The Toronto Airport Workers’ Council: Renewing Workplace Organizing and Socialist Labor Education

A Note on Sources and “Socialism”

The information in this article is drawn from academic, popular, and activist writing, including documents, public materials, and internal communications provided to us by members of the TAWC. The authors are also informed by our experiences as activists in the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly and the TLC, where we participated in airport worker solidarity actions, public education efforts, and facilitated worker-activist training. ¹ Finally, for the purposes of this study, since we are interested less in the different tendencies of socialism than in the contributions of socialists broadly conceived, we define socialists here as anyone to the left of social democracy, ranging from syndicalists to communists.

Deregulating the Skies

The current system of labor relations in Canada was established federally and in most provinces between 1944 and 1950. It arose as workers invented new forms of militancy, including sit-down strikes and mass pickets, and when many worker leaders and organizers were immersed in socialist politics (Heron 1996; Stevens and Nesbitt 2014). Indeed, the combination of a massive strike wave in 1942-1943 and the electoral successes of socialist parties like the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Labor-Progressive Party (a Communist Party front) led in 1944 to the mandatory recognition of unions and compulsory collective agreement bargaining with Privy Council Order 1003. More importantly, after the CCF’s electoral decline federally, another massive strike wave in 1945-1947 amid conditions of full employment ensured the consolidation of the wartime legislation with the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act in 1948. This federal legislation included the “Rand Formula,” which stipulated that workers need not join their workplace union, but that they must pay dues to that union through automatic check-off. Most provinces soon followed suit. Another major strike wave in the 1960s alongside the Quiet Revolution in Quebec inspired the federal legislation in 1967 that extended legal recognition to public sector unions (McCrorie 1995; Panitch and Swartz 2009).

The postwar system of labor relations can be described as industrial pluralism, a state-brokered class compromise which regulates the contestations between workers and capitalists through union recognition, formal grievance procedures, and compulsory collective bargaining that is administered by government-appointed labor boards (Stevens and Nesbitt 2014). Industrial pluralism entailed important victories for workers, but it largely favors capitalists. For example, while capitalist organizations like the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association failed in their attempts to preserve voluntary union recognition, workers’ organizations like the Canadian Congress of Labour, which went beyond demands for mandatory recognition, argued unsuccessfully for worker defined bargaining units. Like the Wagner Act, whose passage in the United States in 1935 set an important precedent, Canadian labor law established state defined bargaining units that privileged craft unions instead of industrial unions (McCrorie 1995; Russell 1995). This fragments workers within and between workplaces and imposes sectionalism, a narrow focus on their own particular forms of work to the detriment of broader working-class solidarity (Swartz and Warskett 2012).

Industrial pluralism in Canada also makes unions legally responsible for enforcing the terms of collective bargaining agreements. This responsible unionism creates rigid divisions within unions because leaders are expected to discipline their own members as much as represent their interests. Worker-initiated militancy is further constrained because labor laws do not challenge employer and managerial rights to change working conditions during the term of the contract. This restricts unions to labor-market issues and imposes economism, an emphasis on workplace economic demands like better wages and benefits, rather than demands for greater workers’ control and broader political issues both in and beyond the workplace (Russell 1995; Swartz and Warskett 2012; Tucker and Fudge 1996).

This is significant because, much more than Wagner and its subsequent amendments, Canadian labor laws prohibit unions from striking during the life of the contract. To replace midterm strikes, industrial pluralism in Canada implemented expanded grievance procedures. Furthermore, after contracts expire, “dispute avoidance mechanisms” feature mandatory conciliation and “cooling off” periods before strikes are legally recognized (McCrorie 1995). These procedures impose legalism on unions because they are adjudicated largely between small groups of workers’ representatives, state officials, and experts such as lawyers (Swartz and Warskett 2012). Not only are these procedures far removed from the participation and active scrutiny of rank-and-file workers, but they are routinely disadvantageous to unions (Savage and Smith 2017). Finally, the genuine victories of industrial pluralism did not extend to all workers. Unionization rates remain low in small and midsized firms and in the service and “white collar” sectors, and many forms of labor-market discrimination and segregation persist (Forrest 1995; Heron 1996).

Many workers achieved better working conditions and compensation within the industrial pluralism of the postwar era, but the limits imposed on—and largely accepted by—unions contributed to declines in the commitment to broader societal change and the workplace and community organizing skills that were necessary for achieving these gains in the first place. Although class struggle produced this system of labor relations, “ironically, working-class organizations had failed to approach the process of reform from a perspective based on the conflict between classes,” which, to a large degree, “would determine the terrain and the tools of resistance for the current series of attacks on Canada’s system of industrial relations” (McCrorie 1995, 31-32). The labor movement tended to treat as a permanent ceasefire what the capitalist class regarded as a temporary reduction of hostilities. In the mid-1970s, however, the postwar economic boom ended in stagflation and the crisis of Keynesianism while workers’ increasingly militant wage demands squeezed profits beyond what employers would tolerate. When capitalist classes initiated a new round of intensified class struggle, the labor movement was drastically unprepared.

Since the late-1970s, there has been a transition to neoliberal labor relations in which government interventions in collective bargaining and employer restructuring of labour processes have undermined industrial pluralism. This transformation of labor relations must be situated in the broader context of capitalist society, because neoliberalism is not merely a series of economic proposals for deregulation and privatization. More importantly, it is a political project to restore the class power and profits of capitalists (Harvey 2007). Airports were among the first battlegrounds in the turn toward neoliberal labor relations, as is illustrated by Reagan’s crushing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981. Strike leaders were arrested, twelve thousand controllers were permanently dismissed, and the military was brought in to run the airports (Panitch and Gindin 2012). The neoliberal transition to increasingly coercive labor relations is also true in Canada. Government intervention has dramatically increased through wage-restraint legislation, the threat and use of back-to-work legislation, broadened definitions of essential services, and imposed extensions of collective agreements (Panitch and Swartz 2009; Tucker 2012). All three of Canada’s main political parties have imposed back-to-work legislation at the national or provincial levels, including the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) (Canadian Foundation for Labour Rights n.d.; Evans 2012; Haiven and Haiven 2015). Since the 2008 financial crisis, airport workers across Canada have faced intensified government intervention in collective bargaining (Albo, Gindin, and Panitch 2010; Thomas and Tufts 2016). This shift is particularly clear for workers at Air Canada, where, between June 2011 and March 2012, back-to-work legislation was threatened, introduced, or passed four times (Stevens and Nesbitt 2014).

