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Union and NDP leaders conspire to close down British Columbia teachers strike
Hundreds of thousands of workers in British Columbia are poised to join walkouts in the coming days in support of the province’s 40,000 public school teachers and the challenge that they are mounting to a battery of antiunion laws and the BC Liberal government’s agenda of slashing public and social services.
On Monday, public transit, mail delivery and other government services in the provincial capital, Victoria, and the Vancouver Island region were disrupted when thousands of workers walked off the job in response to a call from the BC Federation of Labour. The highlight of the “day of action” was a rally of more than twenty thousand teachers, trade unionists, and parents and their children outside the BC legislature.
Meanwhile, Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government is ratcheting up its efforts to use the powers of the state to force an end to the strike. As the protest was unfolding in Victoria, the government announced that it has appointed a special prosecutor to examine whether criminal contempt proceedings should be initiated against the union and teachers.
On Oct. 9 BC Supreme Court Justice Brenda Brown ruled the teachers’ strike illegal. Then last Thursday she effectively seized control of the finances of the BC Teachers Federation to rob teachers of their $50 per day in picket pay. Were she to rule that the strike constituted criminal contempt, she would have the power to jail union leaders and fine individual teachers.
The government’s increasingly draconian stance against the teachers is born of its fear that the strike could become the catalyst for a working-class counter-offensive. Support for the teachers is swelling because masses of working people recognize that in fighting for caps on class sizes and more support for children with various learning challenges, the teachers are fighting to defend public education. Also many rightly see the teachers’ action as a means of striking back against a government that during four-and-a-half-years in office has ruthlessly imposed the dictates of big business by slashing social spending, promoting the contracting out of hospital and other public service jobs, gutting labour standards and environmental regulations, and redistributing wealth to the most privileged through cuts in corporate taxes and the taxes levied on high-income earners.
At a press conference Sunday, BC business leaders accused the teachers and their supporters of fomenting chaos and anarchy and undermining the province’s economy. While charging the teachers and their supporters with flouting democracy, the message of business leaders was that if workers continued to resist Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government the corporate elite would resort to an investment strike, as they did during much of the 1990s, in a successful campaign to push the then New Democratic Party government to abandon its timid reformist program and impose capitalist austerity.
Exclaimed Kevin Evans of the Coalition of BC Business, “There’s no question this is harkening back to some of the bad old days of British Columbia where instability ruled.” Evans went on to voice concern that if the strike was not broken it “may look small in comparison” with “what we are in for in the spring” when many other public sector contracts expire.
Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/bc-o19.shtml
Meanwhile, Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government is ratcheting up its efforts to use the powers of the state to force an end to the strike. As the protest was unfolding in Victoria, the government announced that it has appointed a special prosecutor to examine whether criminal contempt proceedings should be initiated against the union and teachers.
On Oct. 9 BC Supreme Court Justice Brenda Brown ruled the teachers’ strike illegal. Then last Thursday she effectively seized control of the finances of the BC Teachers Federation to rob teachers of their $50 per day in picket pay. Were she to rule that the strike constituted criminal contempt, she would have the power to jail union leaders and fine individual teachers.
The government’s increasingly draconian stance against the teachers is born of its fear that the strike could become the catalyst for a working-class counter-offensive. Support for the teachers is swelling because masses of working people recognize that in fighting for caps on class sizes and more support for children with various learning challenges, the teachers are fighting to defend public education. Also many rightly see the teachers’ action as a means of striking back against a government that during four-and-a-half-years in office has ruthlessly imposed the dictates of big business by slashing social spending, promoting the contracting out of hospital and other public service jobs, gutting labour standards and environmental regulations, and redistributing wealth to the most privileged through cuts in corporate taxes and the taxes levied on high-income earners.
At a press conference Sunday, BC business leaders accused the teachers and their supporters of fomenting chaos and anarchy and undermining the province’s economy. While charging the teachers and their supporters with flouting democracy, the message of business leaders was that if workers continued to resist Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government the corporate elite would resort to an investment strike, as they did during much of the 1990s, in a successful campaign to push the then New Democratic Party government to abandon its timid reformist program and impose capitalist austerity.
Exclaimed Kevin Evans of the Coalition of BC Business, “There’s no question this is harkening back to some of the bad old days of British Columbia where instability ruled.” Evans went on to voice concern that if the strike was not broken it “may look small in comparison” with “what we are in for in the spring” when many other public sector contracts expire.
Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/bc-o19.shtml
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