The 55,000 Ontario government workers who set up picket lines one month ago in cities across that Canadian province are in the front line of the fight to defend social services and trade union rights.
Like their fellow workers in France, Germany, Argentina, and elsewhere, these unionists are resisting the belt-tightening drive mounted by federal and provincial governments in Canada.
Members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), on strike for the first time, have won broad support among working people through demonstrations and mass picket lines reinforced by teachers, steel, auto, and other workers.
OPSEU's demands center on improved severance terms for the 13,000-27,000 government workers facing permanent layoff, and maintaining union rights in jobs that are privatized.
The struggle, however, has become part of a broadening fightback of working people against the government's drive to slash deeply into social rights such as education, health care, welfare, and other vital services, as well as to gut the capacity of unions to defend workers' rights.
The Ontario provincial premier, Mike Harris, is looked to by the employing class in Canada as the most brazen point man against workers' social wage. His administration has responded to the strike with increased use of the courts, police, and scabs.
But physical attacks on strikers' picket lines were met with large protests. After a March 18 attack by baton-swinging Ontario Provincial Police on a picket line in front of the Ontario legislature, large and broad protests were mounted. The provincial police, who had vowed to "whack 'em and stack 'em," were nowhere to be seen when 4,000 people marched in protest a week later. The determined response and outrage of the strikers and other working people to the attack forced the government to call a public inquiry into the assault, which injured four workers.
Protests are taking place throughout Canada against the attempt to dump entitlements, living standards, and union rights. Two days prior to the OPSEU walkout, some 100,000 workers demonstrated in Hamilton, Ontario. Three thousand marched in Campbelltown, New Brunswick, March 10 against proposed cuts to unemployment insurance.
The Ontario Federation of Labor has now targeted the industrial region of Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge for its third one-day protest strike, called for April 19.
The OPSEU workers, who are keeping government buildings closed with picket lines, are showing how union power can be used to fight capitalist austerity programs, which are a consequence of the falling average rate of profit and intensified interimperialist competition.
The task of the hour is for working people and youth to bolster the OPSEU picket lines, demand that the government prosecute the cops that attacked the strikers on March 18, and mobilize the broadest possible numbers of working people and youth for the April 19 action in Kitchener-Waterloo.