As in the United States, the neoliberal restructuring of Canadian airports has severely undermined the industrial pluralism of postwar labor relations (Rosenblum 2017; Stevens and Nesbitt 2014). In 1987, the National Transportation Act initiated airline deregulation in Canada. Soon thereafter, the privatization of Air Canada in 1988 ended the Canadian government’s virtual monopoly of the air travel industry. Around this time, other services, such as air traffic control and certain security responsibilities, were also contracted out to private firms. The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) was incorporated in 1993, and, in 1996, assumed operations of Pearson from Transport Canada, a department of the federal government. The GTAA is a not for profit corporation incorporated by the federal government, to whom the GTAA remits a portion of its revenues, which include the fees paid by companies at the airport.

This restructuring was ostensibly meant to increase competition and decrease the cost of air travel at a time when Air Canada was faltering. Although air travel has become cheaper for the general public, working conditions and services are deteriorating. Since “the federal government largely withdrew to the role of airport owner and safety regulator” and left airlines and airport managers to run their operations according to profit and efficiency, “deregulation and privatization have introduced new economic imperatives that have not always aligned with the regulatory aspects for which the state is responsible” (Edwards 2014, 11). This sometimes results in dangerous service gaps. At Pearson, approximately eighty thousand travelers each month require wheelchair assistance. Between 2011 and 2016, eight court cases against the GTAA alleged negligence, serious injury, and in one case, the wrongful death, of travelers with mobility issues (Seglins and Gomez 2016).

Deregulation has turned air travel into a mass industry through a high growth model based on low wages and nonunion firms (Airports United 2016; Chouinard 1995; Rosenblum 2017; Shalla 2002; Singh, Zinni, and Jain 2005). One strategy through which the GTAA and the airlines at Pearson have accomplished this is subcontracting services to private aviation service providers, such as major multinationals Menzies and Swissport. As a result, airport workers face a dramatic race to the bottom through “contract flipping,” whereby employers change service providers—and potentially entire workforces—every few years. The Canada Labour Code has no provisions for successor rights in federally regulated industries like transport. Therefore, airport workers have to reapply for their jobs each time a contractor changes, which means their union might change, or they can be left without a union and a collective agreement, or they can lose their jobs altogether.

The practice is widespread at Pearson. Workers at Pearson’s customer assistance program have had their contract flipped every three years between 2004 and 2015 (Mojtehedzadeh 2015c). When Pearson flipped a parking services contract in 2014, only thirty of the eighty workers were rehired by the new contractor (Mojtehedzadeh 2015b). In the fall of 2015, 375 wheelchair attendants making $12 an hour had their contract flipped and were forced to reapply for their jobs. It was the second time the contract had changed hands in less than a year and the fourth time since 2004. Each time a new contract began, those employees who were hired back began a probationary period, typically lasting six months, during which they lacked access to benefits (Mojtehedzadeh 2015a).

While many airport jobs used to guarantee stability and a living wage, since neoliberal restructuring, airports have become major sites of worker precarity and poverty (Mojtehedzadeh 2016; Rosenblum 2017). Subcontracting and contract flipping increase precarity even when airport workers have a union. If unions win major gains at a subcontracted employer, they might make their employers’ agreement with the contractor company less competitive, causing them to lose the contract. Union security is also undermined because, when a contract gets flipped and a new employer is brought in, unions must recertify their “new” workforces. Furthermore, it is difficult for unions to develop experienced activists because workers routinely change jobs, employers, and unions. Restructuring also greatly increases union competition, because, when a contract is flipped, other unions can snatch up members without having to engage in raiding campaigns. When combined with the ways in which government intervention undermines the rights to collectively bargain and to strike, this is a major departure from the industrial pluralism of the postwar era. For the most part, unions have not adapted to these changing neoliberal labor relations. Unions largely accept the constraints of industrial pluralism while incrementally losing its benefits.

The Response by Airport Unions

Even if neoliberalism has been largely imposed from above, the labor movement has never been without agency. The decline of union power since the 1970s has provoked numerous calls for union renewal. Although these proposals often emphasize the need for increased union density and militancy (Burns 2011; Jackson 2006), the situation at Pearson demonstrates that this is insufficient to challenge neoliberal restructuring in the broader capitalist context. Union density at Pearson is 70 to 75 percent (personal correspondence 2018-09-05), much higher than the Canadian average of 28 percent (Statistics Canada 2017). The airport has twelve different unions representing various trades and sectors—Unifor 2002: GTAA employees, passenger sales and service agents, security, and ground crew workers; Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) (multiple locals): flight attendants and cabin crews; International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) District 140: ramp, baggage, cargo and maintenance workers, ground handlers, security screeners, and food commissary workers; Public Service Alliance of Canada/Customs and Immigration Union (PSAC-CIU) 024: customs and immigration officers; Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 2: retail workers; Teamsters Local 419: Swissport ground crew; Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW): postal workers in Vista Cargo; United Steelworkers (USW): Delta airline employees and security; United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) 206: food service workers; Labourers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) 183: cleaners; Air Canada Pilots Association; and Air Line Pilots Association. The Pearson workers without unions are mostly in retail, banking, and money exchanges.

Although major North American unions have sought to restore density through the strategy of “organizing the unorganized,” this quantitative growth model should be called unionizing the nonunionized, because unionizing and organizing are not the same. These renewal strategies do not engage in the organizing necessary for qualitatively transforming unions into participatory and democratic organizations that can build the class as a whole (Aronowitz 2005). This quantitative model includes union mergers, like that between the Canadian Auto Workers and Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers to form Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, as well as the international union mergers that attempt to challenge transnational corporations and global institutions. But the internal failings of unions long preceded the era of globalization, and unions that have not built the solidarity in their own countries necessary to challenge attacks by national governments can hardly be expected to build effective global labor solidarity (Gindin 2016). Indeed, this quantitative approach is mirrored in strategies of socialist renewal based primarily in “left regroupment.” Regrouping socialist microsects only creates a larger microsect that does not itself address sectarianism and the role of socialist organizations in their own decline (Draper 1973; Murray 2016).

Similarly, quantitative approaches to militancy cannot explain the neoliberal restructuring of Pearson despite its long-standing culture of militant actions. Between 1984 and 2013, there were thirty-five work stoppages across the Canadian airline industry, including six by Air Canada workers, and after a 2012 wildcat by Pearson ground crews, an arbitrator wrote begrudgingly in his decision, “I recognize that within the Air Canada world, threats of illegal strikes occur relatively frequently. It has become part of the culture” (Chouinard 1995; Stevens and Nesbitt 2014, 119; Stevens and Templeton 2016). Due to the nature of unauthorized work stoppages, many have not been publicized. Nevertheless, numerous TAWC organizers indicate a general culture of militancy throughout the 1990s that included wildcat strikes, slowdowns, and other shop-floor actions (personal correspondence 2018-09-02). Much of this militancy declined in the early 2000s because of airline mergers that led to “seniority wars” and infighting among airline workers (2000-2001), the events of September 11, 2001, and Air Canada’s financial troubles and corporate restructuring (2003-2004). By the late 2000s, however, a resurgence of militancy included Air Canada pilots who, though they tend to identify more as professionals than as workers, staged a sick-in protest against threatened back-to-work legislation in March 2012. It was later found to be an illegal strike.

