Support CUPE 3903; Oppose Back-to-Work Legislation

The university workers of CUPE 3903 have been on strike since the fall. The university administration recently forced a ratification vote on a lousy offer, which the union soundly defeated. The university has continued to refuse to bargain in good faith, and is now counting on the provincial government to legislate the teaching assistants and sessional lecturers back to work. It is vital for anyone who opposes state interference in free collective bargaining to oppose this measure -- not to mention anyone who is in solidarity with the struggle against the neoliberal transformation of the university and its decisive shift towards precarious, underpaid educational labour.

A good place to start if you live in Ontario is by emailing your MPP. You can use this site to send an email to your representative that gets copied to the Premier. There is some suggested text, which I've appended to this post, but feel free to personalize it.

If you live in Toronto, there are events in the next couple of days:

REINFORCE CUPE 3903'S PICKET LINES
WHERE: York University
DATE: Monday, January 26
TIME: Three shifts: 7am-11am, 10am-2pm, 1pm-5pm

*In a bid to undermine the strike of CUPE 3903, York University has reopened several classes for 5,000 students out of 50,000. Not only does this violate the picket lines of workers, it discriminates against 45,000 students left out in the cold by York University's refusal to bargain.

We are calling on all allies and supporters to sign up for a shift: 7am-11am, 10am-2pm or 1pm-5pm. To sign up for a shift, please e-mail Jordy Cummings at jordycummings@gmail.com.

MASS RALLY AGAINST BACK-TO-WORK LEGISLATION
WHERE: Ministry of Labour (South of Dundas St at University Ave)
DATE: Tuesday, January 27
TIME: 10am

*We will march from the Ministry of Labour to Queen's Park and express to the provincial government that we stand behind the rights of workers to strike and to fight for better working and living conditions. We stand against back-to-work legislation. Please help us mobilize a strong showing by informing your lists, friends and members. If you are interested in speaking or performing at the rally, please contact Noaman Ali at noaman.ali@gmail.com.

Here is some suggested text for writing to your MPP and the Premier:

Premier McGuinty's decision to enact back-to-work legislation against striking contract professors, teaching assistants, and graduate assistants, represented by CUPE 3903, at York University, sets a terrible precedent for education workers and indeed all workers across Ontario.

The CUPE 3903 bargaining team consistently attempted to negotiate a collective agreement not only throughout this 11 week strike, but also during many months preceding the strike. Unfortunately, York University administrators used every possible means to avoid negotiating with unionized workers.

On Thursday and Friday of this week, 22-23 January, the CUPE 3903 bargaining team made substantial reductions to bargaining priorities demonstrating the commitment of the entire CUPE 3903 membership to reach a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible. York University responded by holding firm to its offer that was rejected by the members of CUPE 3903 during the forced ratification vote supervised by the Ontario Labour Relations Board, on 19-20 January.

It was obvious, during the meetings between the CUPE 3903 bargaining team and the mediator, Reg Pearson, appointed by Premier McGuinty, that York University knew back-to-work legislation was imminent. Thus, there was absolutely no incentive for university negotiators to bargain in good faith. The Premier's appointment of a new mediator was clearly a public relations stunt to deflect criticism of the Premier's decision to impose back-to-work legislation. There is no indication the Premier genuinely attempted to resolve this labour conflict by using the legitimate processes of collective bargaining. This public relations stunt demonstrates the Premier's contempt for all workers in Ontario and their right to collectively bargain with their employers.

Back-to-work legislation will reward York University's intransigence and show other university administrations they can also refuse to negotiate and rely on the province to impose back-to-work legislation. Premier McGuinty's decision to impose back-to-work legislation further erodes workers' rights to collectively bargain, a precedent that will have far-reaching consequences for workers throughout the public and private sectors and the Ontario economy as a whole.

As a constituent of your riding, I ask that you and your caucus continue to support the right of all workers in Ontario to engage in collective bargaining by using all means possible to resist the passage of back-to-work legislation against the education workers at York University.

Please take a few minutes to support these striking workers!

Mining Giant Has No Right to Exceed Pollution Limits

The Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study has issues this media release, calling on people to attend a public meeting on January 21 at 7 pm, at which the Ministry of Environment will be taking input on an application by Vale Inco to release more than seven times as much nickel into the air as allowed by provincial regulations:

Media Release Jan.19, 2009

Vale Inco has no right to exceed pollution limits: Ministry of the Environment must enforce environmental standards.

