating layoffs! Both the more left-talking CUPE leaders and the mainstream CLC bureaucrats share the same framework: pacify workers to take cuts during tough times to help the bosses.

It is crucial that union militants and the left draw the correct conclusions and see that defying the law is not enough. Yet more militancy is the be-all and end-all of what many left groups demand. In an article titled “Flight Attendants Victory,” Socialist Alternative whitewashes the sellout and claims Air Canada and the government were defeated in a “win for all workers” (socialistalternative.ca, 21 August). The Communist Party hails the lousy tentative agreement as a “significant victory” which “proves that a united and militant membership and a united labour movement can win” (communist-party.ca, 20 August).

For its part, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) does oppose the bad deal and is critical of the union leadership but reduces the issue to a lack of union democracy. It is surely a problem that the union leaders conduct negotiations in secret, then present the results as a fait accompli. And, yes, rank-and-file committees are necessary for workers to take matters into their own hands. But it is disarming to narrowly present the task as one of keeping the leadership in check at the bargaining table. Essentially, the RCP presents a formula: militancy plus democracy plus abstract critiques of the capitalist system equals revitalization of the labour movement.

The RCP and others miss the central lesson: there is no alternative other than building an opposition to the union leaders by offering a counterposed strategy aimed at defeating the bosses and the government. Any leadership that won’t lead struggle around such a perspective will only maximize defeats and push workers into a dead end, while driving increasing numbers toward Poilievre and right-wing reaction. It is the task of the Marxist left to bring a revolutionary strategy into the unions by waging a relentless fight against every act of treachery and the reformist illusions pushed by the current leaders. This is the way to deepen the struggle, uncover revolutionary tendencies, thrust the conservative leaders aside and make the left a factor in the labour movement.