May Day Rally Shows New Face of Today’s Labour Movement

Photos by Tania Heath

Labour Day is often associated with the end-of-summer, back-to-school statutory holiday in early September.

But there is a much older celebration of labour associated with May Day, or International Workers’ Day. Throughout the 19th century, as workers around the world mobilized against the ravages of colonialism and industrial capitalism, May 1 became a day to rally the collective power of workers.

In North America, May Day traditions waned in the 20th century. But recent years have witnessed a resurgence of worker and community activism centred around the event. This year’s rally in St. John’s came in the midst of a two-week strike by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC). While a tentative agreement was reached in the early hours of May 1 for 120,000 of those workers, 35,000 remain on strike.

Hundreds of workers representing dozens of unions and community groups gathered at St. John’s City Hall Monday for a march down Water Street to Harbourside Park. A cold, steely wind whipped off the harbour as temperatures hovered around zero. But the gusty air lashed flags and banners into motion, and the chanting of marchers was undiminished by the howling wind. A boisterous crowd of about 400 made their way through the city’s downtown for the noisy noontime rally.

A rich history of activism

The province has a lengthy, vibrant history of labour action stretching back centuries. The Sealers’ Strike of 1832 saw thousands of Newfoundland sealers fight back against merchant efforts to replace cash payments with credit. Merchants who refused to give in saw their schooners destroyed at night by armed bands of sealers. The sealers won.

Since then, almost every labour sector in the province has seen workers organize to improve their working conditions and the future of their communities: Loggers, miners, journalists, teachers, university professors, retail workers, non-profit and shelter workers, municipal employees, to name a few.  Cyril Strong, an early union organizer for the American Federation of Labour in the pre-Confederation era, even recounts in his memoirs the experience of unionizing downtown St. John’s bars, most of whom only had one employee. But those employees were eager to unionize against the exploitative bar-owners, and in the late 1940s about one-third of them did. Forty years later, workers at all three major breweries in Newfoundland wound up either on strike or locked out. And for its part, the 1985 beer strike lives on in song and poetry.

Efforts by employers and governments to curtail worker power have repeatedly met their match in the ingenuity and audacity of Newfoundland and Labrador workers and their unions. In 1956, union organizers who were barred access to remote logging camps rented planes and parachuted in behind company lines. In 1972, refusal by the Memorial University administration to recognize the students’ union there led to a 10-day occupation of the university by hundreds of students in what became one of the longest student occupations in North American history (supported by labour unions across the province). In 2005, the Fish Food and Allied Workers union fought back against policy changes to the fishery with their own tools of labour, using boats to block shipping lanes and even blockade the St. John’s Harbour. When a Portuguese trawler tried to cross their maritime picket line, union vessels pursued and penned it in for four hours in what they called a “fishers’ arrest.”

This year marks the 75^th anniversary of the Newfoundland Railway Strike of 1948. That struggle, which took place in the context of rising costs of living, would resonate with many today. The previous year, 1947,  railway unions agreed to a lower wage increase than they initially demanded, on the condition that the Newfoundland government take action to control the cost of living and roll back prices. When no price rollbacks or freezes materialized, the following year unions stuck to their wage demands and on October 11 went on strike.

The strike was met with powerful solidarity from other unionized workers. When merchants tried to move their goods by boat instead of rail, dockworkers refused to unload the vessels.

After five days, communities around the island began experiencing food and gasoline shortages. The US air force had to drop food rations by plane to supply its bases on the island. As the strike dragged on, unions intensified their activism and blockaded the airport. After a month-long strike, government finally doubled its wage offer and a deal was signed. According to one international observer, it was “the perfect strike.”

New era, same struggles 

The dynamics of Newfoundland and Labrador’s labour movement have changed considerably in recent years, but the struggle for dignity, fairness and equity remained central themes at Monday’s rally—themes that are especially important to the province’s growing migrant worker movement.

“Labour justice requires migrant justice and migrant rights has to be part of worker rights,” said Adi Khaitan with the Migrant Action Centre.

“Migrant workers face a lot of precarity and exploitation in everything they do and every step of the way,” they said. “We often get a lot less [money] compared to the work we do, we don’t have equal rights, we face policy barriers. We want systemic change and an end to exploitation, an end to precarity. We want status for all.”

Khaitan said one of the Migrant Action Centre’s key struggles is around access to health care. Under present regulations only migrant workers with a minimum one-year work or study permit can access MCP. This means a number of migrants, including temporary workers, international students and those seeking asylum, can wind up without access to health care. 

