Talks resume as strike by 9,000 workers at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario enters third week
On Wednesday, collective bargaining negotiations officially resumed between management and bargaining leaders of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) for the 9,000 workers of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) who have been on strike since July 5.
The strike has now lasted three weeks and is the first in the nearly 100-year history of the government-owned alcohol retailer and distributor. All 677 LCBO stores in Canada’s most populous province have been closed since the strike began, with management staff continuing to fulfill online delivery orders. LCBO agency branches in small towns and rural areas also remain open.
The workers, most of whom work in precarious employment with the Crown Corporation, are demanding protection against dismissal, wage increases to compensate for years of rising inflation and the withdrawal of concessions that OPSEU had enforced in previous contracts.
The main reason for the strike, which workers approved with 97 percent approval in mid-June, is right-wing Conservative Premier Doug Ford’s drive to privatize alcohol sales, transferring the roughly $2.5 billion in public revenue the LCBO brings in annually into the coffers of private companies. The main beneficiaries of this would be the few large retailers – Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, Walmart and Costco – that dominate Ontario’s grocery market.
“Today is about the concrete results that need to be achieved at the bargaining table directly with this employer to end the strike that Ford forced through interference,” OPSEU President JP Hornick said in a statement Wednesday. “This round of negotiations is about what is best for Ontario, and our team is focused on the task at hand – we hope the LCBO management team finally does the same.”
“Ford should never have forced this strike and should reconsider his plan that puts big corporate CEOs and billionaires above the needs of Ontario citizens and puts good jobs and public revenues at risk. His plan will benefit corporations, not Ontario’s mom-and-pop shops or artisan businesses,” Hornick concluded.
Ford has taken personal action against the striking LCBO workers on several occasions, avoiding any impression that this was merely a wage dispute between the LCBO and its workforce and not a political class confrontation between the right-wing government he leads and a significant portion of public sector workers.
At the start of the strike, Ford announced an interactive online map showing where to buy alcohol while government stores were closed.
To break the strike, Ford and his government have also accelerated plans to allow the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails and 12- to 24-packs of beer in corner shops and large supermarkets. Earlier this year, the Ford government announced a $255 million payment to private retailer The Beer Store, owned by a consortium of major brewers, to end its exclusive right to sell bulk beer.
In response to the strike, LCBO management announced it would reopen some stores three days a week starting this weekend, but that plan was scrapped earlier this week, no doubt out of fear that the stores would become the target of mass worker strikes.
Instead, the government pursued an even more aggressive strike-breaking strategy by allowing supermarkets to sell ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages from July 18.
Ford has so far refused to negotiate with OPSEU about expanding private sales of ready-to-drink cocktails, saying on Monday: “The train has left the station, we’re moving on.”
Conservative Ford is building on the undermining of the state’s monopoly on alcohol sales that began under Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, when she approved the sale of beer in grocery stores in 2015, followed by the sale of cider and wine in 2016.
Ford and his ruling class cronies see the attack on LCBO workers as an essential prerequisite to enabling the privatization of other public services. Ford has already begun moving locations of the largely privatized ServiceOntario, which provides government document services and has annual sales of about $2.5 billion, into Staples and Walmart stores.
The holy grail, however, is the province’s public health sector, considered a lucrative, largely untapped pool for private profit, with nearly $190 billion spent in 2022 and 2023. Ford has worked to systematically undermine public health and open the door to privatization. Ontario spends the least per capita on health care of any province, allowing private clinics to offer a wider range of diagnostic services and surgeries.
Ford and his government see the LCBO as an easy target. They hope to exploit popular support for “more convenient” alcohol purchases to demonstrably defeat labor resistance to their privatization plans and further undermine workers’ living standards. This includes maintaining a tiered wage system that sees many LCBO workers earn little more than the minimum wage.
However, an online poll conducted by Leger last weekend found that sympathy remains strong among LCBO workers, with nearly half of respondents saying they support demands for higher wages and more permanent jobs.
“There is broad support here for the union’s message, both in terms of the working conditions it wants to fight to improve and the role the LCBO plays in funding public services in the province,” Stephanie Ross, associate professor at McMaster University’s School of Labour Studies, told the Canadian Press.
Despite this broad support, the OPSEU bureaucracy has done nothing to mobilize the working class in the fight to defend public services, let alone its 180,000 members across the province. LCBO workers are isolated and on picket lines across Ontario. Since Wynne, OPSEU has condoned every step of privatization. Instead, it has put forward proposals to help the LCBO increase its revenues, arguing that services can best be maintained and low-wage workers kept under control if the bureaucracy helps them.
The vulnerability of the right-wing Ford government was laid bare in 2022 when 55,000 education workers went on strike in protest against a preemptive back-to-work law. The illegal strike garnered massive popular support and quickly led to a growing movement for a nationwide general strike to overthrow the hated Ford government. In the face of this growing uproar, union bureaucracies, including OPSEU, jointly struck a backroom deal with Ford to repeal the law and end the strike immediately.
With the unions having rescued him from political irrelevance, Ford felt emboldened to attack the LCBO workers. He was also emboldened by the policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government, supported by the unions and the NDP. The Liberal government intervened more and more aggressively to break strikes and/or prevent industrial action by workers, through back-to-work laws, the threat of back-to-work laws, or arbitrary orders from the Canada Industrial Relations Board. Workers affected by such action include Canada Post workers, workers at the Port of Montreal, west coast dockworkers, and, more recently, WestJet mechanics and CN and CPKC railroad workers.
This attack has provoked – at most – a few complaints from the pro-capitalist unions, which fully support the liberal government and its agenda of imperialist aggression, war and increasing exploitation of workers.
The main obstacle to the struggle of LCBO workers and the development of the class struggle in Canada, as well as internationally, is the union bureaucracies. Workers in the LCBO and across Canada can break out of this straitjacket by forming rank-and-file committees that can advocate and fight for what workers need, not what union bureaucrats, the political stooges of big business in the established parties and corporate boards, think is possible. Anyone interested in this struggle should fill out the form below to contact the WSWS today.
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