Vol. 74/No. 26      July 12, 2010

At the beginning of May hundreds of strikers, relatives, and community supporters blocked two city roads leading to the entrances of an operating Vale mine and mill. They demanded Vale negotiate a contract. The mass protests, which initially defied court orders to disperse, lasted five days. Many strikers saw the actions as strengthening the strike. Vale is now taking a number of union members to court, accusing them of violating court injunctions that limit the number of pickets to eight per picket line.

Last March, 5,000 marched through the streets of Sudbury to a solidarity rally, which included unionists from around the province and representatives of Vale unions from Brazil and other countries, as well as local university students.  
 
Mobilizing union power
USW Local 6500 is a major industrial union with a long history of struggle. As the strike heads towards its one-year anniversary, the stakes in this fight are high for the entire labor movement. Members of this local have never before had to face efforts by the nickel bosses to resume production using strikebreakers. Production is being carried out in at least two of six mines, a mill, and the smelter.

A number of union officials leading the strike emphasize pressuring capitalist politicians and government institutions to make the Vale bosses back down. This effort is packaged in radical-sounding demands to force the company to agree to the “Canadian way” of doing things. The New Democratic Party—a social democratic party linked to the unions outside of Quebec—which has been active in supporting the strike, also promotes this view.

Vale is a Brazilian-based company that bought out Canadian-owned Inco in 2006. “We are sick and tired of foreign capitalists coming in and undermining the Canadian way of life,” said USW District 6 Director Wayne Fraser, responding to Vale’s March announcement of plans to bring in strikebreakers.

There is, of course, no such thing as a “Canadian” way. Workers and bosses have no common class interests. The employers often try to use Canadian nationalism to convince workers they need to sacrifice wages and working conditions to defend “Canadian” business against its international competitors.

The problem with Vale is not that it is Brazilian but that it is a capitalist corporation, supported in its attack against USW Local 6500 by the bosses throughout Canada, along with their courts, cops, and government.

Like all capitalists, Vale’s owners are driven to increase their profits and profit rates at our expense as global competition between capitalists intensifies—a by-product of the initial stages of a global economic depression of the world capitalist system.

Union power—our ability to cut off profits by withdrawing our labor power and then doing what is necessary to ensure all production stops—is the only effective weapon we have to defend ourselves from the bosses’ assaults.

The May protests that closed off two roads to Vale facilities pointed in the direction of the kind of union power needed to win the strike.

The March rally showed the potential for working-class solidarity. The labor movement across Canada should organize a massive, sustained solidarity campaign of demonstrations, meetings, picket lines, and fund-raising events similar to the Canada-wide solidarity campaign that helped win a hard-fought eight-month strike against Inco in 1978-79.
 
 
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