Monday, February 14, 2022

Birth of an Alternative Labour Movement

CLAC was founded 70 years ago with the goal of transforming labour relations in Canada. Here’s a look back at CLAC’s history—and at how far we’ve come

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF the union movement in the 19th and early 20th century, the right to organize and bargain collectively was not won easily. It really was an us-against-them showdown between labour and owners, many of whom ruthlessly exploited workers. When workers began to organize collectively, owners resisted, often leading to violent clashes.

All of us owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought and sacrificed to improve basic working conditions, establish safeguards, develop benefit plans and pensions, and improve the living standards of workers—all gains made thanks to the union movement.

But the war to establish the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively in Canada has been over for a long time. The union movement won. The legal right to form unions is widely recognized in democratic societies.

Nonetheless, some in the union movement continue to fight on as if they had lost. They are like those Japanese holdout soldiers who refused to believe or did not know that the Second World War was over and that their side had lost—some for almost 30 years after the end of the war.

Today’s holdouts in the outdated class-conflict approach to labour relations believe the war between labour and management will never truly end. Collective agreements are merely ceasefire documents. Strike votes are often taken before negotiations begin to flex power and prepare the troops for battle.

In the early 1950s when CLAC was established, the labour relations situation in Canada reflected this pervasive adversarialism. Strikes, lockouts, violence, and corruption were all too common, a natural consequence of the dog-eat-dog mindset of those unions and employers who had little respect for the dignity and wishes of workers or tolerance for different points of view.

CLAC’s founders knew there was a better way. On February 20, 1952, they established a new union, one that stressed dignity and respect for all members of the workplace community—both the workers and the employer. A union that sought win-win solutions rather than workplace warfare. The name of the new union—the Christian Labour Association of Canada—openly declared the union’s basis.

Almost immediately, the new union encountered fierce resistance from the established unions. It also encountered resistance from the Ontario Labour Relations Board, which first refused to certify CLAC as a union in 1954, using the charge of discrimination.

Ironically, in doing so, the board itself was being discriminatory. It wrongly assumed that a union founded on Christian principles would discriminate against non-Christians, even though not a single case of discrimination was presented to the board.

It took nine long years and a ruling by the Supreme Court of Ontario in 1963 to win the right to certification. During this time, the fledgling union split apart and nearly collapsed—and would have if not for the selfless dedication and sacrifice of its founders and supporters.

The official publication of the organization, The Guide, was also established in 1952. The idealism and strength of conviction of CLAC’s founders and early supporters is abundantly evident in the pages of the magazine as they wrote about what the union stood for and the struggles it faced.

Without a doubt, CLAC never would have made it out of the 1950s without their unwavering determination. The early founders travelled all over the country to speak about the new labour movement, organize workers, and rally support.

Despite the constant harassment and illegal tactics employed by some unions—who viewed CLAC’s transformative vision as a threat—the hard work by CLAC’s founders and pioneers began to pay off. CLAC’s steady growth over the years—roughly doubling in membership every decade—really became noticeable in the 1990s and 2000s as the union went from just under 12,000 members in 1992 to over 25,000 in 2002 and over 50,000 in 2012. This remarkable growth came at a time when many private-sector unions continued to suffer serious decline.

For 70 years, the Guide has shown just how far this alternative union movement has come. And yet it still has a long way to go. Most Canadians still have never heard of CLAC. Not yet.

Our task over the coming decades is not just to make CLAC a household name but to make CLAC’s model of labour relations the standard in Canada. Our task is to set a standard of service that workers will come to ex-pect and demand from all unions.

Amid the cries on one side of a need to adopt American-style, lowest-common-denominator, “right-to-work” unionism, and cries on the other side of renewing the old us-against-them brand of strident, anti-corporate unionism, CLAC stands in stark contrast as a voice of reason, a way forward for labour-management relations.

CLAC was not established to be a fringe movement. It was established to fundamentally alter the existing labour relations landscape in Canada. As the editorial committee wrote in The Guide in 1958, “what is at stake is whether the Christian social principles will ever get an impact on labour relations and on society as a whole.”

Dick Heinen, former executive director (2007-2017), liked to say that CLAC is a union of principled pragmatism. That is, we’re a union that works.

CLAC’s principles, rooted in the Christian faith but shared by many people of different faiths as well as those of no particular faith, provide the framework for seeking solutions to everyday concerns and problems in la-bour-management relations. This framework, based on widely held principles, provides a compelling antidote to the economic determinism so predominant on both sides of the union-management debate still raging today.

As Gerald Vandezande, former executive director, Guide editor, and CLAC’s first employee, wrote in 1958, “The practical application of these principles requires not class-conflict but cooperation; not hatred but love toward one another; not selfishness but interest in the welfare of all men; not hoarding of wealth but use of it for the promotion of the welfare of all.”

Working together cooperatively and respecting the dignity of all people is hard work. Saying no, putting up a picket line, or locking the doors is easy.

From humble beginnings in 1952, CLAC’s vision for labour relations has slowly taken hold in Canada. Now, it’s time for all of us to tell people about CLAC and continue the transformation of Canadian labour relations

Learn more about CLAC's major milestones with our special 70th anniversary timeline.

Birth of an Alternative Labour Movement

You might be interested in