The most significant example of airport militancy, however, is also one of the most effective labor actions in Canada in decades. On March 22, 2012, as then Minister of Labour, Lisa Raitt, walked through the airport, three IAMAW ground workers sarcastically congratulated her for removing their right to strike with back-to-work legislation. Raitt reportedly told nearby police officers to “Arrest those animals” and Air Canada fired the trio of ground workers (Gillis 2012). That night, their coworkers began a wildcat, which was joined by other ground crews in Montreal, Quebec City, and Vancouver, causing major disruptions to the Air Canada flight schedule (CBC News: The National 2012). The three fired workers were reinstated without penalty. Although these workers pushed beyond the normal bounds of labor law, it is notable that their militancy was defensive, not an action they initiated to improve working conditions, much less challenge the neoliberal restructuring of their workplace. Indeed, the experiences of ground workers show that militancy is not a panacea. Although many of the airport unions have conceded two tier contracts, causing major and persisting internal divisions, even when ground handlers militantly resisted tiering, their jobs were subcontracted to a company with lower wages.

If Pearson has high union density and rank-and-file militancy, why have government interventions and neoliberal restructuring been so successful? Some scholars argue that a major obstacle to union renewal is the prevalence of “business unionism,” with its hierarchical structures, pursuit of narrow sectional and economic interests, and focus on servicing contracts. The alternative, it is often argued, should be the widespread adoption of “social unionism,” which is generally more expansive in the political issues it adopts, the tactics it uses, and the alliances it forms (Kumar and Murray 2006; Waterman 1999). Nevertheless, there is immense variation between forms of social unionism (Camfield 2011; Ross 2007). Indeed, though Pearson includes some of Canada’s most prominent social unions, throughout the neoliberal restructuring, members of the “social” unions have experienced the same decline in working conditions and union power as their colleagues in the “business” unions.

Before airport workers began developing alternative models of organizing, a long-standing problem was the absence of formal spaces where they could discuss common issues and demands. Indeed, the 1990s saw major interunion conflicts over raiding campaigns and seniority rights between the workers of different airlines during mergers. Since the different airport unions met separately with their own employers, each also had to accept at face value what their employers said about the other groups of workers and unions. Similarly, airport workers had few opportunities to discuss issues directly with the GTAA, because employers like Air Canada acted as mediators. Furthermore, union leaders often focused on their own sectional interests, neglecting the airport-wide issues that are often beyond the scope of their collective agreements. Consequently, the GTAA’s reliance on the information coming from employers and union leaders meant it did not have a full picture of labor relations within its tenant airlines and contracted service providers. Finally, many airport activists felt that union leaders were unable or unwilling to broaden their “strategic repertoires” (see Ross 2007), relying especially on familiar but ineffective legal, media, and political lobbying activities (see Walkom 2012).

These shortcomings, even among the social unions at Pearson, are partly due to the ways in which forms of social unionism are often tied to internal organizing models that are based on a “mobilizing strategy” (McAlevey 2016). This brings many ordinary people into protests and struggles, but these mobilizations typically remain controlled by professional organizers and staff. Workers’ participation is usually limited to a mere show of numbers that bolsters what nonetheless remains elite power brokerage between labor leaders, employers, and politicians (Forman 2013). Meaningful internal organizing efforts to empower rank-and-file members face a myriad of challenges, including increased demand on local resources, which have to be siphoned from servicing budgets, and apathy or resistance from staff who were hired for their specific skills and expertise (Fletcher and Hurd 1998). Conversely, a “deep organizing” strategy seeks not only the mobilization of self-selecting activists, but mass negotiations in which a broadening base of ordinary workers actively participate and make decisions (McAlevey 2016). This strategy treats workers as members of a broader class. Indeed, unions tend to better represent their own members when these unions deem themselves representatives of the working class as a whole (Fletcher and Gapasin 2008). Consequently, deep organizing applies a “whole worker” analysis that conceives of workers not only as workers, but as members of families, communities, and of civil society, with important interests and issues that are beyond the workplace, but no less integral to capitalist society, such as housing, education, and health care. Most importantly, whereas unions often treat their members as sellers of labor-power and payers of dues, deep organizing cultivates workers’ capacities for self-government (Gindin 1998).

If most workers do not currently have the capacities for self-governance, it is from lack of opportunity, not a dearth of innate ability. This is the importance of workers’ education, of some workers teaching other workers the organizing knowledge and skills that have developed cooperatively over time. The decline of the labor movement began before the era of neoliberalism and globalization, and even before the militancy of the 1960s-1970s, because of the gradual withering of the generational transmission—through formal and informal education, through expressing certain ideas and modeling specific behaviors—of deep organizing and its vision of self- and social-transformation. This is due in part to the purging from labor movements of those who most consistently engaged in this education, socialists and their organizations (Gindin 2012; see Dwyer 1977; Taylor 2001), however inconsistent their practices and profound their internal failings—the record varies widely.

Although the deep organizing strategy is the most sophisticated contemporary proposal for labor movement renewal, there are three areas that must be explored and expanded if it is to have wider applicability. First, since deep organizing is so labor-intensive, it requires commitment by the union. It is unlikely to succeed when actively opposed by union leaders and staff. This raises the question of whether or not deep organizing itself is a sufficient strategy for the internal transformation of unions. Second, it is unclear if the application of a deep organizing strategy in a single union local at Pearson could substantially challenge neoliberal restructuring. Airports are a strategic sector for workplace organizing because of their importance for the economy and because labor disruptions have immediate impacts on customers. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the workplace and the number of unions and employers, when combined with the immense fragmentation imposed by restructuring, create limits to what a single union local at Pearson can achieve. Finally, in the past, strategies similar to the deep organizing model have required political organizations, typically socialist, that can provide education, support, and resources for worker organizers, especially isolated workers beginning to organize an internal transformation of their union.

Pearson workers have responded to many of these challenges, and, in particular, the shortcomings of the airport unions, by undertaking ambitious efforts in cross-employer organizing as well as labor-community coalition building, the most exciting of which is the TAWC. As a nonunion, independent organization, the TAWC does not conform to the typical calls for increased union cooperation or strengthened labor federations (see Weir 2006). Although union renewal literature often calls for nonunion labor organizations that prioritize organizing the unorganized, such as workers’ centers, community unions, and noncertified “solidarity unions” (see Black 2012; Fine 2006; Lynd 2015), the TAWC is unique because it is overwhelmingly comprised of already unionized workers addressing issues in their workplace. Furthermore, unlike workers’ centers, or, for that matter, central labor councils, the TAWC does not concede the primacy of workplace economic power in favor of political lobbying or mobilizing (see Fine 2006).

