Seven Oaks Magazine.

The struggle for B.C.'s future: The importance of the BCTF strike
October 5, 2005
Dale McCartney

A little over a year ago, I had the pleasure of working as a research assistant for the Centre for Labour Studies at SFU. In this role I spent a summer interviewing labour and left activists who were entering retirement, discussing with them the challenges they had faced as activists and advice they had for future leftists. The age of these activists had dictated that one of the largest struggles in their political lives had been the solidarity struggle of 1983, when a labour-grassroots social justice alliance had been created to oppose the brutal cutbacks of the Bill Bennett regime.

The labourists, all of them from private sector unions, had a largely uniform opinion of the solidarity movement. For one, they felt that it was a greater success than most people, and certainly most non-union activists at the time, had described it as since. Further, they believed that the extent to which it failed was the result of unreasonable expectations of progressives outside the house of labour, who, in the eyes of the activists I was speaking with, were demanding the unionists risk their jobs, and use their dues to pay for demands that they didn’t share, simply because non-union activists had supported them in some of their demands. It was Jack Munro (whom I didn’t interview) who revealed how truly reactionary this position was, when he castigated the “Rural Lesbians’ Association . . . sitting next to the Gay Alliance, sitting next to the Urban fuckin’ Lesbians, and all this horseshit that goes on in this fuckin’ world these days, making a decision to shut the province down . . . Trade unionists . . . we were the turkeys in the goddamned thing.”

Just before being involved in this project, I had a pleasant dinner with four prominent BC Teachers’ Federation members from the same era. They had been active in their local when solidarity began, and had a very different perspective on the events of 1983. They told me that they were proud of having made an alliance with activists from other streams of the social justice movement, and they blamed the conservative labour leadership who were unwilling to support their members for the failure of the movement.

Their opinions were not unique within the BCTF. The Teachers’ Federation has been one of the most important unions in BC in the past two decades, and their support for other social justice activists has been consistently impressive. Just in the past few years they have provided funding for events against the war in Iraq, strongly supporting Vancouver’s anti-war coalition Stopwar.ca; supported unionists in BC and throughout the country; and showed a serious commitment to supporting activists working on issues in opposition to the Liberal government.

A personal example is the issue of child labour legislation within BC. When the Liberals passed the first of several odious bills numbered 37 in December of 2003, they stripped many of the unique protections for young workers out of the employment standards act. Even though this was an issue that had no immediate economic relevance to teachers, the BCTF immediately objected, on the basis of protecting the interests of their students. They organized educational events about the issue, supported a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives investigation of the impacts of the new legislation, and provided unflagging support for a local activist group that had no ties to the BCTF, that I happened to be a part of, called “Free Campbell’s Kids.” The BCTF was so supportive that a BCTF staffer became a key member of our organization. BCTF support has meant a lot to progressive movements in BC over the past two decades, especially since the Liberal government took power.

That’s one of the reasons the strike vote by the BCTF this week is so important to progressive movements outside the labour movement. As leftists in this province, we owe a debt of gratitude to the BCTF. With the teachers within our communities walking illegal picket lines, we have to repay this debt – we must turn out and support them. The BCTF is one of the best unions in this province: progressive, organized, and potentially powerful. We need to support them in this time of dire need. If progressives want the continued support of the labour movement – that is, if progressives want to continue to be relevant as a force in politics, we absolutely must show the labour movement that we will be there for them when they need us.