TriumphAnt

Diary of a Striker -- Part 1

With apologies to all those through history who have weathered genuinely good-cause strikes, but at the moment this is widely predicted to be a very short strike, so a tone of irreverence and downright flippancy might permeate this probably brief series of posts about the 2004 strike of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. No disparagement of those who acted in the great episodes of workers’ action through history, to wit: http://www.civilization.ca/hist/labour/labh22e.html http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/snprelief4.htm is intended.

Day 1:

Not surprisingly, given that talks only actually broke off at 3am (although the “official” strike start was three hours earlier), the strike’s first morning was pretty disorganized. I only knew I was on strike when I woke up Tuesday morning and heard the radio traffic reporter talking about the utter chaos along roads leading to the entrances to Ottawa’s largest collection of government offices, a complex known locally as “Tunney’s Pasture”. (One is tempted to conclude that the name relates to the multi-building site’s production of a bovine fertilizer equivalent in bureaucratese, but its etymology is probably historical rather than editorial.)

After I dropped my daughter off at school that morning, I drove home to park the car and headed off to my usual bus stop.

The bus ride was insane. Because of pickets pacing slowly back and forth across the major downtown intersections where government office buildings are located, coupled with cars backed up in lanes turning into downtown parking garages where access was being only slowly allowed by the strikers, by the time the bus got to a stop close to downtown, the transitway was jammed solid from there all the way through the city’s core to the other side. It took a numbing 45 minutes to travel a distance of about four blocks.

Eventually, fed up with moving at a pace that would have seen us outrun by a glacier, I asked the driver how long he figured it would take to get to the other side of downtown, where I normally got off the bus. He said about an hour. So I walked from that point to work, and got to the picket line about 10.

Picket shifts at our building are simple time blocks of four hours. You sign in when you arrive and what you’re supposed to do is sign out four hours later. It took me about three seconds to observe that there were seasoned picketers in line ahead of me to complete the sign-in sheet who were filling in the entire line on the form, including departure time and final signature. Later, one explained to me that he had no intention of leaving early, but neither did he have any faith in being able to re-locate the sheet on which he’d signed in when it came time to sign out four hours later.

In fact, even before he had explained the logic of it to me, I had already deduced its sensibility and duplicated it when it came my turn to sign in.

After that, I found a few colleagues. We stood and chatted for a while, walked to a coffee shop across the street, grabbed a cup and resumed our stroll. After a while, we were assigned a courtyard entrance to the complex’s food court, which could also serve as an entrance to the four-tower complex. We were told to steer everyone who wanted admission at that point a little further down the street to a more heavily manned entrance where managers, essential workers, students and holders of a dozen other strike-exempt classifications were patiently lining up to await the strike captains’ grudging permission to enter, but no more than two or three at a time.

This was a cold morning, and our location fell quickly into shade, so when it got to be late enough in the morning that we figured everyone who meant to cross the picket line had already done so, we reasoned that it made more sense to be on the sunny side of the building, which was where we finished our respective four-hour shifts on the line. Thus ended day 1 of my new career as a labour activist.

We'll see how it goes, but the talking heads on the news are already pretty optimistic the strike will be a short one. The union President is actually a very well-spoken woman named Nycole Turmel. And I hasten to add that is not at all meant in any patronizing way. PSAC’s previous President was an exceedingly abrasive ranter named Daryl Bean whose mere presence in a negotiating process would pretty well ensure its descent into antagonism in no time flat. Ms Turmel, by contrast, speaks only of conciliation, and a desire to find a “mutually acceptable compromise”. She has already spoken publicly of her belief that the strike’s duration will be perhaps a matter of hours, a few short days at most.

And finally – for the strike report Day 1 – here is my choice for hands-down prizewinning picket sign (a wholly subjective award based on my own state of mind, and a lifelong appreciation of the appropriate combination of message and attitude. This comes with the perhaps necessary explanation that the Head of Treasury Board and chief representative of the Government side of the table is named Reg Alcock, the first two letters of his last name being pronounced “all”):

“Alcock and No Action”

- 0 -

Non-strike section:

This is probably an opinion being voiced too soon to find much agreement, and I would qualify it by noting that I am second to very few people in my deep respect for the working members of Canada’s armed forces. But I really wonder about the motives of many of those giving microscopic attention to the recent episode in which a Canadian submariner became a fatality in what, parse it however you want, is really nothing more than a tragic job site accident, an event that kills many Canadian workers annually.