The labour movement is getting younger as more students join the province’s picket lines. During the recent Memorial University Faculty Association strike hundreds of students showed up and dozens of student societies declared their support for striking faculty. The students’ union even rebranded the Breezeway Bar as a strike support headquarters for students and faculty. That solidarity has extended to the ongoing PSAC strike, which has seen student support teams visiting picket lines.

Nicholas Keough, a computer engineering student at MUNL, brought that message to the May Day rally.

“As students we all know we’re going to be in the workplace, we’re going to need solidarity with other workers, and we know that when any group of workers succeeds we all succeed,” he said.

Safe Harbour Outreach Project (SHOP), the province’s sex worker advocacy centre, was also on-hand with a vibrant banner and loud crowd of members and allies.

“SHOP is here because sex worker rights are labour rights,” said SHOP Program Coordinator Susan Smith. “We want to be more present and more public and more out there. It’s really important for sex workers and allies to be here because it builds community.”

Smith comes from a labour background and previously served as president of a NAPE local for caregivers. “Labour rights are important to me and safe working conditions are important for me, and that’s what we want for sex workers too.”

Art and activism

Melissa McPherson and Annette Manning are among the PSAC workers on strike. They’re also artists. If you saw the larger-than-life-sized puppets of former premier Dwight Ball and Cathy Bennett during the 2016 anti-austerity protests, they were the artists behind them. When they realized they were going on strike this year, they decided it was time to add Justin Trudeau and Mona Fortier to their puppet team. 

“Justin Trudeau has always looked a bit Disney to me,” said Manning. “So I was sort of inspired by Beauty and the Beast. It’s like he sort of animated the alarms and woke up the Sleeping Beauty.

“I’m an artist, and being on a picket line is stressful. Our pay is cut, we’re getting less than half of our pay, it’s really stressful so what I do is I just channel the stress into art-making.”

McPherson said she appreciates how the strike has allowed workers to build solidarity in ways that aren’t always possible in the workplace.

“I know there’s a lot of confusion and uncertainty, and some people and their families are really impacted financially, but I’ve enjoyed the solidarity, I’ve enjoyed getting to know my co-workers, and communicating with them about what we need and what we deserve. That part of this experience has been really great.”

As the march wound its way down Water Street, construction and traffic workers paused their own labour to watch. “It’s about respect,” one of them told me. “What I’m doing right now is not too hard a day, but there’s days where it just strains you. It’s good to be appreciated because not all of us in the world are lucky enough to have money. I know what it’s like to not have any food in the house; not all of us were born with a silver spoon in our hands. It’s about time that they appreciate us.”

Organizing the unorganized

Less than 40 per cent of workers in Newfoundland and Labrador are unionized. And while that narrowly outpaces Quebec for the highest unionization rate in Canada, it also means thousands of workers here are not unionized. 

Sara Moriarity, an organizer with the Workers Action Network—formed in 2021 to help non-unionized workers—says workers would benefit from legislative change. “Workers in industries like retail, hospitality, food delivery, tech and early childhood education struggle to stand up for their rights because this province’s labour legislation is weak and it must be amended,” she told the crowd at Harbourside Park.

The fishery is one of the province’s oldest industries. FFAW/Unifor’s Courtney Langille told the rallying workers that the union is fighting for the very survival of Newfoundland and Labrador’s rural and coastal communities.

“We’re here today in St. John’s but for many of us here those coastal communities are home. You grew up there. Your parents probably still live there. Your great grandparents settled there. FFAW continues to work every single day to ensure that these communities – our communities – are not archived in The Rooms. We continue to make sure that in 10 years our province has more than wind farms and Walmarts,” she said.

“It’s 2023 and the adversities that workers face have only become modernized and aggravated by the rising cost of living, a housing crisis, inflation, unaccountability, inaccessibility; they’re prioritizing the protection of corporate bottom lines instead of the people working to build them. And so we must modernize how we rise against those adversities, while remembering where our power inherently lies,” Langille continued. “Withholding labour that is demanded but undervalued is our collective power. Every worker is necessary for every part of this economy to move.

“You are all worth fighting for. Eat the rich!” she said, to a chorus of cheers.

Provincial NDP leader Jim Dinn reflected on his own union roots. His father was a unionized railway worker, and Dinn himself previously led the NL Teachers’ Association.

