The Marxist-Leninist Daily

Without any scruples, Canada Post executives have used their privileged positions in control of the publication of the company accounts to pressure postal workers to vote yes to the proposed neo-liberal concessionary collective agreement. The anti-worker diatribe in the 3rd quarter report says, "A failure to ratify could worsen Canada Post's significant challenges and make aspects of the tentative agreements unaffordable."

In this way, company executives used the 3rd quarter financial results to launch a hateful diatribe against postal workers and their legitimate claims on the value they produce. The executives also used the occasion to present as hopeless the future facing Canada Post as a viable public enterprise unless postal workers agree not to exercise their rights as the actual producers, give up the struggle to affirm their rights and the rights of Canadians to a vibrant nation-building public postal service and through a voluntary yes vote to the neo-liberal concessionary contract deepen the process of a gradual return to pre-war wages, pensions, benefits and working conditions and the wrecking and privatization of Canada Post.

The CUPW executive is within its rights to suspend immediately all voting on the proposed neo-liberal concessionary contract and launch a battle to denounce the company executives for abuse of privilege and to demand they retract the 3rd quarter report and write a new one that does not interfere in the internal affairs of postal workers.

The present neo-liberal direction of Canada Post that turns a public service over to private interests and uses technological developments to attack the rights of the working class is a matter of concern for all Canadians. Canadians want to find ways to utilize technological developments to enliven their nation-building project to serve public interests and the general interests of society. They do not accept the use of developments in technology to abuse the actual producers and line the pockets of privileged private investors from the international financial oligarchy.

Canada Post has never been a burden on the public treasury and never will be if it rejects the neo-liberal line of attacking the working class and turning the most remunerative portions of the business over to the privileged private interests of the financial oligarchy. The 3rd quarter report presents the situation confronting Canada Post not as one to discuss with workers and Canadians how to enhance its productive public service but as one to attack postal workers, wreck the company and privatize those aspects of the business that generate the greatest return.

Canada needs a new direction for the economy not the tired neo-liberal defeatist cries for austerity and abuse of the working class. Instead of nation-wrecking, attacking workers, and handing over public assets to private interests, postal executives should be leading Canadians in discussion of a new nation-building direction for our public postal service towards:

- an expansion of services to guarantee one or two-day parcel delivery to all Canadian residences and businesses;

- one day delivery targets for all transaction mail, which could include its own national airline service for passengers, parcels, mail and other freight to all Canadian airports, and high speed rail service (carrying passengers, mail and parcels) to all major centres in all regions;

- better advertising tools for all businesses including its own design, production and public relations division;

- postal outlets in all communities, which could include public banking and insurance services backed by the enterprise,

- and a full range of digital and e-commerce services with its own national internet buying and distribution centre of new and used commodities.

The anti-worker diatribe in the 3rd quarter report is a direct attack on the dignity of postal workers, the value they produce and the future of Canada Post. Contrary to the ravings of the executives, the human factor at Canada Post, when its rights are recognized and its dignity upheld as the producer of postal value, is what will develop the public enterprise in the twenty-first century and beyond. A great viable future serving the Canadian people and economy is possible if the actual producers are provided Canadian-standard livelihoods and working conditions agreeable to themselves, and are not abused, blocked and stymied in building the public enterprise and having a say in the decision-making process to determine a new pro-social pro-Canadian direction.

A first step would be to suspend voting on the neo-liberal concessionary contract and publicly denounce Canada Post executives, demand they rewrite the 3rd quarter report without their anti-worker abuse and stop using their privileged positions to pressure postal workers and interfere with their right to make up their own minds.

On this matter it is unconscionable that company executives threw the so-called "solvency deficit" of the pension plan into the faces of postal workers and so much as accused them of destroying the plan if they do not vote yes to the neo-liberal concessionary contract. Shame on those executives who are utterly contemptible for their anti-social anti-worker words and actions.

Postal workers for many decades have been in the forefront of standing up for Canada, its public institutions and working class. An expectation has grown in the minds of many Canadians that postal workers with their customary courage are a beacon of hope and resistance in confronting the neo-liberal attacks of the financial oligarchy. Let us turn that expectation into reality by taking the initiative to suspend the vote based on the executives' gross interference and use the time to deepen the discussion and campaign to vote no to this neo-liberal concessionary contract.

Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program!

The organized working class movement cannot make headway without a conscious struggle to restrict the labour market. The restriction of the labour market occurs with the expansive organization of unions at workplaces across the country. With organization and structure workers can win equilibrium with owners of capital on issues of wages, benefits and working conditions such as seniority and the condition that all employed workers at the workplace receive similar wages, benefits and working conditions, pay dues to sustain the union and are encouraged to engage actively and consciously in the local union's affairs and the political affairs of the country. The recognition of the rights of workers both as individuals and as a collective is a condition for equilibrium at the workplace and can only be guaranteed through the organized resistance of the working class movement.

The restriction of the labour market occurs politically when the organized working class movement fights to hold governments to account to bring into being and enforce laws that restrict the labour market at particular workplaces where workers have organized into a union and more broadly in society. Recognition of the rights of the working class politically is a condition for equilibrium in the country rather than open class warfare and continual disruption.

An example of a political fight to restrict the labour market is found in the struggle to dismantle the Harper dictatorship's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The TFWP is a blatant example of owners of capital using political institutions to craft legislation to serve their private interests. The TFWP is a form of human trafficking of workers internationally to expand the labour market to drive down wages, benefits and working conditions, and to weaken the organizations of the Canadian working class. The TFWP creates insecurity and disequilibrium. The organized working class movement must fight for immediate abolition of the TFWP.

Public authorities must find ways to guarantee livelihoods and security of employment for all Canadians before turning to immigration to secure workers. This can be done through expanding public services, public enterprises and public infrastructure and strengthening the public education and training system so that the youth are prepared properly to assume their rights and responsibilities as workers and citizens, and that upon finishing their education find employment consistent with their capabilities at Canadian standard wages, benefits and working conditions.

All workers in Canada have rights by virtue of being the producers of all value and providers of all services. All people in Canada have rights by virtue of being human beings. The TFWP is in direct violation of these principles and must be abolished. The organized working class movement has the duty and social responsibility to exercise its right of a say and control over the decision-making process on all issues including all aspects of immigration and its relation to the dialectic of the labour market.

Immigration itself, other than for family unification or refugees from war, must be judged within the dialectic of the labour market and the struggle between its restriction and expansion. Immigration should only be allowed when the capitalist system has achieved a rate of unemployment below one per cent in all regions.

Workers brought in under the TFWP are vulnerable, insecure, susceptible to exploitation and very difficult to organize into permanent unions exactly because of their vulnerable and precarious legal position within Canada. Their rights as workers are not recognized as a prior legal condition of their acquiring employment and entering Canada. This is unacceptable.

The TFWP and immigration generally are political weapons in the dialectic between the organized working class movement fighting to restrict the labour market and owners of capital fighting to expand the labour market. The TFWP is a political refusal of the owners of capital and their government representatives to recognize that all workers have rights that must be recognized by those in authority without exception. The existence of the TFWP is proof that the working class is excluded from the decision-making process concerning immigration directly harming the rights of all. This must change!

The TFWP is also a state-organized weapon to incite racism and divisions amongst the Canadian working class and as such should be condemned as vile and backward. State-organized racism has long been used in Canada to weaken the struggle of the organized workers to restrict the labour market and defend their rights. State-organized racism denies the rights of workers both as workers and as human beings creating disequilibrium within society and should be condemned and outlawed. State-organized racism is further reason why the TFWP must be abolished at once under all circumstances and replaced with renewal of immigration where the public authorities and employers recognize both the rights of Canadian workers to a livelihood and security and the rights of immigrant workers as soon as they take up residence or employment. For this to come into being, the organized working class must fight for the political power of a say and control over the decision-making process regarding immigration.

Organize to restrict the labour market!
No to human trafficking and indentured labour!
Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program!
All workers have rights by virtue of being the producers of all value
and providers of all services!
All people have rights by virtue of being human!

Historic Palestine Vote

The Canadian working class and people stand firmly on the side of the Palestinian people's struggle for the recognition of their national rights.

