Seven Oaks Magazine.

1. How does the HEU strike and the apparent galvanization of the B.C. Labour movement compare to past B.C. labour protests?

There are a few important things to consider. The first is the largely spontaneous walkout by IBEW and OPEIU members at BC Hydro and other sites throughout the province. This tells us just how angry people are at this government: they will gladly sacrifice a day’s pay and more, and risk discipline at work to add their voice to the protest and to support the HEU. That’s huge.

The second is the official voice of labour is more united than it has been in the past. It’s in part because the membership is pushing leaders and in part because the leaders understand the need for action and unity. The labour movement is often divided, but the Liberal government has gone a long way to helping it unite. The usual squabbles are forgotten when faced with a government that refuses to negotiate in good faith and uses the blunt instrument of back to work legislation instead.

Third, public support is strong. The public understands the work the HEU members do; these workers really are the frontline of the public healthcare system. People can see that the privatization has already hurt health care service. And they understand that you get what you pay for and that cutting wages hurts service. Finally, this government has such a record of broken promises, broken agreements, and broken policies that it has alienated just about every group you can name. And the retroactive pay cut and imposed rollback strikes everyone as just plain nasty. The Liberals have created a climate of mistrust and anger, and the HEU strike is just one part of it.

So it is a different situation than other labour protests, in that public sympathy is more clearly on the side of the HEU, workers are better organized, and the leadership is better prepared.

Naturally people are thinking about 1983 and Solidarity and trying to draw parallels and learn lessons from it. And labour learned much from Solidarity. It’s no accident that CUPE has been planning a day of protest for some time now, or that the BC Federation of Labour has been working hard to develop ideas and strategies.

Talk about a general strike isn’t surprising, when you consider that the Liberals have a huge majority in the legislature and have shown absolutely no interest in talking with people. If people aren’t represented in the government and the government ignores them, they understand that protest is the only democratic avenue left to them. And a general strike is a pretty strong protest.

We’ve had general strikes before, though usually they were one day protests, such as the one in BC in 1987 to protest another government’s mistake, and the federal one in 1976 against wage controls. And we have had strikes in single industries where everyone went out; while the IWA has sometimes come out against the general strike, it has effectively shut down the entire industry several times. And we can go back further, to the 1918 one day strike to protest the murder of labour organizer Ginger Goodwin.

3. You recently completed an article for the Globe and Mail on the history of May Day. Does this year’s May Day hold particular salience for workers in B.C.?

The march and rally was one of the largest and most energetic we’ve seen in ages. It’s no coincidence. Workers have seen the standard of living, the social safety net, and wages decline over the last thirty years. We’re all re-learning the most important lessons labour history has to teach: that the world only improves when we fight to improve it.

4. Three years ago, when Gordon Campbell was elected, most of the talk was about a conservative mood in B.C. Which do you think is the real face of the province?

It’s a popular myth that BC is especially polarized and that it swings drastically from election to election. Elections tell us less about the popular mood than we sometimes infer. Our “first past the post" system sometimes rewards and punishes parties disproportionately; the seats in the legislature never accurately reflect the popular vote. People often vote against the government, rather than for another party, and they often vote strategically, sometimes to ensure their constituency elects someone on what appears to be the winning side.

And I know this will shock you and your readers: Politicians sometimes lie. The apparent moderate who gets elected can turn into the extremist no one wants. So elections aren’t always the indicator of the public mood they’re held to be. Politicians need to remember that when they govern. But that seems to be a lesson the Liberals have forgotten. Most people in the province are not hard right or hard left. They want the government to deliver good services efficiently. They certainly don’t need the government to create a climate of distrust or create labour problems; they don’t want the government to create unemployment or terrible wages. The market can do that all by itself.

5. When the labour movement in B.C. started, it was very male-centered and anti-immigrant. What does an action like the HEU strike say about the movement’s evolution?

It’s certainly true that the early labour movement was racist and sexist; at least parts of it were. At the same time, however, workers in unions such as the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World fought against sexism and racism. Even the most conservative craft unions argued early on for women’s right to organize unions, while the Knights of Labor insisted on equal pay for equal work in the 1880s. So it’s important not to over-generalize. And for every union leader who was in the Asiatic Exclusion League, there was an employer and a Liberal and Conservative politician signed up.

This is not to whitewash or excuse the racism and sexism that did exist in the labour movement, not for a moment. But it is useful to understand that racism and sexism divide workers, and therefore are problems the working class has to solve. For employers, however, racism and sexism are crucial tools, precisely because they can divide workers and let the boss pay lower wages. The HEU strike -- in a union that is 80 per cent women, and many members are recent immigrants -- shows us that the labour movement has come a long way in fighting racism and sexism in the union and in the board rooms and legislatures that use them for their own ends to divide workers.

6. You do a lot of work on working class issues in academia. Have the tuition hikes under the liberals affected your constituency on campus?

Tuition fees and more importantly the general economy have all drastically changed who goes to university. When I started university in 1982 as a so-called mature student, I was 27 years old. That was the average age of the undergraduate population. Now the average undergraduate is 22. That tells us something important. We have fewer people working and going back to university, fewer people from the working class going to university. University education opened up for several years in Canada, but it has been increasingly restricted to the middle and upper classes. Even talk about admissions standards reinforces this, because the reality is we do not have a school system based on equality. Richer students have better access to better education from primary school to university. For a brief time, universities helped build equality; now they tend to reinforce inequality.

At the same time, even middle class students often need to work to attend university. Twenty years ago, you could almost afford to live on student loans and grants; today many students are working 20 and 30 and 40 hours a week and going to school full-time. And the jobs pay less in real dollars than they did 20 years ago, as employers have attacked unions and minimum wage legislation. The irony is that at the same time governments and business are saying education is more important for everyone than ever, they are making available only to members of their own class.

7. What are you working on right now?

I’m just finishing a biography of the 19th century anarchist Michael Bakunin -- I’m making some corrections and adding some material in places. But the editor at St. Martin’s Press likes the manuscript, and it’s just about done. It was an exciting project, because Bakunin was an activist and thinker whose ideas are worth looking at today. In some ways 1848 was rather like the first years of this millennium. That is, it was clear that the economy was changing drastically and in ways that threatened to make the lives of working people worse. Our so-called new economy threatens to do the same, and as in 1848, people are taking to the streets to fight back. Bakunin’s life and ideas provides some insight into popular struggle, the importance of ideas, and political strategy.

I’m just developing my next project, which will be a history of anarchist violence. This will examine anarchism from Bakunin to the present, to show that the violence of anarchists is a very small thing compared to the violence of capital and the state. It will look at anarchist tactics more widely and trace how they have developed and evolved. I’m also working on a history of Canada that will outline how capital and the state have depended on each other since Confederation. Who’s missing from that formula? Well, the people, obviously, and that was the intent of business and government from the beginning to the present.