University workers strike blow against austerity

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Teaching assistants at the University of Toronto, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 3902, voted by a margin of 942 to 318 to send all outstanding issues to binding arbitration. That ends the strike for about 6000 TAs at U of T.

During four weeks on the picket lines the issues in dispute narrowed. Still out­ standing are the following: a guaran­ tee of a minimum per-student funding amount, and tuition assistance for mem­ bers. A “neutral” third-party arbitrator, selected by agreement of the union and management, will issue a decision.

Although it is not preferable to place the concerns of the working class in the hands of an arbitrator—a representa­ tive of the capitalist state—CUPE 3902 should be proud of the intense struggle it waged against an aggressive employ­ er, and for already achieving significant gains towards a decent contract. It ap­ pears that the U of T bosses opted for WAM it to the bosses!

TORONTO—The new Workers’ Action Movement— a fledgling, positive force for change inside and outside the ranks of organized labour—has an ambitious goal. It is determined to break the hold of capitalist austerity and to end the downward spiral of concessions bargain­ ing. The founders of WAM seek to establish a crossunion, class struggle caucus that is anti-capitalist, antiausterity, anti-concessions, and pro-union democracy. WAM strives for change based on policies, not on per­ sonalities; to replace misleaders on political grounds; to affirm union democratic principles from the bottom up; and to build an independent, class-struggle movement from below that is inclusive, transparent and account­ able. That means change to the overall direction of our unions, and support for union activists who battle con­ cessions and anti-democratic practices.

Not confined to unionists, WAM aims to work with social justice movements, and welcomes all workers and activists from those movements.

This body of union radicals emerged from the Take Back the CLC campaign, which sought to elect Hassan Husseini to the position of president of the Canadian Labour Congress in May 2014. Although Husseini did not win, the cross-country organizing effort contributed significantly to the defeat of Ken Georgetti—the first time a sitting incumbent lost.

Take Back campaigners decided to convene a grass­ 10 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2015 arbitration as a face-saving measure.

Meanwhile, it looks like striking educa­ tors at York University have achieved an historic victory. Back on March 9, Unit 2 of CUPE Local 3903, which represents contract faculty, accepted a new collec­ tive agreement. But Units 1 and 3, rep­ resenting teaching assistants and gradu­ roots labour assembly at the People’s Social Forum in Ottawa in August 2014. Over 150 activists attended. They agreed to form an anti-capitalist, pro-democracy body in the unions, and to include civil society organi­ zations and individuals in that effort. Over 20 people volunteered to serve on a temporary steering commit­ tee. Via telephone conferences and e-mail, we formu­ lated a Basis of Unity and set WAM in motion.

The campaign to save home mail delivery is one of its current priorities. Why? Because the attack on public services is at the forefront of the corporate agenda. The plan to eliminate home mail delivery would eliminate over 8000 good jobs and weaken one of Canada’s most democratic unions.

At the same time, the postal service cuts are deeply unpopular, and could be the Achilles heel of the Harper Conservative government. But mass action is needed to win. Unfortunately, the union leadership required is not forthcoming.

The Workers’ Action Movement is trying to make a difference but cannot substitute for the mass organiza­ tions. Our ideas are strong, but our resources are mea­ ger. That is why we are trying to change the leadership and overall direction of existing unions. Potentially, militant and democratic unions are the key to unlock­ ing the power of the working class to create a better world for all.

A constitution and an elected steering committee will be put in place over the coming year. To become a vot­ ing member of WAM send $2 a month, or $24 a year to: www.workersactionmovement.com. n Socialist Action (Left) Socialist Action joined a Toronto march for striking educators. ate assistants, rejected the uni­ versity’s deal and remained on strike. Then on March 29, the CUPE 3903 Bargaining Team (BT) and York University man­ agement reached a tentative agreement for Unit 1 (teach­ ing assistants) and for Unit 3 (graduate assistants). The deal, which, as we go to press is ex­ pected to be ratified, addresses the three core demands of the Union.