“The Ministry needs to enforce environmental standards,” said Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) representative Julien Dionne, speaking in advance of the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) public meeting this Wednesday at Tom Davies Square, City Hall.

The MOE has called a public meeting on Wednesday January 21st, 2009, 7:00 pm in Room C-11, Tom Davies Square, 200 Brady Street, Sudbury to discuss an application received from Vale Inco to be allowed to operate under an “alternative” standard. If approved, Inco would be allowed to release more than seven times as much nickel into the air as the new provincial regulation would permit.

“Vale Inco operations produce hundreds of thousands of tonnes of toxic wastes each year, and releases thousands of tonnes into the air. In 2007 alone, the smelter released 31 tonnes of nickel and nickel compounds into the air. This is unacceptable. The Ministry needs to have Vale Inco comply with the new provincial air regulations, and not allow the five year delay they are applying for,” declared Julien Dionne. “We strongly recommend that members of the public come to the meeting and voice their concerns over Vale Inco’s request to extend the time limits to meet the industries new and improved standards.”

The Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study is opposed to Vale Inco’s application for an “alterative standard” under Ontario Regulation 419/05. The new regulation will come into effect for the facility on February 1st, 2010.

“Vale Inco has known that this regulation was coming for several years, and they still have thirteen months to come into compliance. We feel that is ample time,” said Homer Sequin, Community Committee member. “In the last couple of years Vale Inco made record profits so they can’t plead financial hardship to comply with the new regulations.”

The committee is concerned about the continued contamination of the Sudbury area through particulate emission, which the Sudbury Soils Study demonstrated were already in excess in some areas of the city. Pollution Watch Canada reported total releases & transfers with combined air release by the Copper Cliff Smelter Complex in 2005 at 196,976,941kgs. In the same year Vale Inco pumped 50, 328 kgs of nickel and its compounds and 34,810 kgs of arsenic into the Sudbury air. Nickel and nickel compounds are known to be cancer causing, and to have no safe level of exposure. Exposure to nickel can also cause contact dermatitis, respiratory problems and other health effects.

The Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study represents residents from a variety of backgrounds including members from unions, university and community college, from health care, from the environmental community and other community groups.

The Committee recently welcomed pensioner representatives from SOAR/USW at Vale Inco and CAW/Mine Mill at Xstrata to the committee. Jointly they represent 17,500 retirees in the local Sudbury community.

For more information contact: Joan Kuyek, D.S.W., Chair, Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study, 1.613.761.9794; Rick Grylls, President, Local 598, Mine Mill/CAW. 673.3661, ext.23; Homer Seguin, 983.1208.

Website: www.sudburysoils.com

Please attend if you can, and let the Ministry and Inco know that their profits cannot come at the price of our health!

Review: Upstairs in the Crazy House

[Pat Capponi. Upstairs in the Crazy House: The Life of a Psychiatric Survivor. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, Ltd., 1992.]

The cover of this memoir by Toronto activist Pat Capponi contains well-deserved gushing praise from a number of sources, including the late feminist activist and writer June Callwood -- things like "An extraordinary writer with a glittering eye and a compassionate heart" and "Powerful and lyrical, drenched in observation and perfect pitch dialogue." This was Capponi's first book, but it is clear why she has gone to on to write several more, including at least one other memoir, an important book about poverty, and a couple of novels.

I first heard Capponi's name in the context of anti-poverty work, both grassroots and agency-based, that I was doing in Hamilton, Ontario. By that point she was a well-known pillar of struggles around poverty, housing, and the welfare of psychiatric survivors in Toronto, and hers was one of those names that percolated out to the surrounding cities as we engaged with similar issues. This book tells the story of how she started on that path.

Her story began in an extremely abusive family in Montreal. She had a father who kept his wife, his five daughters, and his son in terror all of the time. In high school, in the politicized atmosphere of Montreal during the heydey of the New Left social movements, she was already an activist. Her family and most of the authority figures she encountered in school conveyed the idea that she was worthless. But the occasional person -- a teacher, later an employer or two, a mentor -- treated her like she was worth something. More activism, some college, a marriage, and a job running a group home. And then extreme distress and it all fell apart, and Capponi ended up in a psychiatric institution.

