When Motivation Power and Achievement Society (MPA - formerly Mental Patients Association), a mental health housing network, started hiring staff. Residents at a group home could vote for a staff person there. That all changed when the Hospital Employees Union came in and stripped residents of their voting rights. Its is reasonable for employees whether public sector or otherwise to be concerned about job security. But the methods employeed by the HEU bureaucracy serves to drive a wedge between staff and disabled and mentally ill residents. Also, considering that an increasing number of workers are disabled or mentally ill, this seeks to divide that working class as well (in fact many MPA residents are working-class).
A good solution would be this:
1) Residence of a group home vote for staff member once a year.
2) If staff member is voted out, he/she is transfered not fired.
3) If a new placement can't be found for them they get leave with full pay and benefits (the pay, benefits etc. they would get for working).
4) The only people who can fire staff are the residences of the houses they work in and in these cases point 2 and 3 apply.
5) The only thing staff can be fired is if they are convicted or murder, abuse, rape or assault or something to this degree.
These could easily be afford by the system. There certainly is enough money. The problem is the majority of the wealth is is private hands. The the labour bureaucracy as loyal lackeys of the capitalist class wouldn't dare touch private property. They share the capitalists view that private property is sacrosanct.
Do to the profits that imperialist capitalist power make from exploiting neocolonies (expanding marking, extracting resources and exploiting cheap labour) they can afford to throw a few scraps to a upper stratum of the labour movement. Thus creating a labour bureaucracy, a privelage stratum resting on top of the labour movement. This caste sees the working class and the oppressed through the lense of the capitalists. It typically adopts all the same prejudices and elitisms of the capitalists. It would sooner pit workers against the disabled and mentally ill than mobilize workers against bosses. Don't forget this is the same bureaucracy that sold out the recent HEU strikes, BCTF strikes and countless other strikes.
The stealing of disabled and mentally ill group homes residents should be seen in context of the time period. If I am not mistaken, this took place in the 1960s and 1970s. This when the trade unions had been fully purged of Communists. The bureaucracy and its political arm the CCF/NDP purged the Waffle, a left-wing social democratic tendency, from the unions and NDP. In 1972 the labour bureaucracy opposed the near-insurrenctionary general strike in Quebec and supported the jailing of its leaders.
Apart from Quebec, BC has the most militant working class in Canada. The labour bureaucracy is desperate to cap that militancy (in order to safeguard their privelages). It channels labour militancy away from class struggle into ablest bigotry, psychosiphobia, anti-immigrant racism, anti-Quebec chauvinism and ties to the NDP.
Despites the crimes of the labour bureaucracy, people in the disabled community must not have illusions in the capitalist class (including their government, cops, courts, press etc.), who are all to eager to pit the mentally ill and disabled ghetto masses against labour. The same capitalist class that brakes strikes, slashes wages and pension also sterilized the mentally ill and disabled, give the killers of the disabled like fascistic lyncher Robert Latimer light sentences or no sentences at all, and slashes services that benefit the mentally ill and disabled like welfare, healthcare and social housing.
What is needed is to break the working class from the labour bureaucracy (including its political arm the NDP), and to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard that seeks to moblilize the working class, including disabled, mentally ill and neurolically typical to champion the disabled and all layers of the oppressed and ultimately overturn the capitalist system that inevitabley breeds bigotry whether ablism, psychosiphobia or otherwise.
