Bargaining in an Era of Wage Restraint: Rethinking Strategies for the Public Sector

Socialist Project Bullet

With the Great Financial Crisis apparently over, economic and political elites across the developed countries have cynically ignored who caused the crisis and turned, as their solution, to cutting back social services and attacking the wages and conditions of public sector workers.

So far, they seem to be getting away with it. The crucial question everywhere is ‘where is the labour movement?’ It will not be enough to complain about unfairness or argue that such a strategy will not sustain the vulnerable recovery, or to call for militancy without laying the groundwork for a successful counter-response. If the labour movement cannot use this moment to reinvent itself and its relationship to the community, its recent marginalization will accelerate.

The Bullet produced below attempts to begin a dialogue on these issues in the concrete context of the fightback against public sector austerity in Ontario. It is a preface to an upcoming forum organized by the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly that will provide a space for union and social activists to collectively discuss and strategize over what, concretely, needs to be done. It is a dialogue and process that needs to be occurring across Canada and North America with a sense of urgency and militancy.
Read more here.