All of that is told in episodic flashbacks, but the here-and-now of the book is about her time as a resident in a boarding house for psychiatric survivors in Toronto. With very simple storytelling, her pen skillfully captures her fellow residents, and shows the absurdity, the utter cruelty, the life-being-livedness, the small acts of compassion, the flashes of humour, of their lives. The strength of the book is that, for the most part, it does not tell about politics, but shows the fibre of her life and those that touched it -- shows the workings of power in the context of the complexities of everyday life, as seen through eyes that know what to look for and with a heart that cares about the pain they cause and that holds in utmost respect the everyday struggles of people to survive.

I read this because the interview participant in my current chapter was active in organizing psychiatric survivors in Toronto at about the same time. There were at least a few mentions in the anti-psychiatry magazine that my participant participated in producing in those years of the work of Capponi and her allies. I suspect there were political differences between the two, and I have no idea what they thought of each other's work. But, really, it doesn't matter. What matters is how vividly this book illustrates the awful, oppressive truth that if you experience certain kinds of distress, the institutions and professionals that claim to exist to help you are likely to organize your life into some pretty awful sorts of situations -- drugged into passivity; forced into crushing poverty; exposed to many forms of violence; shackled by stigma and abandonment; tutored in passivity; barred from many resources that might actually help; stored in awful, hierarchical institutions; or thrown into different sorts of institutions -- boarding homes -- which often enough are also about little more than policing you, managing you, keeping you contained and powerless and harmless and out of the way, and are often just plain unpleasant to live in. Yet people live. People form relationships, they support each other, they find ways to survive, they find corners of joy. And, sometimes, they find the capacity to collectively resist.

Just as important is the book's stirring, shown-not-told defense of the idea that, regardless of what biological psychiatrists might claim, the social world is absolutely relevant to the sorts of distress that get labelled "madness." It is Capponi's own journey that shows this -- it would feel ridiculous to insist that the distress which ultimately brought her into the orbit of the psychiatric system was somehow unrelated to the relentless, vicious, patriarchal violence and abuse that permeated her early life.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Review: On Our Own

[Judi Chamberlin. On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System. Lawrence, MA: National Empowerment Center, Inc., 1977.]

This is a simple, direct, well-written, movement book. It was written by an ex-psychiatric inmate who identified with and participated in what she described as the "mental patients liberation movement." What is most interesting about this book, which contrasts it with a lot of what I have seen and read about from radical and not-so-radical professionals, is that it is not just about what's wrong with psychiatry but about how to start building real alternatives.

The book starts with a discussion of Chamberlin's analysis of the psychiatric system. Then she moves into an extensive account of her own experience in that system. This is much like many others I've read in the last several months -- it is powerful, and it clearly illustrates the coercion and dehumanization that are part of psychiatry. Her words show to me yet again how experiences of distress so easily result in people getting swept up into situations and practices they did not choose and that do not provide the sort of assistance they need or want, or they provide useful resources but demand an awful price. Her story, unlike many of the others, also illustrates the power of a particular alternative: She already had a long, difficult history of entanglement with mainstream psychiatry and she was in a period of distress. Though not Canadian, she happened to be in Vancouver, and happened to find her way to the Vancouver Emotional Emergency Centre. This was a place where people could live for short periods while in crisis that was not controlled, staffed, or connected with professionals or hospitals. It was a project of the Mental Patients' Association, a group run democratically by ex-patients.

Next the book goes on to talk about "consciousness raising," both as a process that people who have been oppressed by the psychiatric system experience and also as the emergence of a movement that included the creation of alternative spaces. She addresses head on the politics of alternatives: there are a wide range of things that have adopted that label in the context of what tends to be understood as "mental illness" and organizational responses to it. Some label anything that is not a huge hospital an "alternative," and many community-based services still deeply integrated into the psychiatric system have identified themselves in this way. Chamberlin means something quite different, though. To her, a genuine alternative is one that operates collectively, democratically, and non-hierarchically -- it is controlled not by professionals but by either ex-patients only or some combination of ex-patients and non-patients.

