Powering the Labour Movement since 1987

A project of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council in partnership with George Brown College.

[COPE 343]

LABOUR EDUCATION CENTRE CELEBRATES 20TH YEAR AND FACES THE CHALLENGE TO BE RELEVANT TODAY

On December 6, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Labour Education Centre with friends and supporters, and graced by the presence of Linda Torney who was president of Council at that time and the current president, John Cartwright. As we celebrated, we reflected on where the Centre is going, in order, as sister Torney said, for LEC to continue being relevant to the times.

So we asked ourselves: what has changed? What has remained the same? What is its essential contribution to the union movement, specifically in the current political moment? Running constant through the hundreds of photos and videos of the last twenty years, one thing we can say has remained the same: the political character of labour education as a tool to critically understand and to change our social realities. It is important to affirm this fundamental mandate, given the “tyranny of the moment”, the pressure to “run” our unions and campaigns, and to provide services to more and more workers – now! Thus, the tool courses – grievance handling and collective bargaining courses, for example – are our nuts and bolts. But all such programs must always be rooted in a critical analysis and informed by our vision of a labour movement as key player for social change, together with other players.

What else has remained constant? One image kept recurring through all the photos of rallies, meetings, and conferences: the image of tombstones. Tombstones marking plant closures and jobs lost. It was the dominant image in 1987, and still is 20 years later.

What has changed is the ever increasing domination of global capital over our lives. It has re-defined the rules of the game, making it more difficult for us to organize, undermining workers’ power and destroying our communities. It has re-shaped basic relationships: between employer and employees, between government and citizen, between business and labour.

When LEC started, the US-Canada Trade Agreement was barely around the corner. But then it was followed by a succession of trade agreements. While the labour adjustment training program was then supposed to be temporary, it is now a permanent fixture of our labour market development program. It is the workers who have been “adjusted”, we say, not the economy.

With such rule changes, employers can now more easily create a contingent workforce, bring in temporary (foreign) workers, and yes, limit our unions’ ability to organize, bargain, and ultimately to grow. On top of this, what has changed is the demographics of our workplaces. In 2011, there will be zero growth rate in our working population. The only replacement will come from immigration. But immigration too is controlled by the same neo-liberal model of a flexible workforce – cheap and expendable contract/temporary workers.

What has changed, but almost imperceptible to some, is the racialization of this growing army of low-waged and vulnerable workers, leading to a “creeping economic apartheid” that threatens to divide our movement and tear apart the social fabric of our community. More and more the working poor are from aboriginal and racialized communities – who are less and less identified with organized labour.

What do all these changes mean for LEC? How do we transform our programs to challenge the dominant neo-liberal agenda (i.e., job loss and casualization of labour) and make them instruments of union building and social change? These last two years LEC has launched its three key priorities: workers in a global economy, equity in unions, and labour and community. We thank you all for supporting the work of LEC these last 20 years and we look forward to the coming years – decades! – working with you in the house of labour, here in the regions of Toronto and York, and beyond.

Jojo Geronimo
Executive Director, Labour Education Centre