Firstly, York University has agreed to tuition-offset lan­ guage, indexed to 2012 rates. This means that if tuition fees for domestic or inter­ national students rise above 2012 rates, the university will increase funding for all in-program and incoming students to offset the tuition fee increase. It also means that the international students will receive increased funding equal to the amount of the recent international student fee increases. Secondly, York University has agreed to make LGBTQ an employment equity group.

And thirdly, for Unit 3, the employer has agreed to increase summer minimum funding from $1750 to $3000, in addi­ tion to previously agreed-upon Graduate Financial Assistance and wage increas­ es. This represents a further increase of $750 over the employer’s last offer, a rise of over 70 per cent.

The two strikes should not be seen merely as economic disputes; they are also political strikes that challenge capi­ talist austerity parameters. They essen­ tially confront a hardening, global, cor­ porate agenda. For that reason, workers need to follow suit and escalate these ef­ forts right across the labour movement, and head towards sectoral action, indus­ try walk-outs, and a general strike.

If the objective is to stop and reverse the cuts, and to end precarious, poorly paid employment, it will be necessary to establish a workers’ government, the harbinger of a socialist transformation of society. n ... Memoirs (continued from page 8: “Memoirs of a French revolutionary”) with memory, the most precise and most apt to name the historic issues of the present time.” He cites the Polish dissident, Karol Modzelewski, who, when asked why he persevered in the face of setbacks and disappointment, responded: “loyalty to persons unknown.” It is a virtue of this book to name some of “those unknowns to whom we are tied by an irredeemable debt.” Revolutionary politics he describes as a “wager on the uncertain ... unavoidable as long as the necessary and the possible remain in disagree­ ment.”

Bensaid takes the measure of the retreat that has been registered but is not discouraged: “To­ day’s political landscape is devastated by battles lost without even having been fought, [but] the forces needed for reconstruction exist, and the relationship between capital and labour remains as asymmetrical as ever: the former cannot dis­ pense with the latter, while the same is in no way true the other way round.” “An Impatient Life” is recommended not just to those who came of age politically in the 1960s and ’70s but equally to younger militants already involved in, or open to, the construction of a revo­ lutionary organization. n

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... Climate movement

FILMS

By GAETANA CALDWELL-SMITH A documentary film directed and written by Robert Ken­ ner and Kim Roberts.

D irector Robert Kenner’s film Merchants of Doubt may sicken and disgust you, but it is worth seeing because it exposes the means by which climate change deniers try to debunk scientific facts.

Kenner begins his film with a slight-of-hand magician performing card tricks to an awestruck, gullible audience. Kenner includes this act throughout the film, and even ends with it. I felt that his use of this metaphor for climate change deniers, while appropriate in some respects, lessened the seriousness of the subject.

The real “merchants of doubt” don’t resort to magician’s trickery. They downright lie, dissemble, omit, and obfus­ cate scientific facts that have been developed over a half-century, proving undeniably that the earth is warming.

It is unfortunate that a large and widespread audience will probably not see this film. Its major audience will be those who already believe in and have experienced the results of climate change: higher than usual temperatures, melting glaciers, devastating floods, hurricanes, drought, crop-die offs, decimated stock herds, and disoriented wild life whose centuries old migratory routes have been altered.

It is sad that many of the deniers were and maybe still are scientists themselves, who have been bought by oil and coal corporations and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation for six-figure commissions. Kenner shows clips of com­ promised scientists opining on mainstream news shows, mainly on media giant Fox News.

One archival clip shows deniers laughing at the idea that polar bears are drowning due to the melting of ice floes. “Hell, there are plenty of polar bears! They come right into towns in Alaska.” They never stop to ask why.

(continued from page 12: “Climate Movement Across Movements”)

movements are mobilising impressively, with projects like Nov. 27-29 mass actions aimed at municipalities;

a Brussels-Paris activist train; a “run for life,” with 1000 people running 4km each from northern Swe­ den to Paris; the “Alternatiba” alternatives project with 200 participating villages from the Basque coun­ try to Brussels, which will culminate on Sept. 26-27;

and getting warmed up, on May 30-31, an anticipated 1000 local climate initiatives around the country.

Yet the local context sounds as difficult in 2015 as it was in South Africa in 2011. As Malika Peyraut from Friends of the Earth-France pointed out, national cli­ mate policy is “inconsistent and unambitious” and the country’s politics are poisoned by the rise of the far right to 25 percent support in municipal elections.

