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!
