The attack on teachers is an attack on all working people

People's Voice Ontario Bureau

     If the basis of all real wealth - the real economy, past, present and future - is the application of human labour‑power to material from the natural environment, why has the most draconian use of state power been summoned up as a weapon against the Ontario Teachers Unions? Most people would argue that teachers do not produce wealth. In fact, in the anti‑teacher propaganda blasted by the capitalist media and whispered in a thousand dark corridors, this slander against an honoured profession is perpetrated: why should people who are essentially a drain on the public purse be compensated so generously?

     What is it about this area of collective bargaining that would cause the ruling elite to instruct their political lackeys to suspend parliament, to violate constitutional law and go to direct one party rule?

     The capitalist state has undemocratically dispensed with parliament in Ontario, to launch an unhindered attack on the teachers' unions and their ability to exercise collective bargaining. The instrument of direct class intervention is the Ontario Liberal Party, with the Tories trying to be even more hawkish, and the NDP sitting on their hands.

     Now the silk gloves have been shed for the naked fist, dispelling any illusion that these three parties protect parliamentary democracy. If the NDP had called for massive public resistance, they could have done a service to all working people, especially if the trade union leaders who belong to the NDP had organized labour unity across the board with the Teachers.

     Any Marxist will see immediately the relationship of teachers to the real economy. Their vital role to the ability of capitalism to create and expropriate surplus value is the reproduction of labour-power, the primary human ingredient in the creation of wealth. The scientific and technological revolution demands an ever higher level of education and training for working people. This is about productivity and the rate of exploitation. This is about the uncountable wealth of the one percent.

     No educated person (the product of teachers) would vulgarize the value of the teaching profession as only an instrument to maintain and expand the parasite role of the one percent. But we live in a class society. The historic service of teachers against the mental pauperization of capitalism, their resistance to the increasing demand to produce literate industrial and social drones, instead of people armed with a sense of themselves and a demand for a better future, is a direct threat to the one percent.

     It is also no accident that generations of women have dominated and transformed the profession. Witness the power of their efforts embodied in the courage and unity of the Quebec student's strike. Witness the threat to the capitalist state when student activists are a major part in the defeat of a governing political party. You cannot separate teachers from students, from the awareness of the Occupy movement, from the mental hunger and sense of wrongness and violation that is surging through our youth and through the indigenous people.

     The viciousness of the attempted destruction of collective bargaining in Ontario can only be understood clearly with a world view of the antagonism between the capitalist class in the advanced stages of imperialist decline, and the possessors of labour‑power, the global working class. Teachers worldwide develop a consciousness that makes their students much more than units of labour power, an awareness of self that will become an awareness of class, an awareness that labour power is also the essential ingredient in building the shared wealth of a non‑exploiting socialist alternative.

     The crisis of capitalism will continue to destroy whatever stands in the way of its drive to buy more life for an obsolete and historically unnecessary system, at war with its own productive forces. In the crosshairs everywhere are those who teach our children and youth, those who preserve and pass on knowledge. The capitalists cannot dispense with teachers, but they seek to break their relative independence and their dedication to humanity. They want to turn teachers into trainers who prepare our young for more efficient and profitable exploitation. This struggle is about much more than sick days, wages or classroom size. These issues might be the field of battle, but the stakes are much higher.

     The Ontario Teachers are on the front line of defending labour rights. They will decide on the extent of their resistance, on their tactics, where to attack and where to retreat. The Communist Party calls for one hundred percent support, now and in the future.

Wave of high school protest sweeps Ontario in support of teachers

PV Ontario Bureau 

Ontario high school students are answering the passing of the McGuinty Liberal’s “Put Student’s First Act” or Bill 115 with a wave of walk-outs and protests across the province.

Students in multiple high schools have walked out in large and small communities. New reports have been filed from Toronto, Richmond Hill, Mississauga, Brampton, Bluewater, Georgian Bay, Owen Sound, Goderich, Wingham, Flesherton, Clarington, Kingston, the Kwartha Lakes, the Quinte region, and Ottawa – easily totaling over ten thousand students.

The actions overwhelmingly appear to have been in support of the teachers with students waving signs like “Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts,” “Putting students first means putting teachers first,” and “Democracy Last Act, Bill 115.” In some cases the students headed down to the local office of their Member of Provincial Parliament and staged rallies.

Many of the actions have been organized by social media. “The students are walking in support of teachers who are upset about their right to bargain and the withdrawal of extracurricular activities. The support and effort teachers give to students through education and especially their dedication to extracurriculars is beyond that call of duty, and that’s why students are walking out in support of teachers,” one pro-walkout Facebook group description said.

Speaking at a meeting of the Toronto Young Communist League, Ontario YCL organizer Drew Garvie held up an article from a newspaper report on the student protests and pointed out that the photo – which showed Stop Bill 115 signs – was the opposite from the anti-teacher message of the accompanying article.

High school students are already getting in touch with student unions and other progressive organizations including the YCL, he said.  “This is an attack on the entire education system and it is important for college and university students, and young workers in general, to be in support of these actions,” Garvie said.

The Ontario YCL is issuing a statement, which will be available on the YCL’s website and Rebel Youth blog, calling for “high school and elementary students to rise up in support of our teachers” and force the repeal of Bill 115. “Teachers working conditions are students learning conditions,” the statement says.