In the following sections, we argue that the TAWC, as a nonunion labor organization, shows that union density and militancy are not merely quantitative questions of the amount of members or the frequency of their actions. Insofar as the TAWC has been successful, it is because it also addresses qualitative questions of what workers’ organizations do with the density they have and what kinds of militancy they affirm. In this, the TAWC emphasizes participatory structures, direct action tactics, and a broader class focus that organizes workers as workers, not as members of specific unions or industries. A crucial part of this class focus has been workers’ education within the TAWC. Some of the key organizers in the TAWC are socialists and much of the most important workers’ education has been provided by an organization called the Toronto Labour Committee, which offers organizer training and political education from an explicitly socialist perspective.

The TAWC

The TAWC is open to all Pearson workers, regardless of employer or union. It holds regular meetings to discuss common issues, develop collective demands, and pursue campaigns. In a major international airport, this council model is particularly effective and necessary because of the legal barriers to a single union for all airport workers and the ways in which the twelve existing unions’ fail to substantively collaborate with each other. Nevertheless, it is a daunting task to organize almost forty thousand (nonmanagement) airport workers divided among 320 employers amid neoliberal restructuring (personal correspondence 2018-09-05).

Council organizing at Pearson began during the period of deregulation when a small group of shop stewards recognized the need for interunion organizing. In 1995, shop stewards from three of the Air Canada unions, CUPE, IAMAW, and the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor), refused to meet separately with management and began thinking of ways to directly confront the GTAA (personal correspondence 2018-09-02). Until that point, management announced company-wide policy changes separately to each group of stewards. The three groups of stewards recognized that not only could Air Canada play each of them off of the others, but that Air Canada and the GTAA could deflect responsibility onto each other about the true source of new policies. Initially, Air Canada management rejected any joint meetings and went over the stewards to speak with union leaders. The stewards had issued their demand to management without telling the leaderships, and initially, some leaders told their stewards to desist. Amid heightened strife within the unions, however, political momentum among the rank-and-file members swung toward the stewards. Ultimately, leaders advised management to deal with the combined group of stewards, who were persistent enough that management finally agreed. The stewards’ next demand was onsite transit improvements that would shorten commutes for all Air Canada workers. In 1997, these initial successes inspired the stewards to form the Airport Council of Unions, which consisted of the three Air Canada unions. They also signed a “Solidarity Pact” declaring that the Air Canada stewards would “cooperate on issues of mutual concern,” especially in matters related to “overlapping contractual concerns” and health and safety issues (Pearson Airport Council of Unions 1997).

This first phase of council organizing was interrupted, however, by Air Canada’s 2001 merger with its main rival, Canadian Airlines, the events of September 11, 2001, and Air Canada’s financial troubles from 2003 to 2004. During bargaining with Air Canada in 2011, some of the original stewards revived council organizing when the government legislated Air Canada workers an essential service and forced them back to work (Stevens and Templeton 2016). That groups of airport workers could be targeted and isolated so effectively signaled a need for even broader solidarity work. In 2012, they created the TAWC. The new name signaled a new strategy: the TAWC emphasizes airport workers, not airport unions. They also established a new and expanded Solidarity Pact, which includes not only more of the airport union locals (CUPE; IAMAW; CAW [now Unifor]; PSAC; Teamsters; and SEIU) but also Toronto municipal workers in CUPE 966 and 416, education workers in PSAC 610, and, significantly, the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly, an anticapitalist political organization that was a signatory until it dissolved in 2015 (Gindin 2012; Rosenfeld 2011). Like the previous phases of council organizing, the TAWC is not managed by union presidents and chairpersons. Rather, it is led by local staff, particularly organizers, local officers, including stewards and activist members of local executives, and rank-and-file workers.

Unlike the 1997 phase of council organizing, the TAWC and the expanded Solidarity Pact in 2012 were supported by a number of the national and international leaders of the airport unions. This is largely because the devastating back-to-work legislation in the Air Canada strike provoked renewed interest, including among leaders and staff, for the kind of militancy that could defend unions against the attacks on industrial pluralism by governments and employers. Union leaders have provided the TAWC with in-kind assistance, including sound equipment, printing resources, and paid time release for activists. Despite this tentative support, however, there are tensions between union leaders and the TAWC organizers. Numerous union leaders and staff are suspicious that these activist organizers, stewards, and workers are creating a kind of “dual unionism” that replicates, obstructs, and potentially threatens union activities. At times, this has meant union leaders withdrawing their support for the TAWC and discouraging their members from attending its events, such as its annual May Day rally. Furthermore, some union leaders might fear that the TAWC could be used by other unions to raid their memberships. This is particularly true with regard to Unifor, not only because some of its members are key TAWC organizers but also because of Unifor’s current raiding campaign in the hospitality sector. This has caused significant tensions between Unifor and the Canadian Labour Congress that have split the labor movement (Tufts 2018). Thus, on the whole, union leaders tend to treat the TAWC in an instrumentalist way, supporting it when it is accomplishing what each of the unions cannot, but in general remaining suspicious. This is significant because these leaders have the power to severely hamper or completely undermine it by, for example, rejecting paid time release for TAWC organizers.

These tensions are compounded because, upon the formation of the TAWC in 2012, the GTAA formally recognized it as a legitimate representative of airport workers’ interests and meets with it approximately ten times a year. The GTAA does this because the TAWC is developing a unique form of power. It brings together airport workers in an organization that can directly challenge individual employers, or the GTAA, or both at the same time. Furthermore, the TAWC can exploit tensions between the GTAA and tenant employers, particularly when the GTAA’s interests align with airport workers against the airlines and other employers. This has led to a number of significant accomplishments for Pearson workers. For example, the TAWC was instrumental in creating an airport-wide health and safety council that includes the GTAA, employers, and unions, which might be the first of its kind in the world. The TAWC also collaborated with the TTC Riders, a public transit advocacy organization, to lead a campaign that focused on the commuter train to Pearson, which has reduced fares from $27.50 to $12.35 for the general public and $3.50 for airport workers (Kalinowski 2014; TTC Riders 2015). The TAWC has also engaged in global labor solidarity. In 2013, when Porter Airlines workers went on strike at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport soon after 305 Turkish Airlines workers were fired for participating in a union rally, Pearson and Porter workers occupied the Turkish Airlines headquarters in Toronto. Simultaneously, workers for Philippine Airlines—whose successful resistance to subcontracting was aided by solidarity pickets at Pearson—supported Porter workers by occupying the Canadian consulate in Manila (Smith 2016). While the Porter strike ended in relative failure, the 305 Turkish Airlines workers were reinstated in December 2013.

