The role of globalization and corporate behaviour has been brought into question in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”. Detractors of the anti-globalization movement ask why anyone would object to more interaction to people of different countries, and openness to different cultures. The answer is that there are two very different versions of globalization: one based on corporate entrenchment and another that is the product of working people, perhaps best exemplified by the experience in Canada’s largest urban centre.
Toronto: Diversity is our strength
That is the official slogan of a city where people have come from over 190 different countries around the world, speak over 100 different languages, and have worked hard to live together in relative harmony.
This diversity and acceptance of which we are so proud is the result of generations of struggle, as each wave of immigrants found they needed collective forms of representation to improve their lives. Those included unions but there were also other organizations that played vital roles in civil society, from tenant associations to immigrant aid groups.
One worth remembering is the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights, formed in 1947 by activists such as Kalman Kaplansky and Bromley Armstrong, which helped lead the efforts to challenge discrimination in housing, employment and elsewhere—intentionally “dismantling systemic racism” long before that phrase came into popular use.
In 1954, Bromley, Donald Moore and Stanley Grizzle were part of delegation of 50 Black women and men who went to Ottawa to challenge Canada’s racist immigration system. The brief for the government was written by the Joint Committee. Many of our human rights achievements in Ontario and Canada can be traced back to this vital work.
In 1960, the Hogg’s Hollow tragedy, where five young Italian men were buried alive in a sewage tunnel, sparked a social uprising by the entire Italian community. They were tired of the needless deaths in construction and industry, of the disrespect by police in their neighbourhoods, and the streaming of their kids into lower grades at school. Thousands turned out to Exhibition Stadium, and set in place a movement that won new labour and safety laws, elected politicians to city hall and school boards, and changed forever the dynamics of immigrant communities in relation to the established decision-makers.
Powerful movements like these brought about the social justice underpinnings of a decent society, just as the decision of the post-war generation to invest in infrastructure—such as schools, roads, transit and hospitals—gave us vital physical infrastructure. The subsequent investment in public health care, retirement security, housing and community services gave us the social infrastructure to provide for an inclusive and diverse city we are so proud of today.
Global corporations
But corporate globalization is a different matter. The first global joint-stock corporations were formed in the early 1600s. The Dutch East India Company had in its charter of 1602 three main features of its business operation: to explore and claim foreign lands in the name of the company; to raise a private army to secure those lands by force; and to enslave Indigenous Peoples to work the plantations and operations of the company. That business model provided a profit of 18 per cent for two full centuries.
The British East India Company had, at its peak, over 100,000 men under arms, conquering India, flooded China with opium, and appropriated immense of wealth back to Britain that helped fuel the industrial revolution. The uprising of 1857 against the company’s brutal regime changed its role and led the British government to take over and rule directly.
Meanwhile, the Hudson’s Bay Company became the largest landowner in the world, haven been given the First Nations’ land in the watershed surrounding Hudson’s Bay.
Ever since, working people have been trying to restrain capital and the power of the market over our lives. Those attempts included slave revolts, the formation of trade unions, the struggles for universal suffrage, the revolutions in Russia and China, winning modern labour laws in the 30s and 40s, the anti-colonial struggles after WWII, the universal declaration of human rights, the civil rights movement, the fight for women’s equality, the focus on health and safety, the ecological movement, and, most recently, 2SLGBTQ+ struggles. Unions and union activists were often central in these struggles.
But corporations and their powerful allies never assented easily to these restrictions. They dreamed of returning to a time of absolute market supremacy, and with the help of politicians like Thatcher and Reagan, began rolling back our gains. For a brief few months after the crash of 2008, it looked like they might be in trouble. Suddenly people started questioning the wisdom of unbridled capitalism, and Keynes vs. Friedman was the subject of intense debate. It didn’t take long for them to start applying the shock doctrine described so well by Naomi Klein, including a concerted application of the global austerity agenda.
However, no amount of austerity can mask the three crises of globalization: the job, equity, and environmental crises.
The jobs crisis
During the 2007 fight for a $10 minimum wage, led by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, we held a series of public meetings in low-wage neighbourhoods. Each featured a panel with local residents talking about their experience.
