These struggles and the impasse in union responses have sparked two important new initiatives to build union and working-class capacities to fight back. One has come from the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) mobilising formal union structures, and the other comes from a new alliance of community organisations, socialists and labour activists in the form of a workers’ assembly.
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Meetings like the Stewards’ Assembly have the potential to become a springboard toward a larger and broader effort to educate and mobilise workers across Toronto in resisting current attacks and developing political approaches independent of business-dominated projects that currently dominate the agenda.
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The Good Green Jobs Conference, held in early November 2009, emerged as a key Toronto Labour Council project. The conference was extremely well attended and had all kinds of activists from unions and community groups and coalitions. Most impressive was the participation of many activists from racialised communities from across the city, all involved in one way or another in the struggle over the environment. There were lots of social-democratic politicians, but genuine left activists as well. The orientation from the front of the platform was around making the environment a space for good job creation in a way that avoided what US environmental justice leader Van Jones referred to as “eco-apartheid”.
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What the Stewards’ Assembly and the Green Jobs Conference lacked was an anti-capitalist approach and a collective capacity to push the labour movement toward class struggles beyond where the affiliates individually are at. This is understandable, but it suggests the need for socialists to build new forms of worker and community activist alliances and structures to break the impasse of union politics in Toronto and Canada. One such fledgling effort is the recent efforts to form the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly (
www.workersassembly.ca).
The assembly process works on a number of levels. On the one hand, it seeks to create a new form of working-class organisation, bringing together working people in unions, in communities, employed and unemployed and those who are unable to work. Building on a militant, anti-capitalist and class struggle orientation, it will address forms of division and segmentation that neoliberal capitalism has created and working within and outside existing community and labour organisations, it will develop capacities to move beyond the current level of defensive acceptance of the capitalist offensive.
On another level, the assembly includes much of the socialist and anti-capitalist left and members come from a number of activist groups and movements in Toronto. Therefore, the assembly serves as a space to create new forms of unity and common practice on the left. The assembly is not a coalition or network – people join and participate as individuals, committed to a vision statement and building a democratic, activist organisation. Engaging in common campaigns, building common approaches, planning together, debating and discussing activities, political discussion and debate and summarising experiences will lead to a higher level of unity and can contribute to the growth of a more unified and sophisticated socialist left movement.
The assembly idea was initiated by the Socialist Project, but it was soon taken up as a collective project of the radical left and anti-capitalist individuals in labour and community movements. A series of consultas (consultation meetings), held in the summer of 2009 and into the early autumn, built momentum toward an initial assembly. The meetings dealt with important issues underlying the project, such as the relationship between union and community approaches, how an assembly would relate to the activist Labour Council in Toronto and the issue of class.