The TAWC has achieved these victories because of its participatory structures, direct action tactics, and a broader class focus that organizes workers as workers. We will discuss each of these in turn.

Worker Participation and Democratic Control

The TAWC is more democratic, participatory, and dynamic than what many airport workers can find in their own unions. It embraces “wall-to-wall” organizing, which, in the airports, means terminal-to-tarmac, from parking attendants to pilots (although the latter, so far, have not participated). Participating is conditional on the principle of building the TAWC for all airport workers, not particular unions or sectors. Its members have been careful to dissuade participants from using the TAWC to promote any union’s sectional interests. The TAWC symbolizes its rejection of sectionalism by choosing purple as its official color, a synthesis of the union colors of the three initial participants, CUPE (red), IAMAW (blue), and Unifor (white).

The TAWC consists of a core group and a secondary group. The core group, whose members attend almost all TAWC meetings, is comprised of around fifteen people from the six airport unions that signed the Solidarity Pact, with a higher proportion of participants coming from Unifor, CUPE, and IAM. Of this core group, two-thirds are staff, particularly organizers, and the other third is split between elected officers, stewards with time release, and a few rank-and-file workers participating on their own time. There is also one spokesperson who is neutral between the unions, a university professor who serves as the Brampton-Mississauga & District Labour Council GTAA board representative. The core group ranges from socialists to social democrats to trade union activists who do not identify with a particular political tendency or party. Nevertheless, while socialists are a minority, they are some of the key organizers and have been indispensable for every phase of council organizing at Pearson. The secondary group is comprised of fifteen to twenty rank-and-file activists who attend some of the meetings and provide support. At the major planning meetings, the highest turnout is fifty people (personal correspondence 2018-09-02; 2018-09-05). Despite their small numbers, TAWC activists are routinely able to gather thousands of signatures for petitions and can draw hundreds of workers to their most successful events, like some of their annual May Day rallies. Nevertheless, a major challenge will be reducing the TAWC’s reliance on the core group as well as the core group’s dependence on a few key organizers. Another challenge will be securing its own funding. The most consistent funding has come from the modest budget of a staff organizer who is a key TAWC activist. Since 2018, however, funding for worker education has also been provided by the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which deems the TAWC among the most inventive resistance to the neoliberal transformations of airports across the world (see International Transport Workers’ Federation 2017b).

In its first few years, the TAWC sustained its basis among rank-and-file workers through innovative, equity-based meeting procedures. Organizing meetings is difficult because international airports feature many different forms of work in widely dispersed locations amid complex arrays of work shifts. It can take a worker forty-five minutes to get from one part of the airport to another. Most airport workers also have considerable commutes, and, in these increasingly precarious working conditions, many work more hours than they would like, or less than they need, or have multiple jobs. To address this, the TAWC successfully demanded and won from the GTAA a large onsite meeting space. The TAWC chooses meeting times that overlap many different shift changes to get the widest possible participation, including among the most precarious airport workers. Workers can come to work early and leave the meeting when their shift begins, or they can join midmeeting after their shift ends. Any participant is free to speak and the meeting facilitators not only prioritize first-time speakers and participants from underrepresented groups, but people can also be advanced in the order of the speakers’ list if they need to leave soon for their shift. Furthermore, the meeting procedures feature regular, succinct summaries of the discussions and decisions so far, which allows recently arriving workers to get informed quickly.

These open and accessible meetings provide illuminating discussions between different groups of workers who usually do not have many opportunities to speak to those outside of their union or sector. Consequently, participating workers learn that they have common issues simply by virtue of sharing the same workplace, no matter how large and complex, including poor health, safety, and security conditions, long commute times, and contract flipping. At these early meetings, hundreds of workers participated. From this, approximately thirty to fifty worker leaders continue to attend the TAWC’s near monthly meetings with the GTAA. This allows the TAWC to spread its activities and information through the networks of these worker leaders in the different unions and sectors. This “social charting” is an organizing technique that encourages class consciousness among workers who must consider how to identify worker leaders who can bring into TAWC campaigns neglected, marginalized, or seemingly apathetic groups of workers. It has also been used by workers at Heathrow Airport, leading to impressive wage gains, especially for cleaners (Coughlan 2016; Walter 2018).

This is one way the TAWC organizes the worker while the unions only “organize the job.” If an airport worker cannot reasonably treat their job like a career because they might soon be contract flipped out of their job, union, or collective agreement, they have much less reason to organize through them and struggle for them. But this is precisely why a worker might dedicate effort to the TAWC. If they go from job A to job B, or from union X to union Y, as long as they still work in the airport the TAWC will be there for them. Furthermore, the TAWC not only establishes common issues but also teaches participants how to develop them into achievable demands. This brings us to its second major feature, direct action.

Direct Action

If contemporary unions often confront their employers from “behind a desk or across a table” (Heron 1996, 89), direct action is on our feet and in their face. Workers use direct action when they attempt to achieve their demands on their own behalf rather than relying on intermediaries, such as union officials, lawyers, or politicians. Whereas most contemporary unions use direct action only as a last resort, for the TAWC, direct action is its first choice. Although this is partly due to the constraints imposed on collective bargaining under neoliberal labor relations, it is largely because of the TAWC’s socialist organizers who recognize the limits of collective bargaining even when governments and employers respect its procedures and precedents. The TAWC cannot file grievances or collectively bargain, but its direct actions can advance workers’ interests by confronting individual employers, and, more importantly, the central airport authority, regardless of the scope or duration of a particular union contract.

Take, for example, the TAWC’s contributions to a series of direct actions in support of wheelchair attendants facing contract flipping and outsourcing. In 2015, when Swissport wheelchair attendants had their contract flipped, many of them, particularly union activists and elderly workers, were not offered interviews by the new employer, Terminal Ground Airport Services (TGAS) (Mojtehedzadeh 2015c; personal correspondence 2018-05-11). Meanwhile, the GTAA also tried to outsource the Air Canada wheelchair attendants to TGAS, who would have rehired them at minimum wage, a 50 percent wage cut. Their union, Unifor, launched information pickets with passengers on Terminal 3 and rallies in front of the GTAA’s headquarters. When Unifor confronted Air Canada about the issue during contract negotiations, the airline replied that, even though the wheelchair attendants have a scope clause in their contracts, the outsourcing was the GTAA’s decision, not their own. While Air Canada attempted to make the outsourcing a legal issue about jurisdiction at the airport, Unifor militants and TAWC activists decided that, instead of waiting to resolve the issue through arbitration, they would organize a wildcat strike on the May 1, 2015.