On Thursday, November 29, the United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote in favour of a resolution upgrading the status of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) -- from that of an observer to that of a non-member state endowed with membership-seeking privileges among any of the numerous United Nations agencies.[1] Various projections have been published of the favourable vote that the PA can expect; one predicts a majority of votes in favour of the resolution.

Last year, after an earlier version of this idea was subverted by the United States in the Security Council, most doubted that further progress on this front could be expected for some time into the future.

For the last year and more, the Israeli government has striven to disappear this entire resolution and debate. The United States also tried to twist the arms of numerous UN member states to either speak in defence of Israel or at least abstain from voting in favour of this resolution. Despite these efforts, this week the governments of France and the United Kingdom announced that they will support the resolution. Canada under the vehemently pro-zionist Harper government, stated its virulent opposition to the resolution.

The selection of the debating and voting date is historic. November 29, 2012 marks the 65th anniversary of the historic Resolution 181 by which means the United Nations General Assembly created the future State of Israel on 56 per cent of the physical territory of British Mandate Palestine. It also envisioned an Arab Palestinian state for the other 44 per cent. Each piece of the partition was supposed to have Jewish and Palestinian majorities respectively. Under Resolution 181, they were even supposed to fulfill a 10-year economic union.

The ink wasn't even dry on Resolution 181 before the Zionists set about importing British-trained troops, aircraft for terrorizing Palestinian villagers and townspeople, pushing hundreds of Palestinian villagers to the bottom of village wells, rounding up hundreds of women and children (as at Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem) for firing squad-style executions. After dispersing more than 750,000 Palestinians from their home towns and villages, the Zionists declared Israel as a Jewish state on a territory 40 per cent larger than Resolution181 had provided.

The UN vote this week comes as the Zionist capacity to sustain wanton killing and mayhem seems to shorten with each homicidal outburst. Indeed, the British and French support for the PA's quest for non-member status, and the public endorsement of the latest General Assembly resolution on Palestinian status by the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, are all products of an event that Israel and its U.S. armourers and interference-runners never anticipated: the waging of tit-for-tat armed resistance by the Gaza Strip against the fourth-strongest army on the earth to an extent that compelled the Israelis to sue for a ceasefire after just eight days. Compare the situation in July-August 2006, when the Zionist assault on Lebanon and its Hezbollah resistance killed and injured tens of thousands of mostly Lebanese civilians for 34 days before the U.S. finally dropped its objections to a UN-monitored ceasefire. Or even more remarkably, compare the December 2008-January 2009 rampage, in which the Israeli armed forces killed 1,500 and wounded another 4,000 in Operation Cast Lead, over a period of 22 days -- right up to the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Once again, the Canadian working class and people stand firmly on the side of the Palestinian people's struggle for their national rights.

1. One of the agencies of some interest to the Palestinian National Authority is the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Depending on evidence that PA officials might bring, this court could exercise its universal international jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli government officials for specific war crimes committed by the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Horrific Mass Workplace Deaths in Bangladesh

Demonstration in Dhaka in 2006 to protest mass deaths of workers.

On November 24 workers throughout the world were again horrified and outraged by mass workplace deaths of workers in a Bangladesh textile factory fire. This mass killing of workers, along with many other mass workplace deaths in other low-wage countries, is a consequence of neo-liberal globalization. These deaths constitute a crime against humanity by the international financial oligarch and the global retailing monopolies with the complicity of the Bangladesh government and the local elite.

The latest Bangladesh factory fire broke out in a garment factory in the Ashulia industrial area near the capital city Dhaka. More than 120 workers were killed in the fire and hundreds of others were injured. Many of the deaths were caused by all the factory doors being locked, a common practice used by factory owners to prevent workers from leaving their work stations. Other deaths resulted when workers fell from the multi-story building while trying to escape the fire. Almost all of the workers who died were women and girls.

Similar incidents involving fires or the collapse of factory building occur frequently in Bangladesh and other low wage countries with only the most horrific reported by the international media. Less than two years ago another factory fire in Ashulia resulted in the deaths of 30 workers and hundreds of injuries. In a single week in February 2006, there were mass deaths of workers in two separate factory fires and the collapse of new nine-story factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The government covered up the number of fatalities and injuries in these three incidents but labour organizations report that 300 workers were killed in the week's catastrophes including several girls only 12 years old.

