‘We will be your human shields’: Why unions are showing up in force to support the U of T pro-Palestinian protest encampment
‘We will be your human shields’: Why unions are showing up in force to support the U of T pro-Palestinian protest encampment
With tensions stretching to their limit, representatives of workers have thrown their hat into the ring, pledging to support the student protesters till the end.
On Monday, union leaders from across Ontario descended on the University of Toronto campus, vowing to physically defend the students.
“Our job is to put our bodies in between you and whatever the administration brings to you,” JP Hornick, president, Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU), told a rally by the protesters and their allies. “If the police come, we will be your human shields. We will be your line of defence. And I promise you that we will be here for as long as it takes to make sure that you are safe.”
Laura Walton, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), pledged not only her union membership in defence of the protesters, but her own maternal instinct.
On Saturday, in response to the university’s trespassing notice, the OFL’s Walton issued a call to all unions to support the encampment, and on Monday she was joined by four past and present union leaders, including Sid Ryan, former head of CUPE; Fred Hahn, current president of CUPE; and Carolyn Egan, president, United Steelworkers (USW) Toronto Area Council.
Walton said that, in her mind, support for the protesters is undeniably linked to labour issues. “If the university administrators can get away with trampling on your rights to protest and dismissing your legitimate demands, then employers everywhere will feel emboldened to do the same,” she said.
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This sounds significant. Is it significant?
If the police show up, and the labour unions actually stand off against them, the photos alone could spark a significant social movement. One of the things that labour has failed to show for, oh, like 2 generations now is that the movement is willing to actually help people more generally, being mostly content to limit itself to helping its membership.
Engaging publicly in a big way has the potential, at least, to be a huge deal.
Too bad they won’t help the people they’re paid to help.
Police? They help exactly the people they’re paid to help.
I think it's significant in principle at least.
Part of the reason that the youth are so disillusioned is that nobody in the older generations show any interest in protecting them in any sense. From abstract things like the projected future climate in which they will live, or in the concrete immediate of swarms of police.
Intergenerational solidarity isn't something these students have really experienced.
If this gets youths hyped to join unions, it could be big.
This is what the rich are really afraid of: that support for Palestine acts as a catalyst for left-wing radicalism in general.
The wealthy know they've pushed it too far, that people are sick and tired of being exploited, from the jobless recoveries of the mid 90s, to the dotcom crash where we bailed out the wealthy, to the '08 crisis where we bailed them out even more only to have them piss it away on their own compensation, to the '10s where we rolled out the red carpet for them and let them party on cheap money for decade, to the pandemic where we shovelled money at them only to have them whine and cry about how we wouldn't work hard enough and how dare get off of our knees and ask, maybe, not to be ground so hard.
They know that this is a flashpoint, and they're scared, but despite that fear, they can't help themselves and despite ebing able to fix things by just not being so egregiously greedy, they're going to try to flex more and take more because, well, they've been able to since at least 1980. They think that because they escaped OWS, they're get off scott-free here.
So yeah, this is significant. If organized labour is getting off it's knees, and if the message sticks, there's a real cascade that could happen. We haven't seen labour do this since the mid-90s, if not the late 60s. It could, with momentum, result in some serious change.
Probably a PR stunt so they sound important. Unions have been useless things for years. Leaches grifting off of their workers.
It's nearly perfectly inversely proportional. From this chart we can see that union membership needs to go up to 60% so that top 10% income share drops to 0%. Or ideally union membership can go even higher than that, so they start losing money.
