Since June 22, 2011 the Board Attendants, working for Rocky Mountaineer's and organized under Teamsters Local 31, have been locked out. As the they state in one of there leaflets:
"The issue are simple". When bargaining began we asked for overtime beginning after 11 hours (our shifts are often up to 16 hours or longer), and modest improvements to health and welfare benefits and wages increases.
Rocky Mountaineer's response was to quietly recruit replacement workers, place them on trains as passengers, and then lock us out and order us off the trains part way through our trip."
What is needed is to break the working class from the labour bureaucracy and to build and win the working-class over to a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard (i.e. a revolutionary leadership).
Workers for VIA rail are organized under a different union than rocky mountaineer.
A revolutionary leadership would fight for all railway workers to be organized under one union. This is necessary to prevent scabbing from workers' not on strike.
Such a leadership would mobilize workers to barricade the working place and physically block out scabs.
The labour bureaucracy as well as there political arm the New Democratic Party (NDP) are quite capable of selling out this strike. They sold out the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) strike in 2004, they sold out the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) Strike in 2005 (then NDP leader Carol James even revoltingly told strikers to "bide by the rule of law") and they sold out the Telecommunication Workers' Union (TWU) strike in 2005.
The workers' must not play by the bosses rulebooks. Karl Marx was right when he said the "law is the will of one class imposed on all". Canada is a capitalist society and every government here is a capitalist government whether Liberal, NDP, Conservative, Green, Bloc Quebecois etc. The legal system is built to defend the capitalist class. Those who are hired to enforce those laws are on the capitalist side of the class line. Be they cops, security guards, courts, prison guards etc. Such elements much be driven out of the unions and kept out. The Liberals, Conservatives, Greens and Bloc Quebecois are all capitalist parties from top to bottom. Despite its working-class base the NDP is a thoroughly pro-capitalist party in both leadership and outlook.
Workers in other industries especially related industries must support this strike not just in words, letters and petitions but in deeds (i.e. striking in solidarity). These workers also deserve the support of all the oppressed be they women, immigrants, students, homeless people, the "disabled", the "mentally ill", Asian, south Asian etc.
Victory to Teamster Local 31!
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The Barbarism of Capital Punishment
First of all, I think it should be stated that the death penalty is a barbaric act and very much part or the legacy of medieval torture. Even lethal injection a supposedly humane form of execution has proven to be barbaric. There have been instances where this method has taken half an hour to actually kill the person. So even this is a slow agonizing death. All the other forms are as bad as or worse than lethal injection.
I think that Robert Boyle, who commented above, is dead on when he spoke about the race and class bias of the death penalty. In capitalism, the state, which includes the cops, military, courts and prison, serves to defend the rule of the capitalist class against the working class and the oppressed.
American capitalism had the enslavement of blacks by whites built into it from it's inception. Racial oppression, namely black oppression, is the bedrock of American capitalism. Blacks and Latino's are disproportionately represented in the prison population and on death row. As the writer, former Black Panther and MOVE supporter pointed out in his book Live from Death row, the chance of a black person receiving the death penalty for killing a white person is much higher than a white person receiving the death penalty for killing a black person.
There are also plenty of cases of innocent people on death row. And it doesn't do a thing to reduce crime. The US has a much higher crime rate than Canada and West Europe and the former country has the death penalty and the latter countries don't.
There is also the fact that the criminals and the cops and other state apparatchiks are not necessarily separate entities. A third of the police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania have been implicated by the FBI for having ties with the mob. In the south of the US the cops have a history of working hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan!
(This is in response to the following article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201106/the-death-penalty)
I think that Robert Boyle, who commented above, is dead on when he spoke about the race and class bias of the death penalty. In capitalism, the state, which includes the cops, military, courts and prison, serves to defend the rule of the capitalist class against the working class and the oppressed.
American capitalism had the enslavement of blacks by whites built into it from it's inception. Racial oppression, namely black oppression, is the bedrock of American capitalism. Blacks and Latino's are disproportionately represented in the prison population and on death row. As the writer, former Black Panther and MOVE supporter pointed out in his book Live from Death row, the chance of a black person receiving the death penalty for killing a white person is much higher than a white person receiving the death penalty for killing a black person.
There are also plenty of cases of innocent people on death row. And it doesn't do a thing to reduce crime. The US has a much higher crime rate than Canada and West Europe and the former country has the death penalty and the latter countries don't.
There is also the fact that the criminals and the cops and other state apparatchiks are not necessarily separate entities. A third of the police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania have been implicated by the FBI for having ties with the mob. In the south of the US the cops have a history of working hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan!
(This is in response to the following article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201106/the-death-penalty)
Reply to an Anti-Working Class Libertarian
Its interesting for all his allegations of unionized workers being "always violent" he can't even provide one concrete instance of it. Oh and how about the strike-breaking cops, security guards and private gun thugs? Think they aren't violent? Also, the notion that scabs are all kind and gentle I think is ludicrous. The scabs and gun thugs are the nucleus of the fascists movement and I wouldn't call the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler "non-violent".
Also, comparing the term scab to n*$*$er or k&$e really goes a long way toward trivializing anti-semetism and racism. As I said the fascists (including Nazis and Klansmen) aren't exactly nice to Jews and black. Since this guy is a "Libertarian" I wonder what he has to say about Rand Paul thinking that restaurants should be allowed to exclude black people.
(This is a reply to the following article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201106/is-there-right-unionize)
Also, comparing the term scab to n*$*$er or k&$e really goes a long way toward trivializing anti-semetism and racism. As I said the fascists (including Nazis and Klansmen) aren't exactly nice to Jews and black. Since this guy is a "Libertarian" I wonder what he has to say about Rand Paul thinking that restaurants should be allowed to exclude black people.
(This is a reply to the following article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201106/is-there-right-unionize)
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