French society will be distracted by regional elections from Dec. 6-12 and “there is a high risk of co-opta­ tion,” she warned.

Indeed, there are no reliable state allies of climate justice at present, and there really are no high-profile progressives working within the COPs. It’s a huge problem for UN reformers because it leaves them without a policy jam-maker inside to accompany ac­ tivist tree-shaking outside.

Although once there were heroic delegates badger­ ing the COP process, they are all gone now: Lumumba Di-Aping led the G77 countries at the Copenhagen COP15—where in a dramatic accusation aimed at the Global North, he named climate a coming holo­ caust requiring millions of coffins for Africa—and so was lauded outside and despised inside, but then was redeployed to constructing the new state of South Sudan; President Mohamed Nasheed from the Mal­ dives—also a high-profile critic at Copenhagen—was outed by WikiLeaks for agreeing to a $50 million deal to get support for the Copenhagen Accord, was couped by rightwingers in 2012 and, earlier this month, was illegitimately jailed for a dozen years.

Bolivia’s UN Ambassador Pablo Solon was booted from his country’s delegation after the 2010 Cancun COP16, where, solo, he had bravely tried to block the awful deal there; an Amazon jungle road-building con­ troversy divided Evo Morales’ supporters, and in 2013 the COP’s progressive leadership void grew wide after the death of Hugo Chavez and the battle by Rafael Cor­ rea against green-indigenous-feminist critics for his decision that year to drill for oil in the Yasuni Ama­ zon (after having once proposed an innovative climate debt downpayment to avoid its extraction); and Filip­ pino Climate Commissioner Yeb Saño had a dramatic 2013 role in Warsaw condemning COP19 inaction af­ ter his hometown was demolished by Super Typhoon The film begins with the public confrontation of the tobac­ co industry, specifically R.J. Reynolds. From 1954 to 1994, the corporation denied that nicotine was addictive and that smoking and second-hand smoke cause cancer. There is a scene where scientists force cigarette smoke into the lungs of monkeys—trapped in Lucite boxes—to prove that their product is safe.

Captains of the tobacco industry published paper after paper written by its own in-house “scientists” denying the findings, and paid “doctors” to proclaim that smoking was harmless to one’s health. Yet, hidden files, which turned up during hearings (clips of which Kenner included), showed the opposite.

The corporate strategy is: blame the consumer for any health problems or damages. Corporate naysayers state that “doubt is our product.” Create conflict and confusion. The confusion extends to their printing alleged “facts” in publi­ cations that mimic in design those of scientists backing the findings of global warming.

Kenner interviewed James Hansen, a NSA climate change scientist who in 1988 studied the earth’s atmosphere. He explained at the time how the “greenhouse effect” works on Venus, stating that this could be the earth’s future if we don’t cut emissions. He also stated, “We can’t assume so­ Haiyan, but he was evicted by a more conservative en­ vironment ministry (apparently under Washington’s thumb) just before the Lima COP in 2014.

If you are serious about climate justice, the message from these COP experiences is unmistakeable: going inside is suicide.

Framing for failure It is for this reason that the original protest narra­ tive suggestions that CAN’s Mark Raven proposed were generally seen as too reformist. Acknowledging the obvious—“people losing faith in the broken sys­ tem, corporations sabotaging change” and “we need a just transition”—his network then offered these as favoured headline memes: “Showdown in 2015 leads to a vision of just transition to fossil-free world” and “Paris is where the world decides to end fossil fuel age.”

Yet with no real prospects of reform, the more mili­ tant activists were dissatisfied. Nnimmo Bassey from Oilwatch International was adamant, “We need not merely a just transition, but an immediate transition: keep the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sands in the land and the fracking shale gas under the grass.” That, after all, is what grassroots activists are mobilising for.

The movement’s principles were further fleshed out at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Cli­ mate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Boliv­ ia, to include emissions cut targets—45 percent below 1990 levels in the advanced capitalist economies by 2020—plus a climate tribunal and the decommission­ ing of destructive carbon markets which have proven incapable of fair, rational, and non-corrupt trading.

