Found at: https://peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint/Why_internationalism-_Why_us-_Why_now-.html
Why internationalism? Why us? Why now?
(The following article is from the July 1-31, 2007 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)
From an address by Stephen Seaborn to the international solidarity forum at CUPE Ontario's 44th annual convention in May. Seaborn, a CUPE member since 1979 and VP-Political Action of CUPE Toronto, is a founding member of the union's National Committee on International Solidarity.
Why internationalism? Why us? Why now?
Concrete expressions of solidarity across borders, by members of our union, began long before we might think. In the late 1800s Toronto city workers were among the May Day marchers demonstrating outrage at the brutal repression against American workers and their demands for an 8-hour day.
Through the Dirty Thirties, the members of civic employee unions in Calgary and Toronto and hydro worker unions in Central Canada were also friends and members of progressive internationalist movements of the day, including those who were members of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the Workers Party and the Communist Party.
Later, our sisters and brothers were certainly providing direct support and solidarity in the fight against Fascism during the Spanish Civil War.
Less than 30 years later, at the height of the Cold War, CUPE was born through a merger of two very different unions. A deep-seated ideological divergence between CUPE's founding unions revealed itself starkly during the union's convention debates concerning statements of solidarity with workers in foreign lands facing the imperial interests of international capital.
And we can be quite certain that there were members of our founding unions who were at the table when the peace and nuclear disarmament movement took shape across Canada in the late 50s.
Our young union joined with this country's churches and the growing anti-Apartheid movement in helping to shape, guide and fund the hugely influential "Banks Divestment Campaign" of the 1970s and 80s, drawing the explicit link between Apartheid's impact on South Africa workers and Canadian corporate interests.
The under-the-radar role of successive Canadian governments complicit in the oppression of working people in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, Grenada, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela were each the subject of contentious convention debate both inside CUPE and within the Canadian Labour Congress.
Not so long ago, the CLC was actively dissuading unions from hosting South African healthcare workers. These workers had been brought to Canada by the ANC and SACTU primarily because they were (and are today) in an open alliance with the South African Communist Party. Happily, CUPE healthcare workers defied the CLC and hosted the South Africans.
When members of the US-deposed popular movements of Grenada, including the Bank and General Workers Union, toured Canada, the CLC again advised us against meeting with the delegation. And again CUPE locals sat down and learned first hand of these workers' struggle in the face of US imperial might. (Note that a similar face-off is looming this fall as the CLC presses for anti-boycott union reps to address CUPE's national convention being held October 14-20 in Toronto.)
In short, CUPE's internationalist track record was already pretty firmly established at the membership and local union level when, at the 1987 National convention, we fought on the floor to establish a committee of members to ramp up the visibility and centrality of our union's solidarity with international struggles.
The National union's working committee of members (which was formed in 1989) began to provide legitimacy to our global solidarity work. CUPE members started to take note as we initiated a union-to-union solidarity alliance with health, civic and education workers of our South African sister union, NEHAWU. In 1990 a healthcare sister from this same South African union addressed the CUPE Ontario convention and in meetings with union activists urged us to form an Ontario international committee of members so as to widen our solidarity work. Nine years later this committee was established.
Based on our direct experience (and in line with the educational focus of the initial 1987 convention resolution), CUPE's national committee guided our international solidarity resources into the area of member-to-member and local-to-local training exchanges. Other agencies in the non-governmental sector (it was reasoned) specialize in humanitarian aid and charitable deeds. And more than one Canadian union had already established Humanitarian Funds which sent members' dues to Third World community projects. But as public sector workers we in CUPE were unable to see the effectiveness of NGO development assistance or drought relief.
We really wanted our efforts to be unique and direct. And more importantly, based upon our common interest as working people. So: we in CUPE would do "solidarity not charity." We'd deal with working people, not war-relief. We'd engage in strategic actions not in emergency responses. We'd specialize in social change, but not in unrelated humanitarian aid. CUPE's outreach would continue to be both internationalist and reciprocal.
Our experience as workers through this last century has put CUPE firmly on the path of membership-based international relations designed for the sharing of survival strategies in a rapidly globalized (and privatized) economy and world-wide job market. By building concrete global alliances between members of the working class we are learning from each other how to support our individual and collective struggles, how to maintain and develop services that respond the needs of the people, not of the profiteers, and, essentially how best to outwit global capital.
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