Fragile Future: The Attack Against Public Services and Public Sector Unions in an Era of Austerity

This study is about the ongoing transformation of neoliberal public policy, precarious work, and public sector unions' struggles against demands for austerity. Situated in long-term historical perspective, I examine to what extent changes in the nature and content of government intervention, social welfare provision, and restructuring of the public sector are structurally-induced, the products of historical and contemporary circumstances, the result of mismanagement, or some combination of other factors. I argue that in addition to reducing the compass of social services, recent expenditure restraint measures have targeted unionized workers in order to lower wages and reduce benefits across the sector. Case studies include original analyses of striking workers at the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, collective bargaining between teaching assistants and contract instructors and Carleton University, and striking civic workers at the city of Toronto. Together the cases break new ground in understanding how neoliberalism is being reconstructed and redeployed in light of the Great Recession and the consequences this has had on public sector workers and services. The three jurisdictions in this study - municipal, provincial, and federal - represent three scales of neoliberal restructuring in Canada. While all three governments have resorted to some form of austerity, the methods used to reduce the deficit and move toward balanced budgets have been differential and multifaceted. These include service delivery restructuring, increasing use of public-private-partnerships, privatization, new user-fees, and/or consumption taxes, as well as public sector worker layoffs, workplace intensification, and the selling of Crown assets. I contend that such measures seek to shift the burden of recession onto the public sector by reducing social services provisioning and seeking concessions from unionized public sector workers. In fact, the state has taken a leading role in narrowing the field of free collective bargaining, suspending trade union rights, and implementing an aggressive program of dispossession. Absent the collective capacities to stop let alone reverse these measures, public sector unions have reached an impasse. Unable to translate militancy into an alternative ideological perspective and a coherent political and economic program, they continue to desperately hang onto previous gains that look increasingly insecure and fragile. I argue that in order for unions to regain their once prominent role in the pursuit of social justice and workplace democracy, they will need to take the risks of organizing working class communities and fighting back while they still have some capacity to do so - else they risk continuing the decades-long labour impasse and union decline. In my view, this necessarily requires an explicitly anti-capitalist perspective, with the aim being to develop both alternative policies and an alternative politics rooted in the working class.