Striking International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada workers walk a picket line on a road leading to Deltaport, in Delta, B.C., on July 7.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Stephanie Ross is an associate professor at the School of Labour Studies, McMaster University
Around the world, dockworkers, Starbucks baristas, and Hollywood writers and actors have been on strike. Conditions for a strike wave are ripe in 2023 – and have been building since last year.
The typical attitude of business leaders and politicians toward most strikes is to fear and repress them. Strikes are undeniably disruptive.
However, strike activity should be welcomed, even with its short-term disruptive effects. Most Canadians – whether they’re in unions or not – benefit from strikes in the long term.
That’s because strikes are one of the few tools workers have to redistribute wealth and rebalance an economy whose rewards have become utterly out of balance. And that is good for the economy as a whole.
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Profits these days mostly sit in offshore bank accounts or generate investment returns for those that already possess unthinkable wealth. When workers get higher wages, corporate profits make their way to people who will spend it on goods and services in our communities.
Strikes, and the unions who organize them, get more money in the hands of people who will drive economic activity and job creation. They are the real force for improving the economy, not the misguided policies that governments have long pursued in one way or another.
Since the late 1970s, as taxes on corporations and the wealthy have been repeatedly cut, we’ve been told to have faith in their role as job creators as their wealth would eventually trickle down.
Four decades of an ever-growing wealth and income gap puts the lie to that theory. That is in part why this is yet another hot summer – and we’re not just talking about the record-high temperatures.
Bargaining has been under way in other key sectors such as shipping and retail grocery in Central and Eastern Canada. We’ve seen WestJet pilots, Metro grocery store workers in the Greater Toronto Area and now UPS delivery workers go right to the eleventh hour to get deals, with very strong strike mandates in hand.
Negotiations are soon to begin at the Detroit Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Stellantis North America) in both Canada and the U.S., taking place simultaneously for the first time in decades. Even more collective agreements are set to expire before the end of the year. After years of a falling strike rate, it feels like the labour movement has rediscovered the power of the strike.
In the face of that, it is indeed in the short-term interest of businesses to repress strikes and workers’ wages. If effective and well-organized, strikes interrupt production, the delivery of important services and the generation of profits.
Moreover, strikes are polarizing and require people to take sides, sometimes creating long-lasting rifts amongst families and communities. Many people who are not directly involved in a strike either pay little attention or think only about how their own lives are disrupted.
But if we do not have strikes, the alternative is worse. It’s deeply dysfunctional for the economy to see an ever-widening income gap.
We see signs of this dysfunction every day, whether in the form of increased food bank use, an inability to afford housing or the long-term destruction of hope in the future. It’s not rational for the business community to degrade the situation of workers to the point where they are unable to participate meaningfully in the economy.
These were lessons learned after the Great Depression and the Second World War – economies don’t thrive when workers are unable to benefit from their work and the social wealth they’re part of creating. Until business leaders relearn this lesson, strikes will continue to heat up.