Activism and Education in Canada's Labour Movement
Excert From Chapter One "We Shall Take Our Freedom and Dance"
We had gone to Barrie to join some women warehouse workers in their battle against the huge, Texas-based Tandy Corporation, which was ploughing its profits from the Vietnam War into consumer electronics. No Tandy location in the world was unionized, and the company had made clear that there would be no union at its Radio Shack warehouse in Barrie. There were the usual threats that the company would pull out of the city if the employees voted the Steelworkers in.
On the picket line that day I had kicked a car as it slowly moved past me to cross the line, and I now found myself charged with obstructing police. One by one we were taken from the cell for fingerprinting, and when my turn came the constable who checked my I.D. asked what my job was. He wrote down my answer and told me I was the highest ranking of the five people arrested. Another constable yelled out, "Hey, we got ourselves the head nigger!"
I was duly given a date for a court appearance and released, but the constable's phrase kept echoing in my head. I had only been in the union's employment for a year and a half, and this contempt for both unions and black people left me feeling helpless as well as angry.
Back at the union office I got a call from the union's Ontario director. He congratulated me on my arrest, joking that now I had really completed the entrance exams into the labour movement. When the case finally made it to court, the union's legal counsel advised me to dress well and emphasize my credentials as an educator who had only recently joined the union. I followed instructions, was acquitted, and the "head nigger" phrase began to fade in my memory.
The Crown appealed my acquittal, and in this new stage I realized that the local Barrie establishment was bending to Tandy's threats about pulling out of the city to avoid unionization. A conviction would help show the city's support for the company. I decided to at least score a couple of points on the way down. At that stage of the battle - it would be months before the union won the right to represent the Radio Shack workers - any gesture of defiance could help keep spirits up. When we prepared for the court appearance I asked my lawyer to be sure to question me in court about my experience in the police station after I had been arrested.
During that second set of hearings I sat in the courtroom while Horace Singh, a black Steelworker, testified about my actions on the picket line. Horace later became active as a course leader, conducting steward schools with me all over Ontario, and went on to join the Steelworker staff, servicing Toronto locals. He also now sits on the executive board of the Labour Council of Metropolitan Toronto and York Region. That day he told the court that the police had been aggressive, that the rights of picketers were not respected, and that a single kick at a car with a soft-soled shoe was not a particularly excessive expression of frustration on the line.
When I took my turn on the stand my lawyer slowly worked his way around to the events in the police station. When I mentioned the comment - "Hey, we got ourselves the head nigger" - the judge momentarily flushed, then took my lawyer to task for introducing what he considered to be "irrelevant" and "provocative" information. The judge was clearly ill at ease, and the police in the room were squirming. I looked over at Horace, and saw a smile on his face. He understood what was happening. He knew what I was trying to do.
Between the first and second set of hearings, a balance had shifted within me, from educator to union educator. My allies were workers on a picket line, and one of them was black. The episode was a moment when speaking out against racism and classism in the justice system became concretely possible. Although I do not come from the working class, I had come to know which side I was on. This time I was convicted, left with a suspended sentence and a criminal record, but for me it was an important lesson about talking back, about solidarity, about taking risks.
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Early in the process of writing this text, I showed a draft chapter to my friend and colleague, Paul Keighley. He returned it with a number of useful suggestions, and a note across the top: "What gives you the right to draw back from our situation and write about it?" The question rattled me, triggering a whole set of insecurities.
My initial impulse was to "sell" the project based on the needs of the labour movement and the adult education field. Certainly I hope that union activists and grassroots educators will find some encouragement and insight in the text. My second, and perhaps more realistic, response was to assert my personal need and right to speak. Union education is central to my life, and I have a creative urge, a passionate desire to talk about it. I am convinced that union education has the potential to change power relations in the workplace and in the society more broadly. I want to share what I have learned in years of facilitating other people's learning, from picket lines at dawn to contract ratification meetings in the late evening. It would be dishonest to present my motivation only as social service. In this text is a calm, defiant message to those with whom and against whom I have struggled over the years: I won't opt out, I won't be pushed out, and I won't be silenced.
Yet my voice is only one in labour's internal discussions, and in some respects it is an unusual one. Most union staff come from within the membership, rather than being hired from outside as I was in 1978. My upbringing was in a "red Tory" family, settled as lawyers for generations in the industrial city of Hamilton, with a strong tradition of community service. My schooling was in well-run private boys schools, which instilled a strong achievement drive. My undergraduate involvement in the student movement of the late 1960s anchored a personal conviction that education can and should be part of a broad popular movement for social and political change. My exposure to the politics and culture of Latin America, through travel there and work with refugees here, radicalized my understanding of how power works.
I have since met many people with that special combination of spirit and skill that it takes to challenge authority carefully and creatively, and I continue to learn with them. Along the way I have shared some of my book smarts and absorbed some of their street smarts. This book grows from dialogue, distilled from a floating conversation in a range of places over many years. I draw it together at a time when many people are discouraged about the prospects for transforming power relations in this country.
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A Couple of years after the incident in Barrie I was in Ottawa with Danielle, the older of my two daughters.
Danielle had been three when I stared work in the labour movement. For her, in a world of things you could touch, "the touch" that kept me away from home so much was a puzzling thing. It was hard to get a hold of. When she came to my office, she would ask if it was the union. I would say no, the office was a support to the union, but the union was not a place. When she came to courses or meetings, she would ask if this was the union. I would answer no, education was just one of the ways to build the union. When we drove past the steel plants in Hamilton, she would ask if the factories were the union. Again I would have to say no, the plants were places where union members worked. All these things and places were connected to the union, but the union itself was a relation among people.
In Ottawa in November 1981 Danielle was six years old, and we were walking from a car park to join a demonstration against high interest rates on Parliament Hill. I was tired after the drive from Toronto to Ottawa and wasn't too happy about her insistence that I carry her. She was heavy on my shoulders, and her boots were digging into my ribs as I lurched around the corner onto Wellington Street, ready to see a normal turnout on a chilly Saturday. Then I stopped short. We saw a huge mass of people on the lawn outside the Parliament Buildings - the largest crowd I had ever seen in Canada (estimated later at a hundred thousand people) - and the sight took my breath away. I felt Danielle bounce forward on my shoulders, and suddenly her nose was almost touching mine. "Papi, this must be the union." I squeezed her ankles happily, and said yes, it was.
That kind of exhilaration is not always the case. The union for me has also meant fatigue, loneliness, and disappointment. I have seen good ideas destroyed by personal feuds, and dedicated people discouraged when they couldn't halt an inequity, a firing, or a plant closure. I have felt overwhelmed by the range and intensity of learning needs among workers, and the great difficulties of working to try to meet those needs. At times the same callousness and egotism we see in management show up inside the union, where they are even more upsetting because of the lofty principles promoted by the movement.
Still, when I become weary, tempted to move into a quieter harbour of the adult education field, moments like the courtroom in Barrie and the march in Ottawa come back into my mind, lightning flashes of clarity in the mist of everyday work. I see a strong, unified labour movement, willing to fight the employers and the state on issues that affect all Canadian workers; a movement based on collective, enlightened self-interest; a movement that knows how to struggle and how to create. I am one of many people trying to build this elusive concept of a "union" inside the always imperfect institutions of our society.
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