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Description
I. Introduction
IN ONTARIO, THE NEW CENTURY has seen a major upsurge of interest and activity surrounding the interrelated questions of farm labour unionization and the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program [SAWP], a "guest worker program" which brings thousands of migrant farm labourers to the province each year. Recent scholarly studies and the documentary film El Contrato (2003) have offered vivid portraits of the sub-standard living and working conditions of the migrant workers, as well as critical commentaries on the SAWP. (1) In 2001, several major unions backed the Canadian office of the United Farm Workers of America in launching the Global Justice Care Van Project, whose findings were the basis of a much-publicized report and a series of public policy recommendations. In the intervening years, union officials have followed up with court actions, reports, and position papers, and a Toronto-based group, Justicia for Migrant Workers [JMW], has campaigned for far-reaching reform of the Canadian state's policies toward SAWP-enrolled workers.
Almost without exception, these initiatives have adopted, explicitly or at least tacitly, a liberal-legalistic frame of reference. From academics to social movement activists to union officials, the assumption appears widespread that "justice" for farm workers can be won through pressuring governments to enact new forms of protective legislation, extend trade union rights, and eliminate the more blatantly discriminatory features of the SAWP. (2) Court challenges, moral suasion, and public education constitute the tactical repertoire of this essentially legalistic and legislative strategy, which accepts as a given the permanence of capitalist exploitation. (3)
In this article, we start from a rather different set of premises. Our view is that the history of the labour movement, in North America as elsewhere, demonstrates that workers' rights have always been won through workers' own direct struggles against capital and the capitalist state, usually in defiance of prevailing legal frameworks. This is especially true for the most brutally exploited, previously unorganized sectors of the working class. Unfortunately, this elementary, Marxist truth has been obscured in recent decades owing to the bureaucratic ossification of the organized labour leadership and the hegemony within it of a social-democratic legalistic perspective that seeks assiduously to avoid and even derail militant, extra-legal forms of working-class struggle.
We believe that significant improvements in the conditions of both Canadian and migrant farm workers, including gaining the same rights that are enjoyed by non-agricultural workers in Canada, depends upon a bold recovery and indeed a further development of the class-struggle strategy and tactics that were essential to the earlier advances of organized labour. (4) Such a perspective implies the need for a struggle within the labour movement against the conservatism and sclerotic gradualism which now pervade it.
The case of farm labour is particularly revealing of the politico-ideological limits of "social unionism"--the most ostensibly progressive form of mainstream unionism in Canada over the past quarter-century. Often contrasted to a business unionism that is wholly preoccupied with narrowly defined collective-bargaining issues, social unionism purports to address wider questions of social justice and welfare, including gender and racial oppression, as well as international solidarity and, more rarely, environmental issues. "Social unionism," writes Bryan Palmer, "preaches coalition-building, stressing that labour should unite with other progressive sectors to implement reform and better the lot of the weak and the underprivileged." (5) Union officials who espouse social unionism are also likely to stress the need to organize the unorganized and to organize labour transnationally in response to the new realities of the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] and economic globalization. (6)
Unfortunately there is a striking dissonance between the rhetoric of social unionism and the practices associated with it. The social unionist official can "talk the talk" (and often with great passion and urgency) but fails to "walk the walk," relying on litigation and electoral activity in support of the New Democratic Party that promise, at best, a glacial pace of social change. Near-exclusive reliance on such policies amounts to a betrayal of the interests of the "underprivileged" workers that social unionists profess to champion; and this is abundantly clear in the activity of the organized labour movement on behalf of farm labour, perhaps the most super-exploited sector of the Canadian labour force.
Compounding the problem, in our view, has been the general reluctance of scholars in the field of Canadian labour studies to undertake a critical analysis of the contemporary labour movement from a Marxist, class-struggle perspective. This article is offered as a modest contribution to such an analysis. Our purpose, it bears emphasizing, is not to provide new and original research findings on either farm labour or recent trends in organized labour, but to synthesize the findings of some of the best critical scholarship on these issues with a Marxist-socialist theoretical and historical-analytic perspective. By critically examining the response of the union officialdom to the farm labour issue, we hope to illuminate the current impasse of organized labour and to outline some directions for its reorientation on the basis of a militant, class-struggle policy.
Our central concern is to show how specific lessons drawn from past labour struggles can inform such a reorientation. We recognize that this enterprise is likely to arouse skepticism among those who are ill-disposed to accept the relevance of such lessons, as well as among many who are keenly aware of the formidable obstacles that exist to their assimilation by contemporary labour movement activists. But it is our view that the issue of relevance is ultimately inseparable from the capacity of militants to acquire and utilize forms of knowledge that an array of powerful forces seeks to suppress. A great many obstacles exist to the activation of this capacity; the silence of labour studies scholars, we think, should not be one of them.
Foremost amongst these obstacles is the regression in class consciousness that has resulted from the heavy defeats that capital has inflicted on labour on a world scale since the 1970s. Two issues, which in our judgement were critically important factors in these defeats, have received scant attention in the labour studies literature. The first is the long-standing dominance of conservative bureaucracies within the organized labour movement. The second is the "anti-hegemonic" and "anti-vanguardist" perspective that has developed among so many critical intellectuals and leftist social movement activists in recent decades. Each of these issues deserves some preliminary comment here to better situate our argument theoretically and politically.