The TAWC tapped into a unique tradition at Pearson. For as long as any of the airport organizers can remember, saying “I’m going to get an ice cream” announces a wildcat strike while maintaining plausible deniability. On May Day 2015, the TAWC rented ice cream trucks, parked them on Terminal 1, and circulated the message to workers that free ice cream was available. Satisfying both their sweet tooth and a taste for militancy, approximately 70 percent of Air Canada check-in workers walked off the job, and, with other Pearson workers and community allies like the Fight for $15 and Fairness campaign, seized the entrance to Terminal 1 (personal correspondence 2018-03-25; Rabble.ca 2015). The TAWC also indicated to the GTAA that they would escalate these wildcats if TGAS did not offer all of the other wheelchair attendants their previously held jobs (personal correspondence 2018-05-11). This proved so effective that the GTAA ended its attempt to outsource the Air Canada jobs. Air Canada also settled with Unifor and signed a letter promising to end outsourcing attempts during the five-year contract (Keenan 2015). Finally, TGAS offered jobs to all of the former Swissport workers, including the elderly workers and union militants (personal correspondence 2018-05-11).

The TAWC is not yet able to initiate broad mobilizations among rank-and-file workers across unions and sectors. Its wildcat strikes have been most successful when they engage workers whose unions are already in intense struggles during contract negotiations with their individual employers. But the TAWC provides effective support for wildcats initiated from the shop floor by different sectors of workers. Amid the massive wildcat by ground crew workers in 2012, the TAWC organized the occupation of Lisa Raitt’s riding office by mobilizing activists from groups like CUPW, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (Toronto Video Activist Collective 2012), as well as disruptive protest calls to Raitt’s office by teaching assistants in PSAC Local 610, a signatory of the 2012 Solidarity Pact.

The TAWC’s direct actions attempt to achieve airport-wide demands while also mobilizing community allies in the labor and social movements. This is most clear in the TAWC’s annual May Day rally. In 2012, at the start of the current phase of Council organizing, the TAWC held a May Day ceremony at Terminal 1, which featured a discussion of contract flipping and a reading of The Red Flag, a socialist song about labor solidarity. Although more security guards and police attended this ceremony than did workers, it inaugurated a tradition of seizing Terminal 1 for a part of every May Day. These rallies are also a key way for the TAWC to interact with community and labor allies beyond the airport.

Organize the Worker, Not the Job

The TAWC organizes airport workers as workers, as members of the broader working class. An important aspect of this is negotiating various forms of politics, including the politics internal to each union. Although the TAWC does not intend to contest the power of the airport unions, it must navigate the skepticism and potential opposition of some union leaders and staff who regard it as a form of dual unionism. The TAWC ameliorates these concerns by refusing to publicly criticize specific leaders, though it might be critical of union leaders in general, and it does not advocate or endorse internal opposition caucuses. Even if many of the Council organizers and participants would prefer a different leadership in some of the participating unions, the TAWC will work with the members of any union as long as they adhere to the Council’s prioritization of airport-wide issues and its direct action approach.

The TAWC partially reduces overlap with the airport unions by focusing on the issues they do not emphasize, such as employee parking and public transit. The TAWC also focuses on issues that are beyond the scope of collective agreements and for which it can go directly to the GTAA, such as contract flipping. This is how Council organizers maneuver around what many union leaders regard as their sovereign terrain. The TAWC also tends to avoid the electoral campaigns of political parties, although the TAWC did recently endorse two NDP candidates running for provincial office. One is a TAWC organizer and the other is a left-leaning transit activist, a potential ally in the TAWC’s long-term strategy to reduce commutes. Nevertheless, these endorsements are rare. Usually, the TAWC suggests only that workers vote for whomever best represents their class interests.

Despite conceding the realm of electoral politics to members’ individual unions, the TAWC embraces politics in a broader sense when it engages in “community unionism,” which attempts to connect unions to broader social struggles rooted in working-class communities (Black 2012; Tufts 1998). Like workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Rosenblum 2017), the TAWC contributes significantly to local minimum-wage campaigns. In Ontario, the Fight for $15 and Fairness pressured the then-ruling Liberals to pass legislation that included paid sick days, equal pay for equal work, and fairer scheduling, and that would have established a $15 minimum wage by January 1, 2019. Nevertheless, the new Conservative majority government has since passed Bill 47, the “Making Ontario Open for Business Act,” which eliminates most of these protections and freezes the minimum wage at $14 until 2020, at which point it is pegged to inflation.

Since most of the workers at Pearson are federally regulated, they will not benefit from legislative achievements at the provincial level. Nevertheless, the TAWC is a major partner in this provincial minimum-wage campaign because of its industrial approach and broader class orientation (Andrew-Gee 2015) as it builds toward its own demand: that the GTAA establish an airport-wide $15+ minimum wage by including it in the minimum standards in its contracts with the 320 companies that operate at the airport. Even those TAWC participants who make comparatively higher wages support this demand because, through the TAWC, they have learned about the poverty wages and precarious conditions of airport workers in the retail, food service, and cleaning sectors, who are disproportionately women, racialized, and without unions.

As the TAWC begins to formulate and struggle for these demands, however, it must grapple with fundamental questions, such as what is its source of power, why does the GTAA formally recognize it and meet regularly with its members, and what are its relations with the unions and broader labor movement?

The TAWC’s Form of Power

The TAWC not only unites otherwise disparate groups of workers through its direct action strategy. It also has fewer legal constraints than unions. Even when union leaders personally agree with wildcats, they can be fined or jailed for publicly supporting them. Conversely, when fuel workers began a sick-in to protest their contract getting flipped (Martell 2015; Mojtehedzadeh 2015b), a TAWC organizer who was not a member of the affected union served as a media spokesperson to express the fuel workers’ message without facing repercussions (Global News 2015). The TAWC can also navigate stifling labor laws by organizing workers to confront other workers’ employers on their behalf. With this strategy, the TAWC could become a powerful organization. There are clear indications that this is understood by both the GTAA and union leaderships.

The GTAA recognizes and meets regularly with the TAWC because doing so can be in its interest. The GTAA can bypass the sectionalism of both the individual employers and the union leaderships to conveniently exchange information and build consensus with multiple groups of workers about issues across the airport and beyond. Indeed, the GTAA applies its own form of “whole worker” analysis, understanding airport workers as, for example, commuters who take up valuable parking spaces or add to transit crowding, and, critically, as voters who live in the communities around the airport who can be leveraged to support planning and development initiatives. This point is especially important in light of the GTAA’s plans to further develop Pearson as a regional transit hub that is integrated into local development strategies (GTAA 2015, 2017a, 2017b). Council organizers know that the GTAA wants to learn about workers’ issues and demands directly so that they can attempt to resolve them in advance, rather than discovering them later through direct actions that disrupt the airport. As such, airport labor relations are a three-way struggle between workers, employers, and the GTAA, who form various constellations of alliances over different issues and at different times as each advances their own interests. Sometimes the GTAA’s interests will align more with airport workers, as is the case with certain airport-wide safety and security measures neglected by each of the airlines, and at other times the GTAA’s interests will align more with airport employers, as occurred when it issued licenses to four temporary worker firms during a 2017 strike of Swissport ground handlers (TAWC 2017).