“There are two types of power,” he said. “There’s corporate power, which seeks to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few. And then there’s the power of unions, which seeks to distribute that wealth and that power to individuals in and beyond the union. We would not have the 40 hour work week, safe working conditions, the end of child labour, holidays, leave, maternity; all of these things that came about are because of unions, pure and simple. ”

The provincial branch of the Communist Party of Canada also spoke, drawing attention to ongoing worker struggles in Turkey, Greece, France, Britain, and elsewhere.

“Our greatest tool in this shared fight is unity,” said Ash Quinn. “In the longer term the solution is socialism, where working people are in the driver’s seat and exploitation, oppression and war are relics of history. A better future is not only possible, it is necessary.”

Ky Rees, chairperson of the St. John’s May Day organizing committee, stressed the importance of solidarity across national boundaries.

“It’s so important that we stand in solidarity with our workers across the globe and across the world and realize that we have more in common as a class than we do separating us,” they said. “There’s a lot of imperialism nowadays, and the bosses and the ruling class say that we have less in common with those across borders or that we should fear new Canadians, migrants. There’s always people trying to find ways to turn worker against worker. And what this day is about in essence is to override that and to stand in solidarity with each other and to realize what we can accomplish with each other.”

Pay equity, queer rights, and a more militant labour movement

Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour President Jessica McCormick came to the rally fresh from a consultation session with the provincial government over its belaboured pay equity legislation. After years of lobbying by unions, in 1988 the province negotiated a pay equity agreement with NAPE that would see women health care workers paid equal to men. But citing the province’s fiscal crisis in 1991, the Clyde Wells government passed legislation cancelling the payments. The move ignited outrage among public sector workers and feminist and labour activists.

Finally brought forward by the Liberals in 2022, the Pay Equity and Pay Transparency Act is being widely criticized as inadequate. McCormick says the consultation process has been biased in favour of employers and business interests over workers. She said by going to extra lengths to reduce red tape and make it easy for employers to achieve a low threshold for equity, the legislation risks actually furthering discrimination.

“A few weeks ago [we were told by government] that this is better than nothing, that we had nothing before and this is a step. But pay equity legislation that doesn’t cover private sector workers is not going to meaningfully address the gender wage gap,” she said. “It’s been a very frustrating process and we are far from where we need to be.”

But today’s labour struggles are not just about money. With rising violence against LGBTQ people in the US and parts of Canada, McCormick said it’s crucial to remember that queer and trans issues are also labour issues.

“It’s been on my mind because it’s been on the news, but also because I am a queer woman in a leadership role in the labour movement and I feel that it is my obligation and duty to talk to my fellow labour activists who are members of the community and allies about this stuff. Because we are not immune even in our unions from hateful and bigoted behaviour,” she said.

“I think people feel distanced from what’s happening in the US and it’s really important to bring people back to reality, because these kinds of things happen in our own backyard and in our workplaces. We as trade unionists have a tremendous amount of leverage to influence collective agreements, to ensure that they incorporate gender-affirming care into benefits, to advocate for better policies and legislation provincially and federally. We should be using our influence in those spaces to support our queer and trans brothers and sisters and siblings.”

It’s a grim historical moment in many respects, but McCormick looks forward with hope. What inspires her is not just the strong organizing power and solidarity demonstrated by the PSAC strike, but also a broader shift toward more militant, active unions.

“I think more unions are moving towards a model of organizing from the ground up, and leveraging their collective power to take direct action. That really makes me feel excited and inspired. Throughout history different types of trade unions have existed, and some focused more on the service model—you know, if you have a grievance in the workplace you go to your union and they help you deal with it and that might be your only interaction with the union,” she explained. 

“But what I am observing in the labour movement today is more and more unions tapping into their collective power and using it not just to leverage better collective agreements but also to mobilize en masse for all the other issues that affect workers both in the workplace and outside the workplace. That is the direction that we need to go in.”

Facing a sea of banners and flags at Harbourside Park, McCormick emphasized that message to the hundreds of workers.

“Workers standing up against a system that seeks to undermine our rights is the same fight today as it was back then,” she said. “As long as workers continue to struggle against exploitation and oppression under capitalism, as long as our demands for a more fair and just society aren’t met, then we must continue to mark May Day and organize together in solidarity for a better world. 

“The progress that working people have made cannot be taken for granted. People fought for our rights and dignities that we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to fight for. The sacrifices of so many workers cannot be forgotten or we’ll end up fighting those same battles all over again.”

Check out more of Tania Heath’s photos from the St. John’s 2023 May Day March and Rally