“Education is not a business opportunity to make profit, it is the right of the youth, and a keystone in securing our future.  Another vital necessity for quality education is the right of teachers to form, participate, and be represented by their labour unions,” the statement says.

“The government is telling everyone a Big Lie. They say there is no money, and no alternative to Bill 115’s anti-union measures. But Ontario is a province with tremendous natural wealth, a surplus of the super-rich, and many giant corporations and banks -- controlling all of the wealth.  In their shadow stand our hospitals, transit system, and schools that remain underfunded and neglected by the government. Who made the crisis in education? It wasn’t the teachers or the students – it was government policies which pay no serious regard to people’s needs, only corporate greed,” the statement says.

The YCL is fully supporting the student walk-outs and calling for them to spread. “When injustice becomes the law, resistance becomes a duty [...] Organizing a walk out can be done quickly and successfully using social media, word of mouth, defiance, courage and unity. Convince your friends. Convince your class. March through the halls and hit the streets!  You can suspend one student, but you cannot suspend hundreds.”

So far there have been no reports of students being disciplined because they participated in protests.

Submission on Bill 115 Putting Students First Act

From the Communist Party of Canada (Ontario)

September 6, 2012

The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) calls on the Liberal government to withdraw Bill 115, the misnamed “Putting Students First Act”, as unconstitutional, an attack on free collective bargaining, an attack on the local autonomy and democracy of elected School Boards, and an attack on quality public education in Ontario.   If Bill 115 is passed, it will open up an attack on the collective bargaining rights of all public sector workers in Ontario, threatening the labour, democratic and civil rights of all citizens.

In the event Bill 115 proceeds to a vote, we call on MPPs across all parties who support quality public education to defeat it.

The provincial government is not the bargaining agent and has no bargaining rights, and no legal rights to impose a collective agreement on either Ontario School Boards or the education unions that negotiate with them.  It is noteworthy that collective agreements were in force right across the province in August when the government drew up this Bill and began its disinformation and fear-mongering campaign that schools would not open September 3 due to imminent strikes and lock-outs.

In fact, if the provincial government had not interfered School Boards and education unions in the province would have been in negotiations in September working towards collective agreements.

The only crisis in education today is the one wholly manufactured in Queen’s Park by the Liberal government which has continued the policy of the chronic under-funding of education that was started by its predecessors the Harris Tories. The Liberals have followed the example of the Harris government and its Education Minister John Snobelen, and ‘created a useful crisis’ in an attempt to remove large sums of money from their education transfers over the next two years.

The real crisis is not in education, it’s in the spring budget where the Liberals undertook deep cuts to education, health, and social spending as recommended by Ontario’s bankers and corporations in the Drummond Report.  Some cuts made by the provincial government are even deeper than those proposed by Drummond.

Removing funding from education is not a vote-getter as the government well knows.  So the problem for the government was how to remove these funds without also losing public support.

Attacking unions and education workers as greedy, and counter-posing their wages, benefits and pensions to the full-day kindergarten programs being rolled out across the province, is the government’s cynical solution.

But it has back-fired as the results of the Kitchener Waterloo by-election are showing.  The public is rejecting union-bashing and attacks on free collective bargaining, quality public education, and local autonomy and democracy.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has warned that Bill 115 is unconstitutional and that the round-table discussions with OECTA and the French Boards took place under duress.

The ‘agreements’ were forced, and therefore not legal.

The unions in the education sector have stated they will challenge Bill 115 all the way to the Supreme Court, should it pass September 10th.

They could be joined by the province’s School Boards whose collective bargaining rights have also been eliminated, and whose authority over collective bargaining, budgeting, and in other vital areas is also attacked in Bill 115.

The government should withdraw Bill 115, and instead deliver the over-due and long-promised needs-based funding formula for public education, which would enable collective bargaining to proceed quickly and new collective agreements to be ratified.

Finally, we call on the government to heed the UN Human Rights Committee and end the discriminatory funding of religious schools in Ontario.   In fairness, as Quebec and Newfoundland  have already done, Ontario should phase out Catholic School funding and establish a single, secular, and quality public school system open to all – regardless of religion, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality.

Ending the duplication of two parallel school systems would save billions of taxpayer dollars over the long haul, generating needed funds for investment in capital repairs as well as programs and operating costs.  This will deliver a better quality education for all.

The government cannot ‘put students first’ if it puts teachers, educational workers, school boards, and democracy last.  We call on all MPPs to defeat Bill 115, if the government refuses to withdraw the Bill.

Respectfully submitted,

Elizabeth Rowley
Executive Committee
Communist Party of Canada (Ontario)

An Assault on Collective Bargaining, a Degradation of Justice and an Attack on Youth

Statement of the Communist Party, British Columbia

The Communist Party condemns Bill 22 as an assault on Collective bargaining, a degradation of the judicial system and a threat to democracy in British Columbia. In one stroke this failed and doomed Liberal government has violated the right to negotiate, to withdraw labour, and to exercise the franchise of citizenship in a democratic society. They have changed the meaning of the word “mediate” to “enforcement” and degraded the numerous court victories of the BC Teachers with legislation that is in opposition to the Teachers, the Court decisions, their own Labour Board, any sense of human decency and most important of all the quality of life and education of BC children. Twice the Supreme Court has ruled anti-worker legislation of this government illegal.