As the TAWC develops, the tensions with union leaders might intensify. When the TAWC makes demands directly on the GTAA, union leaders and staff might argue that the TAWC undermines airport unions by allowing the GTAA to bypass elected representatives. TAWC organizers can respond that if the airport unions do not meet to discuss common issues and collaborate on demands that are important to each of their own memberships, they are failing to represent airport workers’ basic economic interests, let alone engaging in the kinds of unionism necessary to reverse the erosion of workers’ power under neoliberalism. Furthermore, TAWC organizers can argue that, since it is not a dual union, airport unions should support it because its campaigns benefit airport workers and its community unionism can be leveraged by airport unions during bargaining and strikes. Nevertheless, though the TAWC rejects direct opposition to individual unions, tensions with airport union leaders might increase in the future.

The TAWC’s next challenge is securing its autonomy from the airport unions. This means establishing bylaws, better structures and procedures, and its own budget. The process for accomplishing this is not clear. Since May 2018, drafts of a modest constitution have circulated among the core group. As it formalizes, however, the union leaders’ suspicions of dual unionism might increase. The TAWC could mitigate this by giving the unions the right to appoint candidates for a small but significant number of Council “seats” on the condition that each must be confirmed by the entire TAWC membership so that candidates adhere to the Council’s mandate. Nevertheless, this could dilute the TAWC’s self-governance and complicate the participation of nonunion Pearson workers. Funding could come either from voluntary dues or donors, but both entail challenges. Donations almost always come with expectations that can limit organizational autonomy. If the TAWC’s dues come from an arrangement with the airport unions whereby each provides a per-member levy, the TAWC could become further dependent on the airport unions with their own sometimes competing interests. If TAWC members begin paying dues directly, this could exacerbate fears of “dual unionism.”

Without a clear home in existing union bodies, the TAWC might have to invent new structures to claim a recognized place in the labor movement. Although some have suggested that the TAWC could attempt to affiliate with the Canadian Labour Congress or with Airports United, the organization developed by the aviation wing of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (Cotton 2016; International Transport Workers’ Federation 2017a), even if the other affiliates in these organizations agreed to this, it is an open question if this would stifle the TAWC’s independence. The TAWC is striking a very fine balance.

The TAWC’s achievements show that the council model can be effective in workplaces that feature many different trades, sectors, companies, or unions, under a broader central authority. This is true not only of other airports, such as the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam—Europe’s third largest—where the aviation union, FNV Luchtvaart, is organizing outsourced ground handlers, KLM airline workers, and security guards to directly challenge the central airport authority to set airport-wide standards on pay, working conditions, and union recognition (International Transport Workers’ Federation 2017a). The council model could also be effective in workplaces like college and university campuses, which, like airports, feature a complex range of jobs, sectors, and employers under a central authority. Indeed, a lawyer representing the GTAA recently compared it to a landlord or a shopping mall, which is suggestive for those who are organizing tenants or retail workers (Seglins and Gomez 2016).

Despite the TAWC’s achievements, however, it is much too reliant on the core group, and in particular, the informal leadership of a few very adept organizers. Most of them have been at the airport for decades, come from long established traditions of workplace organizing, and some of the key organizers are nearing retirement. The most important goal of creating a more formal, democratic structure is broadening the cultivation of decision-making powers and organizing capacities throughout the TAWC. Gramsci (1971) argues that one of the criteria by which we should judge leaders is how they prepare for their successors. The organizers of the TAWC refer to this as “the bus factor,” namely, if they were hit by a bus today, who would be there to take over these efforts tomorrow? These organizers now recognize that, in the absence of unions engaging in genuine leader identification and mentoring, the TAWC must develop the next generation of organizers. This requires regular skills training, popular education, and developing workers’ organizing capacities. Therefore, one of the most significant activities undertaken by the TAWC has been labor education, ranging from workplace organizing to political discussions about broader societal issues. A fundamental part of this has been the contributions of socialists and their organizations.

“Building Our Collective Power”: Socialist Labor Education at Pearson

Most unionized workers inherit their unions and were not involved in their initial organization. If union locals do not encourage active member participation and mentor new leaders, organizing skills become relegated to staff, leaving a dearth of skills on the shop floor. Most existing union trainings neglect organizing skills and political analysis, focusing instead on technical training for grievance and contract negotiation procedures (Smith 2016). This is insufficient for resisting the ways in which neoliberal labor relations undermine industrial pluralism. Although some labor scholars have noted the importance of more expansive labor education and organizer training for union renewal (Thomas and Martin 2002; Weststar 2006), the renewal literature often neglects the broader capitalist context of labor relations and the historical contributions of socialists (Gindin 2012).

In the first half of the twentieth century, workers’ education was often provided by organizations outside of unions, especially socialist organizations. In Canada, this not only included groups like the Workers’ Education Association but also the Communist Party’s labor colleges and the CCF’s study groups and distance education programs. Likewise, within unions, broader workers’ education was often dependent on an active left wing. A comparison between the internal education offered by unions in the Canadian Labour Congress and those which had been expelled from it or its predecessors because of alleged communist sympathies, such as the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers or the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, show that the latter “placed more stress on rank-and-file control, workplace organizing, and the links between industrial, economic and political democracy than did their [siblings] in the mainstream labour movement” (Taylor 2001, 122). As is demonstrated by the class struggle that founded and extended industrial pluralism in the 1940s and 1960s, workers generally have greater power and accomplish more when they think of themselves as a class and act as such. Historically, this is an important role of socialist organizations. Even if the majority of workers have rarely gone as far as socialists in their critique of the capitalist system, socialists have sometimes persuaded significant groups of workers to think of capitalism as a system.

Although socialists regard workers as capable of genuinely democratic control of production and administration, we must account for the many times when socialists have contradicted these beliefs in their undemocratic practices (see Abella 1973). This is one major reason why, since the postwar era, socialist organizations have declined even more than unions. But we also cannot discount the expulsions of socialists from labor organizations in the 1930s-1940s and especially during the Cold War, which was often “a very hot war against political radicalism in the domestic labour movement” (Panitch and Swartz 2009, 15). The decline of socialist organizations overlaps with the decline of more expansive labor education by workers’ organizations external to unions and labor federations. Consequently, though unions increasingly developed education departments in the postwar era (Dwyer 1977), internal labor education consisted largely of “union maintenance,” teaching courses in contract interpretation, grievance procedures, and collective bargaining training. This reinforces the sectionalism, economism, legalism, and responsible unionism of industrial pluralism.