His death has, in the past few days, launched two separate federal government enquiries, caused the Prime Minister to abbreviate a multi-nation tour so as to be present, along with the leaders of all three of the other “federal” political parties, when the sailor’s body finally arrived on shore, dispatched the Minister of Defence to the sub’s berth in Scotland to gaze photo-op’ly at the smoke-stained bulkheads in its interior, caused the nation’s federal flags to be lowered to half staff, triggered international live coverage of not one, but two simultaneous funeral ceremonies, one in his home town with family and friends, and the other in Scotland with his surviving shipmates and representatives from both the US and British navies who helped bring the crippled submarine – HMS Chicoutimi – back safely to port, caused the subsequent immediate yanking from active service of her three sister vessels and spawned an orgy of Canadian media attention, as well as dominated the agenda of the House of Commons for the past week so far.

I am frankly scratching my head. Yes, there’s grist for putting into motion the wheels necessary to determine the cause and recommend remedial action. But on this scale? A submarine is, after all, a working environment that by its nature comes with a higher-than-average element of risk.

And while “accidents will happen” sounds perhaps outrageously callous, depending on how much you’ve bought into all the recent political and media railing about it, accidents, nonetheless, will happen. Should the navy honestly be expected to do more than discover why, and fix it? And should the navy stop doing everything that it does – under the sea – while it finds and fixes the problems aboard HMS Chicoutimi? Because it sure seems to me that the navy is being asked in effect to all but swear on a stack of Bibles that no Canadian sailors will ever again die in the line of duty.

… With my profound respect to Lieutenant Saunders’s widow.

- 0 -

The power of a two-letter preposition

Long-winded intro to the point: One of my favourite music genres is something I call “big guitar” for lack of a more specific name. It’s music that features the instrument prominently. It doesn’t refer to any one traditional music classification. There’s stuff I’d call “big guitar” in rock (Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen), blues (Sue Foley, Steve Earle), bluegrass (the Flatt half of Flatt and Scruggs), country (Johnny Cash, the Dixie Chicks), folk (Gord Lightfoot), even easy listening (The Ventures) and classical (Liona Boyd). And one of my favourite practitioners has always been John Fogerty, now enjoying well-earned success as a solo act, but who also was the source of the Bayou Rock sound that was Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The point: Mr Fogerty has just released a new album, called Déjà Vu All Over Again, and the title song seems to open with a chorus that is a wide condemnation of the entertainment industry (the more so when you understand that he went through a decades-long legal battle with Creedence’s original label, Fantasy Records):

“Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio?
Did you try to read the writing on the wall?
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before?
It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Then you swiftly realize, after a couple verses, that the man who wrote “Fortunate Son”, a hammering condemnation of the class divide between those who fought, and those who avoided, the Vietnam War (“Some folks inherit star spangled eyes, ooh, they send you down to war, Lord. And when you ask them, how much should we give, oh, they only answer, more, more, more.”), is not whining about anything so selfish as missed royalties. Instead, he has turned his well-ground crystal-clear “Fortunate Son” lens onto the present war in Iraq:

“Day by day we count the dead and dying;
Ship the bodies home while the networks all keep score.”

But in a powerful evocation, after the song’s third verse he takes the chorus (above) and replaces just one little word:

“Did you hear ‘em talkin’ ‘bout it on the radio?
Did you try to read the writing at the Wall?
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before?
It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Did you catch it? -- “the writing at the Wall”. In this one deceptively tiny adjustment, Fogerty places you at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, asking the same kind of questions that he and his angry contemporaries were asking about that wrong war 40 years ago.

And who would have guessed that Fortunate Son’s label, people who “inherit star-spangled eyes”, would be even more perfectly applicable to the current occupant of the White House than it was to Lyndon B Johnson and Richard M Nixon in the 1960s?

Man, that’s danged good writin’! Throw in a powerful chugging guitar and it’s danged good music, too!