May Day 2021
Only the
Working Class Can Help the Working Class
Focus on Socialism (FOS)
Don Currie, Editor
April 27th 2021
May Day 2021 finds
millions of Canadian workers struggling to earn a living in the midst of a
global pandemic and economic chaos. Public trust in government and state agencies
is falling. Federal and Provincial governments are engaged in blame game
politics unable to successfully organise a country-wide mass vaccination
campaign.
To provide for families, wage earners are compelled to labour in
unsafe conditions in many cases without
paid sick leave and many still unvaccinated. Front
line public health care workers, public school teachers, child and senior care
workers are working to exhaustion. Mass transit workers, assembly line workers
in manufacturing, meatpacking and food processing, Amazon and other retail chain
workers, many without union protection, are particularly exposed. All work places
are now unsafe.
The spectre of unemployment is ever present. Statscan labour force
numbers record a chronic 8 to 10% (1 to 2 million) unemployed 15 to 65 age demographic
and a constant double-digit rate of over 600 thousand youth age 15 to 24. The lack
of career opportunities for the latter, durable jobs and socially useful work, dwindles
and youth are advised not to expect anything better in the future. They are
advised to put off their hopes and equip themselves with a variety of high-tech
skills to “remain competitive” in a revolving door capitalist economy. Long
term employment is now the preserve of a minority of wealth and privilege.
Youth, forced out of education before
attaining skills to survive, are compelled to hold several temporary minimum wage jobs and live
communally or with parents to afford rent and food. Young working women and
girls, among the lowest paid, are particularly vulnerable to victimization. University
students and their families are burdened with staggering student loans and dwindling
summer job opportunities to fund the next semester.
Immigrant workers confront
discrimination on the job and seasonal farm labour is often forced to live in
squalid conditions fearful of complaining to hostile government agencies.
Racialized minorities are channeled to the lowest paid and most onerous work. The
incidence of criminal violence against Indigenous, First Nations, Black, South
Asian, Muslim and Chinese citizens, men, women and youth, is evidence of the
growth of fascist racist thuggery encouraged by a constant mass media and
on-line hate campaign.
With dedication and
self-sacrifice and placing their families needs above their own health,
millions of workers in spite of all obstacles, continue to do their jobs.
They do so as the
purchasing power of average wages declines as cost-of-living index rises.
Two income families are
the norm. The recent federal budget child
care plan claims child care costs will be reduced to $10/day in five years. There
is no guarantee the plan will be approved. If a federal election takes place
this year it may never see the light of day. The plan is already endangered by
federal provincial wrangling. What is needed is a
universal and free child care plan implemented now.
EI
and CERB programs are erratic with complex
wait time and qualification requirements. Government administrators treat
applicants as a problem rather than rightful recipients their taxes have paid
for to cover family needs in an economic situation they did not create. Right
wing politicians and their media cons keep up a constant barrage of 19th
century rhetoric reminiscent of R.B. Bennet and the Dirty Thirties when he
infamously said; “I wasn’t elected to subsidize idleness”. Such baleful voices
today continue to condemn worker support programs while lauding the obscene
excesses of the idle rich.
The Canada Emergency Wage
subsidy program (CEW) goes to employers with weak oversite as to whether or
not it prevents layoffs.
US Federal Treasury quantitative
easing financialization policies are being adopted in Canada as the Bank of
Canada stimulates a flagging stock market with a reported $4 billion/week liquidity
injection, fueling the threat of inflation. The results are wild speculative housing
bubbles in all major Canadian cities, driving up rents while the Canada Mortgage
and Housing Program lies idle, prevented from solving the growing demand for
affordable housing.
The concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of a
few mega investors having at their disposal investment funds rivaling the GDP
of Canada means that vital pipelines, railways and hydro-electric grids are irreversibly
established north south to serve US demand for Canadian resources. The result
is the gradual de-industrialization of Canada.
