Keith Jones: British Columbia Teachers Defy Anti-Strike Law, Court Rulings

(From October...)

British Columbia teachers defy anti-strike law, court rulings
By Keith Jones
World Socialist Web Site

Forty-two thousand British Columbia elementary and secondary school teachers are mounting an “illegal” strike in defiance of a provincial labour relations board “cease-and-desist” order, a BC Supreme Court contempt of court ruling, and a series of repressive laws enacted by BC’s Liberal government.

The latest of these laws, Bill 12, was rammed through the provincial legislature last Friday. It imposes a new contact on teachers that freezes their wage for two years (from June 30, 2004 to June 30, 2006) and re-imposes the increases in teacher workload and class sizes that the Liberals first imposed in January 2002 under Bill 28.

The Liberals and the corporate media have denounced the public school teachers for breaking the law and holding 600,000 school children “hostage.” Opinion polls, however, show that most working people recognize that it is the government and its big business masters who threaten public education. According to one poll, 55 percent of British Columbians supported teachers taking strike action, while just 19 percent said they were more supportive of the government than the teachers.

First elected in 2001, the Campbell Liberal government has modeled itself after the 1995-2001 Ontario Conservative regime of Mike Harris. It has slashed public and social services, promoted the contracting out of hospital and other public sector jobs, passed a battery of anti-worker legislation, and victimized welfare recipients, while rewarding the rich and big business with repeated rounds of tax cuts.

Provincial cuts to education have resulted in the layoff of close to 2,000 teachers since 2002, the closure of more than one hundred neighbourhood schools, cuts in the number of librarians, specialist teachers and counselors, and a growing shortage of classroom materials.

The teachers’ militancy and the broad public support for their struggle notwithstanding, it would be a serious mistake to believe that the BC teachers can prevail without the adoption of a radically new political strategy. Teachers and their supporters across Canada must fight to make the BC strike the catalyst for the independent industrial and political mobilization of the working class against the Campbell Liberal government and for the building of a genuine political party of the working class that opposes the subordination of social needs to the imperatives of the capitalist market. The fight for such a program will require a rebellion against those who posture as the leadership of the working class—the BC Federation of Labour (BCFL) and Canadian Labour Congress bureaucracies and the social-democratic politicians of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

In BC, as elsewhere in Canada and around the world, the past quarter century has been punctuated by bitter class struggles. But these struggles invariably have been suppressed and betrayed by the trade unions and social-democratic parties because these nationally-rooted organizations accept the inviolability of the existing capitalist social order. Under conditions where, as a result of the development of globalized production, capital systematically shifts production to wherever profits are highest, the unions and social democrats have evolved from placing pressure on the employers within the national labor market to pressuring workers to accept speed-up, wage cuts and corporate tax cuts so as to secure investment.

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