Similar incidents also occur regularly across the Indian sub-continent and in other countries. In Pakistan, a total of 389 workers were killed in two textile factory fires in Karachi and Lahore on the same day this September. The same month, 40 textile workers were killed in a fire in Tamil Nadu State in southern India.

Almost all the mass deaths of textile workers in Bangladesh occur in the factories producing ready-to-wear garments (RTWG) for international retail monopolies like Wal-Mart and Gap Inc. In contrast to fabric manufacturing which is highly mechanized, the RTWG sub-sector is labour intensive and operated by local entrepreneurs.

RTWG workers produce a huge amount of wealth, but neo-liberal globalization works in a way that channels most of this wealth to powerful global monopoly groups. Factory owners have beaten down workers' wages below what is needed to sustain life and have imposed working conditions which put workers' lives in constant risk. The monopoly manipulation of prices by the global retail monopolies and high interest charged by the international financiers also restrict the profits of local entrepreneurs. Even the claim of government on the wealth in the form of taxes is restricted by the constant threats the powerful monopolies that they will move production to another country. Almost all the wealth produced by millions of workers in the sector flows to the vaults of the global monopolies.

In the case of Bangladesh, the government and the local elite have been aggressively pursuing the expansion of the RTWG by ensuring that Bangladeshi textile workers are the lowest paid in the world. Bangladesh is now the world's second largest exporter of RTWG products after China. Exports of RTWG products from Bangladesh have increased from $5 billion a year in 2000 to $19 billion in 2012 and now make up 80 per cent of Bangladesh export revenue.

There are now 2.2 million workers employed in the 5,000 RTWG factories in Bangladesh many of which are located in special industrial export zones where the government allows factory owners rule over workers with impunity. Even those factories outside the export zones are in thoroughly militarized districts. Because the entire Bangladesh balance of trade depends on RTWG exports, the government has declared workers' resistance to brutal exploitation and inhuman working conditions to be "a threat to national economic security." Suppression of workers' rights and resistance is the government's highest priority.

In 2004 a heavily armed para-military police force was established to suppress workers resistance, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). The British trained RAB has been involved in frequent battles with workers and has been repeatedly implicated in assassination and disappearance of workers' movement leaders.

Despite the repression by the RAB, the workers' resistance developed along with the expansion of the RTWG sector. In 2010 hundreds of thousands of textile workers joined a powerful strike movement in response to rising food prices, to mass deaths of workers at factories and also in response to the murder and disappearance of militant workers by the RAB.

The government tried to suppress the strike movement by establishing the 3,000 member Industrial Police Force in 2010 for day-to-day surveillance and control of workers in the industrial areas. Several workers were killed by the Industrial Police and the RAB in these demonstrations but in the end the government was forced to raise the textile worker wages from $20 per month to $38 per month in 2010.

Workers are continuing to clash with police and factory owners in actions to defend their rights and the dignity of labour. During the past summer action by 500,000 workers to defend militant workers attacked by the police resulted 350 factories in the Ashulia district being shut down. Strike action was taken in several locations during the summer over rising rents and food costs and over several cases of abuse of women workers by factory managers.

In recent days, workers have been angrily demonstrating in many districts over the November 24 fires. In coming days demonstrations are planned for Dhaka to denounce the government for allowing this massacre of workers by factory owners and the international retail monopolies.

Top: Textile workers confront Rapid Action Battalion in Ashulia in June 2012. Bottom: Workers mass picket of Ashulia
industrial district during lockout by factory owners in June 2012.

Demonstration in Karachi, Pakistan to protest mass deaths of workers in factories

Read The Marxist-Leninist Daily
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca

Condemn Direct Intervention of
Canada Post Executives

Condemn Direct Intervention of
Canada Post Executives

Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program!

Historic Palestine Vote

Horrific Mass Workplace Deaths in Bangladesh

Condemn Direct Intervention of Canada Post Executives

Condemn Direct Intervention of Canada Post Executives

Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program!

Historic Palestine Vote

Horrific Mass Workplace Deaths in Bangladesh

Condemn Direct Intervention of
Canada Post Executives

Condemn Direct Intervention of
Canada Post Executives