Mean Tweets for Standing up for Freedom

Like many, I spend more time on social media than I care to admit. Twitter is my preferred forum as a place to comment on current events and happenings at CLAC, but I scan Facebook and LinkedIn from time to time, too. 

In response to my posts about things happening at CLAC, I often encounter critics. Plenty of them are the anonymous type often referred to as trolls. 

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night television show includes a segment called “Mean Tweets,” a popular sketch in which celebrities and even presidents read aloud mean and nasty tweets posted about them by mostly nameless critics. If I was ever invited on the show, I could read, “CLAC is not at a real union!” “CLAC is an employer front.” “CLAC is a @#$%^&* rat union!” 

Antagonism toward CLAC is nothing new. Members who have been with the union long enough can recall stories when that antagonism was more than just nasty online comments. Over the years, CLAC members and representatives have experienced vengeful—and criminal—vandalism, pickets, threats of violence, and even sabotage on the job site.

The online criticisms we face today can mostly be sourced back to CLAC’s competitor unions in the traditional labour movement. Their suggestions that CLAC is not a “real” union are of course factually incorrect. CLAC has been certified as a union by federal and provincial labour boards since 1952, and workers have chosen CLAC as their union more than 2,400 times in proceedings overseen by labour boards. 

The criticism levelled against CLAC by its opponents is largely due to CLAC’s different and unique views on workplace democracy. In every unionized workplace, workers can exercise a legal right to leave a union. Sometimes, workers leave when a union fails to provide them with responsive and effective representation, or when it doesn’t properly reflect their values, or spends their dues on causes that they don’t support. Sometimes, members can face situations in which their union—which is supposed to protect their interests—can become even more oppressive than the employer that led them to join the union in the first place. 

The legal right to leave a union is an important right. It is a tool by which workers can hold their unions accountable. This can happen via a raid by another union or via termination of the union’s bargaining rights. 

The traditional labour movement, led by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), has little interest in making this right available to its own members. Approximately 70 percent of unionized workers belong to the CLC, which requires its member unions to abide by a strict no-raid pact. The mechanics of this pact are complicated, but the net effect is that workers cannot move easily from one CLC union to another CLC union. 

The congress maintains that this pact is necessary to keep the union movement in Canada strong and united. In contrast, CLAC views no-raid pacts as fundamentally anti-worker because they deny workers choice in union representation. For this reason, CLAC is not a member of the congress and does not take part in no-raid pacts.

CLAC’s progressive view—a radical idea when it was founded in 1952—is that employees should be able to democratically select the union that best reflects their collective interests and values. CLAC, believing fully in the need for unions and in the value they offer, does set out to offer a unique alternative. Its views on worker dignity, on the need to be politically nonpartisan, and its aim to create workplace partnerships are what set it apart from most CLC unions. These ideas and values, when worked out on the shop floor and in the union’s programs (health benefits, retirement plans, and training programs), result in a very different kind of union experience. 

In the last 20 years, CLAC’s membership has grown by more than 350 percent to about 60,000 members. This number not only demonstrates growth, but also that workers are regularly electing to keep CLAC as their union. This growth is even more remarkable when considering that, since CLAC does not participate in no-raid pacts, its members have many other union options. 

Meanwhile, the traditional labour movement has been stagnant at best, and in some sectors in a steady state of decline, struggling to be relevant to workers today in their ever-changing workplaces. This is not a trend that any Canadian should relish or delight in, because Canadian workers, businesses, and governments are well-served by healthy, robust, and active labour unions. 

It’s not likely I’ll be asked to read out “mean tweets” about CLAC on late-night television. But I do monitor the “not-a-real union” claims with interest, and a bit of pride. We encounter this kind of anti-CLAC opposition precisely because CLAC provides a viable and distinct alternative option. In doing so, CLAC serves to make itself and other unions more accountable to their members and that, in our opinion, is the best way to maintain a strong, vibrant, and thriving Canadian union movement.