The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), which represents more than 1 million workers, held a convention the week of Nov. 17-21 in Toronto. With the economy hemorrhaging unionized jobs, this couldn’t have come at a more important time.
The leaders of the federation, however, appear to be living in a different world than the workers they represent. Instead of using the convention to debate how to confront the major challenges facing workers, it instead became the site of an embarrassing bureaucratic turf war.
Scandalously, this was waged between leaders of the so-called “left wing”, using many of the classical methods of the right! Leaders such as CUPE Ontario president Fred Hahn, OPSEU president JP Hornick and outgoing OFL president Laura Walton together led a slanderous whisper campaign against outgoing secretary-treasurer Ahmad Gaied, alleging he was “derelict of duty to protect the finances of the federation”. In response, a hit piece against Walton alleges she had created a “toxic, hostile (…) work environment” at OFL head office.
Worse still, there do not appear to be any political differences between Walton and Gaied. Both are running on a nearly identical program of “fighting the right”, which commits them to practically nothing.
The OFL convention should have been the launch pad for a broad campaign against factory closures, attacks on public services, and the right to strike in the province. This could have linked up with similar fights in other provinces, and in federally-regulated workplaces fighting back against Mark Carney’s austerity agenda. Furthermore, the OFL could have extended a hand to workers in the U.S. and Mexico, inviting them to join in a continent-wide fight against the capitalist trade war and its destructive effects on workers’ livelihoods.
To private-sector workers facing the imminent reality of plant closures, Walton, Gaied, and other OFL leaders should have put forward a plan of promoting factory occupations, and demand the government nationalize the plants under democratic workers’ control.
To defend trade union rights, Walton and Gaied should have proposed the launching of a common front of public and private sector workers, with the aim of building a movement towards a general strike. Gaied muses about this in several blog posts on his campaign website, and even suggests targeting May Day 2028 as a general strike date. And yet there was zero mention of this in his election platform and this was not discussed at the OFL convention.
When asked, Gaied said that he does not have the authority to “dictate this to his affiliates.” But is this not what the convention is for? And if you truly believe this is the way forward, why would you not stick your neck out and put this forward? This unfortunately smacks of an unwillingness to rock the boat.
As a result, a massive opportunity was missed. But this situation won’t last forever. As workers move to fight back, they will toss aside unworthy leaders and push forward more genuine, self-sacrificing leaders from their ranks—people who are prepared to do what it takes to lead the fight for a better world.