Corporate-owned communication and
telecom information networks is reduced to a few mega providers who control the
volume and content of a vast cosmopolitan stream of dis-information and do so
without public oversight and with power to deny user access. User information
gathered is a monopoly controlled saleable commodity. The CTRC is reduced to an
arena of struggle between media giants that excludes competition and burdens Canadians
with the highest television, internet and cell phone rates in the world.
Capitalist electoral
politics and tedious federal-provincial electoral blame-games played
masterfully by LIBCON politicians with a buy in from the NDP, the Bloc and the
Greens is the stuff and substance of vacuous CBC, CTV and Global celebrity analysts
who self-servingly define what they do as the ultimate of freedom of the press
and freedom of speech. The struggle to end private ownership and control of
communications and media is at the forefront of the struggle for democracy
today.
Corporate control of media has given rise to a progressive, anti-imperialist labour and peace
internet social alternative
that is growing. It is becoming a stronger voice for nuclear disarmament, for
upholding the founding principles of the UN, for Canadian withdrawal from NATO
and NORAD. It is becoming a stronger voice against US-Canadian government provocations
and sanctions against China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, the DPRK and other
US so-called “adversaries”, at last count numbering more than 40.
The rise of an
alternative to monopoly-controlled information has alarmed CSIS and CSE who
supply MP’s and Parliamentary committees with a constant supply of dire
warnings that alternative information is a “threat to our way or life” and should
be shut down before it indoctrinates Canadians with the virus of sedition.
Powerful finance capitalist elites, possessing massive
capital resources, fund political parties to control governments. Such
interests hold controlling interests in corporate mass media platforms to
promote the line that monopoly capitalism cares about the lives of wage earners
and their families. Capitalist funded think tanks and its academic mercenaries
are paid well to cynically appropriate popular people’s slogans and re-mold the
message to the service of exploiters. Such interests are masters at playing
two-party politics and federal provincial relations as the limit of democratic
practice today.
While millions of workers are compelled to work in low paid
unskilled occupations others earn wages in more complex and evolving workplaces
of skilled labour, science and technology. The Canadian labour force of about
18 million is roughly divided 60% service workers to 40% industrial,
manufacturing, transportation and utilities. All are impacted by new
technologies.
All passive and simplistic attitudes about the evolving work
places of today are harmful to the cause of the working class. Such matters
deserve the deepest study by anyone purporting to be consistently proletarian
and programs that make workers beneficiaries and not victims of new productive
forces.
Likewise, a classless
analysis of the social problems that arise from the transition to a carbon
neutral economy is dominant among many who believe themselves to be environmentally
progressive and has led them to dismissive and simplistic states of mind about
the consequences for workers compelled to sell their labour power in the discovery,
extraction, processing, storage and delivery of fossil fuel energy. That is not
the view of the workers and their unions.
On this May Day, 2021, here and now, all workers, regardless
of where they work, organised or unorganised, are forced to sell their labour
power wherever there is a demand for it. Their cause is indivisible, all for
one and one for all.
Monopoly and its liberal-reformist agencies such as the
World Economic Forum align class collaborationist labour lieutenants occupying
high office at the ITUC, ILO, AFL-CIO, CLC and their “friends of labour”
acolytes who issue statements, slogans and learned tomes advising workers to
limit their demands to making the profit system “fair and just.” Such voices
assert that capitalism can be managed, profiteers can be persuaded to share a
bit more with workers so long as workers agree to abandon organizing economic
struggles and abandon class struggle science-based revolutionary struggle with
the goal of the overthrowing capitalism and relacing it with socialism.
Class social antagonisms are reaching a point in Canada
where the ruling class is finding it more difficult to rule in the old way and
more working people are learning from their own experience that there is no
future by continuing to accept things as they are.
A
new type of government is needed, a government of peace, people’s economic
development and people’s democracy that places labour at the top of the
country’s agenda.
Worker’s
unity for worker’s needs serves all those who are oppressed.
Safe
and free vaccines for everyone
Full
employment at living wages without inflation
We
Shall Have Peace If We Fight For It!