The problem of bureaucratism has been a persistent one within organized labour movements of advanced capitalist societies for well over a century. (7) At bottom, the bureaucratization of the labour movement is a product of three factors: the need for a functional division of labour and a cadre of full-time leaders and staff members within trade unions once these organizations have established themselves as on-going apparatuses commanding significant material resources; the ability of capital and the state to transform the full-time leaders of trade union organizations into "labour lieutenants" of the capitalist order, both through the cultivation of a labour aristocracy enjoying significant material privileges in relation to the mass of workers and through the institutionalization of a state-sanctioned collective-bargaining process which legally obliges union officials to contain workers' struggles within prescribed limits; and, finally, a "dialectic of partial conquests," which predisposes the labour movement as a whole to reject or retreat from more radical goals in order to avoid any confrontations with capital and the state that might jeopardize previously won gains. (8)
Together these factors tend to continually reproduce conditions conducive to "bourgeois trade union consciousness"--an "economistic" outlook which limits workers' struggles to an incremental improvement in the terms and conditions of the sale of labour-power within the framework of capitalism. The corollary to this in the parliamentary-electoral arena is an "independent working-class political practice" whose ostensible purpose is to exert pressure on the capitalist state apparatus to safeguard workers' rights and to implement pro-labour policies (without encroaching upon the fundamental prerogatives of capital). This form of working-class political practice is usually referred to as social democratic reformism. From a Marxist perspective, the essential problem with trade union economism and social democratic reformism is their shared assumption that working-class interests can be reconciled with the requirements of the capitalist social order, and that this reconciliation can be effected on the basis of bourgeois institutions. (9)
Historical experience testifies resoundingly that a challenge to the dominance of social democratic reformism and gradualism within the labour movement is unlikely to emerge from within the trade union bureaucracy itself, for this bureaucracy's materially privileged position is tied up with its perennial role as a mediator between capital and labour and its determined containment of workers' struggles within the capitalist framework. Instead, a counter-hegemonic, oppositional current must be organized in the rank-and-file of the labour movement to challenge it. Yet history also shows that a key subjective factor in the emergence and development of such a political class consciousness has always been the presence of an organized current--a vanguard--of socialist activists committed to educating the rank-and-file, bolstering its self-confidence, and galvanizing it in opposition to the bureaucratic leadership. (10)
The emergence (or re-emergence) of a counter-hegemonic, anti-bureaucratic opposition is long overdue in the Canadian labour movement, as it is in most other labour movements throughout the world. But two developments in particular have militated over the past period against any serious attempt to address the chronic crisis of leadership afflicting the working class: the huge propaganda victory scored by world capitalism that was associated with the demise of Stalinist "actually existing socialism" in the former Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, and the severe disorientation of leftist activists that attended this fateful event. Reinforcing as well as reflecting these developments has been the abandonment of working-class socialism by a large majority of ostensibly left-critical intellectuals in favour of an anti-hegemonic politics, inspired by a postmodernist "politics of identity" and by new, reform-oriented social movements that have prioritized their own autonomy and goals over any attempt to articulate a counter-hegemonic basis for the mobilization of progressive forces. (11) This anti-hegemonic politics stands in explicit and conscious opposition to those trends within the socialist left (for example, Leninism and revolutionary syndicalism) that have traditionally stressed both the necessary leading role of the labour movement in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, and the need to build an opposition to its existing leadership. The anti-vanguardism and reformist sectoralism of the proponents of a politics of identity have served, in other words, to divert left-critical intellectuals and radical activists from precisely the sort of political practice which, in the past, played such a vital role in enabling the labour movement to break free of its bureaucratic straitjacket, even if only episodically.
It has been in just this political and intellectual context that social unionism has flourished as a seeming compromise between a narrow, economistic business unionism and a purportedly outmoded, Marxist-inspired class-struggle unionism. While projecting a more modest role for organized labour in the struggle for social change (on the grounds that labour is merely one among several progressive constituencies), the social unionist bureaucrat has found common ground with "postmodern progressives" by accepting the idea that progressive change is necessarily limited to the incremental reform of capitalism. (12)
The common basis of social unionism and of all "new social movement" sectoralisms is precisely reformism--the faith that human needs (whether for material necessities, world peace, environmental sustainability, or human equality) can be met adequately within the capitalist system. Such a faith has little use for historical memory; indeed, it must devalue it. And it is for just this reason that the lessons of labour history must remain a closed book to bureaucratic conservatism and to postmodern sectoralism alike. Contrariwise, for those who uphold a politics of working-class emancipation and socialist transformation, these lessons constitute a crucial repository of hard-won knowledge that remains indispensable to defeating the now decades-old capitalist offensive against labour and to informing the latter's future struggles for a better world.
Our itinerary in this article is as follows. We begin with a general overview of the situation of farm workers in Ontario, with special attention to the Niagara region. (13) This is followed by a review of organized labour's response to the issue to date. By viewing this response in light of the concrete historical experiences of farm worker mobilization in particular and industrial union organization in general during the last century, we think that it is possible to lay the basis for formulating a winning strategy to organize the agricultural sector and... |
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