The book then goes through an examination of the key alternative or quasi-alternative organizations that existed in North America in 1977. None perfectly embody the kind of alternative Chamberlin wants to see, but a number are important and exciting explorations. She devotes an entire chapter to what she sees as the most promising of the alternatives, the Mental Patients Association of Vancouver. She describes its governance by ex-patients, its day-to-day functioning, its ideals, its ways of dealing with problems and crises. I couldn't help but suspect that the portrait was perhaps just a little too generous, knowing first-hand how hard it can be for any space with aspirations to being truly participatory and non-hierarchical to meaningfully reach those goals, but at the same time her excitement for a different way of doing things that is acutally happening is a vitally important thing to recognize, respect, and follow. The book ends with a return to the theme of coercion versus co-operation, and reaffirmation that any approach to supporting people who are experiencing emotional distress must involve only the latter and never the former.

On Our Own is well-written, well-argued, accessible, and compelling. Regardless of their specific purpose, I always find something exciting when reading about different ways of living and organizing our lives that are not just expressions of desire or anticipation but actual descriptions of inevitably messy and conflicted attempts to actually make them real. I should add that this book was received very positively when it was first published by others in the anti-psychiatry milieu. The interview participant at the centre of the chapter I am currently writing was involved in founding the first group for survivors of the psychiatric system in Ontario not too long after this book came out. After a number of name changes, the group decided to call themselves "On Our Own," both because it reflected their analysis and because of the importance they gave this book.

Yet it also feels a bit lonely, this book. A bit sad, because it embodies such great hopes that were never quite realized. I realize that a book like this is only ever a snapshot of much more involved conversations that happen over coffee and beer, at conferences and in living rooms, about how movements can and should and will move forward. So this was not a solitary intervention that then slipped beneath the waves, even if we can't see the conversations of which it was a part from this end of history. In fact, I'm sure that in the U.S. context there must have been more books after this that dealt with alternatives and practicalities and politics of making them happen. I'm not aware of anything else with such a significant amount of Canadian content, though. And I know that an introduction added to the book about ten years after initial publication says that there were many more alternatives present at that point than during the original writing. But I don't have the impression that a lot of them have survived to 2008. Maybe I'm just unaware, or I've been looking in the wrong places. But I sort of have the impression that, with certain important exceptions, 'alternatives' are now mostly integrated into the psychiatric system, and are therefore not alternatives at all in Chamberlin's understanding. I'm interested in whether the MPA, which still exists, continues to have the participatory democratic organizational form that made it so exciting both to Chamberlin and to my interview participant back in the '70s, because I know a lot of organizations that have survived from that time have taken on conventional, hierarchical, professionalized structures. The dismantling of space for alternatives -- space to be creative, to explore, to appropriate resources in the service of advancing a different vision for society -- is one of the many tragic results of neoliberalism, and one that is seldom noted even by those who are committed to defending the more conventionally organized sorts of resources that neoliberalism has stolen and is still trying to steal from ordinary people.



[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Roi Will Be Missed

I recently heard the sad news that union activist and political cartoonist Roy Carless, a participant in one of the first oral history interviews I ever did, has passed away.

It was an interview I did before I had formally started my social movement history project -- before I even had an inkling I would embark on such a journey, as a matter of fact -- and it was one of the things that inspired me to do so. A friend of mine was involved in putting together a show of left-ish political cartoons in the community gallery of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He and I had both done a lot of community radio stuff and, at his prompting, we decided to go around and get some of these lefty cartoonists on tape. All of the interviews were interesting, but the one with Roy was by far the best in terms of entertainment value and political interest. I think we talked to him twice, and had a beer with him after one of those. I took that raw material and made a cd from the interviews, complete with cover art and brief liner notes and all that, which was distributed at the show.

Roy -- or Roi as he started to sign his work at one point -- was more than just another political cartoonist. He was proudly working-class and an avid trade unionist. For more than a decade he was the chief steward of one of the most solid locals of one of the most left-leaning unions in Canada at the time, the United Electrical Workers. At the same time as he was drawing cartoons mocking the boss while he worked on the line he was also the best known labour cartoonist in North America. His work appeared regularly in many labour movement publications across the continent. At the time we interviewed him he had stopped drawing because a car accident had damaged his eyes and he couldn't see well enough, and it was obviously a sorrow for him. I'm not sure what changed, but a little later on he started drawing again, and from what I understand kept at it right to the end.