Dating to well before the CJN! split from CAN in Bali, that latter fantasy—letting bankers determine the fate of the planet by privatising the air—remains one of the main dividing lines between the two ideologies of climate justice and climate action.

Concrete actions against the emitters themselves were suggested, including more projects like the Dutch “Climate Games,” which saw a coal line and port supply chain disrupted last year. There are coming protests over coal in Germany’s Rhineland, and we will likely see direct actions at Paris events such as Solution 21, a corporate “false solutions” event where geo-engineering, Carbon Capture and Storage, and carbon trading will be promoted.

Radical alternatives Likewise, ActionAid’s Teresa Anderson reported back from a Narrative Working Group on lessons from Copenhagen: “Don’t tell a lie that Paris will fix the cli­ mate. People were arrested in Copenhagen for this lie.

ciety will press the government to do some­ thing.” More public awareness is needed.

Clips show think-tank operatives funded by oil and coal industries who shape pub­ lic policy, stating that curtailing emissions will devastate U.S. economy. Kenner’s film points out how journalists fell for the line of the corporate “experts.” A self-proclaimed blowhard publicist, Marc Morano, boasts in clips of sending crude, threatening e-mails to scientists who warned about climate change, copies of which Kenner shows on screen.

Still, there is hope. Consider Michel Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, whom Kenner interviewed. He confessed that he had been a denier and wrote about the “hoax” in his magazine. Then he began do­ ing massive research, he said, which totally turned him around.

Clips show him at a debate attended by a majority of sci­ entists who deny global warming. Shermer tried to pres­ ent facts that he felt certain would change minds. Instead, most walked out. One group published a paper, which Kenner shows, signed by about 32,000 scientists refuting the idea that humans were the cause of global warming. It made huge headlines: “32,000 scientists agree!” Turns out, many of the “scientists” names were of dead celebri­ ties and presidents.

Unfortunately, government and corporate heads—even those who say that they “accept” the conclusion of 95 per­ cent of climate scientists that climate change is caused by human activities—refuse to take the necessary steps to cur­ tail the greenhouse gases that have the earth hurtling toward disaster.

Although Kenner’s film outlines the problems, it comes up short on indicating what must be done to protect the envi­ ronmental health of the planet. As eco-socialists, we believe that a worldwide mass movement must be built, demand­ ing a fundamental reordering of society in accord with the principle of putting human and environmental needs ahead of capitalist profits. n No unrealistic expectations—but we need to give peo­ ple hope that there is a purpose to the mobilisation.” Most important, she reminded, “There is Global North historical responsibility, and those who are most vulnerable have done the least to cause the problem.” This is vital because in Durban, UN del­ egates began the process of ending the “common but differentiated responsibility” clause. As a result, find­ ing ways to ensure climate “loss & damage” invoices are both issued and paid is more difficult. The UN’s Green Climate Fund is a decisive write-off in that re­ spect; a different approach to climate debt is needed. Looking at more optimistic messaging, Anderson concluded the report-back: “Powerful positive actions are in play. We are life—fossil fuels are death. Paris is a moment to build movements, to show we are power­ ful and will fight into 2016 and beyond to solve the cli­ mate crisis. It takes roots to weather the storm ahead.” Responding, said former Bolivian negotiator Solon (now Bangkok-based director of Focus on the Global South), “I think we need a clearer narrative: let’s stop an agreement that’s going to burn the climate. We are against carbon markets, geo-engineering and the weak emissions targets.”

But the clearest message of all came from veteran strategist Pat Mooney of the research network called the etc group, describing to the mass meeting what he wanted to see in Paris: “It should start like New York and end like Seattle. Shut the thing down.” Back in 2009, just weeks before he died, this was what Dennis Brutus—the mentor of so many South African and international progressives—also advised: “Seattle Copenhagen!” The Paris Conference of Pollut­ ers also needs that kind of shock doctrine, so that from an activist cyclone a much clearer path can emerge to­ wards climate justice in the months and years ahead.

A slightly longer version of this article was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: http:// www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Climate-Move­ ment-Across-Movements-20150326-0035.html. Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban. n SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2015 11

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SOCIALIST ACTION