Recent surveys note that there has never been more labor education in North American unions, and this often includes new and important features, such as equity training that challenges many inequalities between workers (Byrd and Nissen 2003; Gereluk and Spencer 2001). But this education is often tied to the mobilization model, not “deep organizing” strategies. It teaches about labor history, the union, and some current struggles, but only insofar as these can persuade members to become more committed to their union, to learn the skills necessary to expand the union, but not to develop the critical capacities that might challenge and transform the union. Therefore, union education is often based in a “social myth,” the “widespread belief that workers are not thinkers and that it is best to tell them what to do: ‘what we need is foot soldiers’” (Needleman 2004, 107). It does not fulfill the aspirations of the workers’ education provided by progressive and socialist organizations in past eras, namely, teaching people how to think, not what to think.

Although socialists continue to affirm workers’ potential capacities for democratic self-governance, as a result of their marginalization within unions and labor organizations, their class focus is rarely class rooted (Murray 2016; Wood 1998). Consequently, in both labor organizations and socialist organizations, workplace organizing knowledge declines, as does the power that workers can have at the site of production. If, as socialists often argue, labor movement renewal requires larger and more influential socialist organizations, they must also concede that socialism requires even more renewal than do unions (Panitch 2008).

Much of the socialist left in Toronto has supported the struggles of Pearson workers (Rabble.ca 2011), but the most extensive and sustained worker education at Pearson has been conducted by the Toronto Labour Committee (TLC), which includes members who are also key socialist organizers of the TAWC. The TLC is a small, membership-based, multitendency left organization. Its members are working and retired trade union activists who meet monthly to discuss and strategize about the labor movement. The TLC, formerly a committee of the now-defunct Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly, is organized by members of a group called the Socialist Project (SP) (socialistproject.ca n.d.). The TLC is comprised of SP members and nonmembers, including socialists and nonsocialists. In general, the goals of the SP members in the TLC are to work closely with labor activists and to make nonsectarian contributions to renewing the labor movement and cultivating socialist capacities. Any long-term strategy for recruiting to the TLC and the SP are only means to those ends.

One of the main projects of the TLC is “Building Our Collective Power” ( BOCP), a worker-organizer training program that goes beyond union-offered trainings without being crudely oppositional to them (Smith 2016). BOCP workshops are usually two days long and feature modules on organizing skills, union strategy, and political education from a socialist perspective, asking workers questions like, what does it mean to consider capitalism as a system, who exactly is the working class, and what is the role of the state in workers’ lives? The course draws on material from the IWW, Labor Notes (Bradbury, Brenner, and Slaughter 2016), the former CAW’s union training, and Jane McAlevey’s (2016) deep organizing model. BOCP is a modest effort, but over the past five years, it has trained members of the Ontario Public Sector Employees Union, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, and CUPE, among others.

The TLC has collaborated with the TAWC to offer the BOCP course on four occasions to a total of about seventy airport activists, including members of CUPE, IAMAW, SEIU, the Teamsters, and Unifor. The latest round of trainings, offered in April and May 2018, was supported by the International Transport Workers’ Federation and York University’s Global Labour Research Centre. Participants have become more active in their unions, several rank-and-file participants have become stewards or elected officers, and officers who have taken the course are more likely to participate in the TAWC (personal correspondence 2018-03-23).

An example of how the TLC teaches workplace organizing from a socialist perspective is the discussion of “good work” strikes. This exercise challenges workers to develop union strategies based on the ways in which particular groups of workers are embedded in the broader working class. In general, good work strikes put pressure on employers without harming consumers or users—who are usually other workers—by offering services better or cheaper at the employers’ expense (libcom.org 2006). For example, bus drivers, instead of withholding their labor, can refuse to accept fares. This imposes financial costs on employers while winning public support from commuters. When asked how they might apply this to airports, one session of Pearson workers suggested refusing newly imposed extra-baggage fees, which customers hate and are a source of considerable conflict with workers. This exercise broadens workers’ understanding of the repertoires of union activity, fosters their collective creativity, encourages them to develop strategies as members of a broader working class, and inspires them to imagine radically expanded and decommodified public services.

Challenges for Workers’ Education

Tensions similar to those between the airport union leaders and the TAWC could arise between labor leaders and socialists engaging in effective labor education. So far, the TLC has benefited from relationships with allied union staff, stewards, and local executive members. By contributing meeting space, funds for meals, and work-release to allow participants to attend trainings during paid work hours, they help the TLC to offer courses that are no-cost for participants and cost-neutral for the organization. But this also means that BOCP participants are often selected by the unions. While this saves facilitators the hard work of recruiting training participants, the relationship between facilitators and trainees is mediated by the unions. This can make it difficult to sustain relationships with workers after the trainings. On the whole, this union support is quite positive, but we must also be careful: trainings that appear to be developing reform caucuses within unions are unlikely to be supported by existing leaders. To avoid this issue at Pearson, the TLC has followed the TAWC’s basic position that we are interested in building workers’ power across unions, not in becoming involved in internal union politics. Nevertheless, worker organizers who bring rising consciousness and expectations into their unions might provoke reactions by the existing leaders against socialist labor eductors.

In addition, if union leaders support labor education by socialists, we must make sure it is not because we are being used by unions as cheap, outsourced training. Socialist organizations should carefully consider their own goals in doing labor education. The TLC connects the BOCP trainings to particular campaigns and struggles with which we are engaged as a way of recruiting to the TLC. One of our goals is that some of the workers who attend BOCP will then participate in “train the trainer” courses so that they can teach it themselves. This will help the TLC grow beyond our small group of trainers. Regardless of who we recruit through the BOCP course, however, we hope to cultivate socialist capacities—both analytical and organizational—throughout the TAWC, the Pearson unions, and the labor movement in general.

Conclusion

Industrial pluralism is in decline, its revival is nearly unimaginable, and, given the many workers excluded from union protection and the limits to working-class power even at its peak, perhaps its revival is undesirable. Some workers are responding to neoliberal labor relations by experimenting with new forms of workers’ organizations, including community unions, workers’ centers, workers’ assemblies, and workers’ councils like the TAWC. If these experiments are class rooted and class focused, they offer potential models for labor movement renewal that can transcend the limits imposed by industrial pluralism. Nevertheless, such experiments do not develop spontaneously. They require expansive workers’ education, organizer training, and participatory organizations that cultivate democratic capacities widely within the working class. If labor movement renewal is indeed tied to socialist renewal, then socialists will also need to retrieve and cultivate these organizing skills and democratic capacities.