And he was truly a character. Anyone who was lucky enough to hear him tell anecdotes about his encounters with premiers and presidents and the guys on the shop floor is truly blessed.

A little while after the interview and the cd, I was lucky enough to work for awhile with his granddaughter Shannon -- a wonderful person. I've been thinking about her and feeling much sorrow for her loss these last few days.

Here is the article about Roi that was published in today's Hamilton Spectator:

Cartoonist 'Roi' championed underdog: ROY CARLESS 1920 - 2009
by Daniel Nolan, The Hamilton Spectator, January 06, 2009

Roy Carless skewered the high and mighty in his editorial cartoons, blasting them for the way they treated the little guy -- and by most recollections they loved it.

He has letters from three U.S. presidents -- Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter -- and from Pierre Trudeau, Tommy Douglas and Bill Davis thanking him for his cartoons.

And the day he retired after 34 years as an assembler at the Camco appliance plant, his bosses let him know he would be missed. Over the years, he drew many unflattering, shop floor humour cartoons about plant management. The bosses let him know that, rather than throwing them away, they had kept every one.

"He thought that was great," recalled Hamilton Spectator cartoonist Graeme MacKay.

"He loved knowing whether his bosses or politicians got a chuckle out of his work."

Carless, whose cartoons had appeared in The Spectator over the years, died suddenly Friday at his beloved Bold Street home. He was 88. His son Marc said it is believed he died of a heart attack.

The son of a Toronto area village police chief and a housewife, Carless had been drawing since he was a child, but started to sharpen his talent when he came to Hamilton in 1948 to work at the then Westinghouse plant on Longwood Road.

His shop floor cartoons posted around the plant got him into the union paper of the United Electrical Workers. In 1968, he branched into political drawings and that got him into numerous other trade union publications and even a calendar.

By day, he was a factory worker, helping put food on the table for his family and being an active union member. By night, he was a cartoonist, with the trademark signature Roi, drawing for publications in Canada and the United States.

He eventually became a member of the Association of Editorial Cartoonists and his cartoons are now in the National Archives in Ottawa and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

He also published a book of his cartoons and had various local shows of his work.

Carless's son Marc and granddaughter Shannon Morgan both said he was an advocate for the underdog, read five newspapers a day and had a great sense of humour. He drew cartoons right to the end.

"He was somebody I looked up to and respected," said Marc, who works for John Deere in Grimsby. "His ability to express himself through cartoons was always amazing to me."

Morgan was taken in by Carless and his wife Audrey after her mother and their daughter, Cindy, died of leukemia in 1987. Morgan was 11.

"Everything he did was on trying to get a message out," said Morgan.

"He wanted people to start thinking and pay attention to their community and the world around them."

Carless is survived by his wife, son and four other grandchildren. His body has been donated to medical science, as he wished.

A memorial is set for Jan. 17 at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, 51 Stuart St. It will begin at 1 p.m.

A Few Links

Check out an anti-colonial podcast, an exciting new political journal, and a web site of important local environmental interest:

• Here is a podcast from Healing The Earth Radio via the Rabble Podcast Network, called "Talking Decolonization with Waziyatawin, Part 1". Waziyatawin "is Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe in southwestern Minnesota... In this interview she talks at length about colonization and decolonization - the physical and mental aspects of decolonization work for both indigenous and non-indigenous communities..."
  
  
• Check out a new publishing project called Jalan Journal of Asian Liberation. I haven't had a chance to read the articles in depth yet, but they look fabulous. The inaugural issue includes a look at anti-Asian racism in the United States, an article on Asian American anarchism and another on anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, a look at immigrant workers' struggles in the U.S., and a look at hip hop in the South Asian diaspora. (Thanks to both MC and YL for the link.)
  
  
• And here is the official website of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Not too long ago, a collaboration between the mining companies and the government produced a study of contamination in the soil in the Sudbury area. Many people in the community were concerned at the arbitrary, deceptive flim-flam of the official report, and some of those got together to form a group that would look at soil contamination in ways that centred the needs of the community rather than the profit-lust of a few huge corporations. This is their website.