One of the most powerful stories was of a South Asian woman who had left an abusive relationship, becoming a single mother with two children. She explained that she started working at minimum wage—$8/hour back then—had risen to a supervisory position at Wendy’s and now earned $9.26 an hour. But she couldn’t afford to raise her two kids on $9.26, so on Saturday and Sunday she worked another job at Value Village. Think of what that meant for her family life—working seven days a week trying to raise two small children. But that is the reality for hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, and it is neither acknowledged nor comprehended by mainstream society.
Not long after that, I got a call late Friday night from Jenny Ahn, a Canadian Auto Workers leader on our executive, asking me to come early the next day to a factory her members were about to occupy. The company Collins + Aikman owed millions in severance pay but was attempting to move the machinery out in the middle of the night. When I showed up at the plant, I was met by over a hundred workers, mostly Chinese, Eastern European, and Caribbean women, blockading access to the plant. Their union was busy negotiating with the big three automakers, who needed the machinery for their assembly plants to keep operating. Fortunately, the employees did get the money for severance, but the jobs were gone.
As I drove from that location, I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Not four weeks before, I had been standing on a picket line at the national headquarters of media giant CTV, with 27 cleaners, mostly Tamil or Latin American. They had recently unionized, and CTV’s response was to terminate the contract of their employer and give it to a non-union company. These people were earning barely more than minimum wage, but now their jobs were gone and all they were asking for by picketing was to at least be re-assigned to another location instead of losing everything.
The juxtaposition of the two incidents was jarring. For decades, factory jobs were the entry point for immigrants to a “middle class” life in Toronto, but tens of thousands of jobs were being lost due to free trade and economic restructuring. What remained was the service sector, but if workers in that sector dared raise their heads above the poverty line, they risked them being cut off in reprisal.
Capitalism’s creative destruction of earlier means of production, combined with the new powers of globalization, meant that stable, secure jobs became a thing of the past. The future points to massive growth of precarious work, informal economies and income disparity.
Equity crisis
I will always remember growing up in Scarborough, listening to a radio interview with an author who travelled across the U.S. deep south to expose the terrible racism suffered by the Black population. I was filled with anger that people could be treated that way, and believed that it was everyone’s responsibility to challenge racism.
Later, I joined the army reserve, where, as an infantry sergeant, I trained with people who had been in Vietnam. I was disgusted by what I heard of the American disdain for human life when it had a different colour of skin, and I saw the connection of that war with the oppression of people in the global south in places such as Angola, Mozambique, and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Today, the majority of Toronto residents are people of colour, and most of us were born elsewhere. Working with hotel workers in their inspiring campaign to raise standards for workers in the hospitality industry, one discovers not just the challenges they face, but also an entire economic reality seldom reflected in mainstream media. Every month, those workers, and so many others, send millions of dollars home in remittances. The money sustains families and sometimes entire communities in the Philippines, Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere.
What are the geo-political factors that brought so many of our neighbours here? In many cases, they are leaving poor economies for the hope of better income, but many have fled wars, famine, persecution, economic collapse, or environmental disasters. Often those were the result of neo-colonialism, or structural adjustment programs, or a massive increase of slums as trade deals wiping out agrarian economy.
Then came temporary foreign workers. In fact, globalization has created an immense temporary workforce swirling around the globe that undermines standards of work and any chance of security for millions. In Toronto, despite our social commitment to diversity and equity, the hard economic reality is that, regardless of education levels, income inequality for people of colour continues to grow, as does the increased racialization of poverty.
Environmental crisis
My family came from mill towns and mining villages in Lancashire. In the early 1960s, I visited London, England and saw, firsthand, the noxious smog that had just killed dozens of residents. It was a mix of coal smoke and fog; the heritage of an economy built on coal. At the turn of the last century, more than a million men toiled in Britain for coal, and I grew up listening to stories of the 1926 miners’ strike, when my father and his brothers would go out at night to the slag heaps to search for bits of coal to heat their home. Later, when my grandfather came back terribly injured in a mining accident, his wife lined up her three sons and made them promise to never go underground. Coal fuelled the industrial revolution, spawning massive amounts of pollution and greenhouse gas, just as oil fuelled the massive expansion of modern manufacturing and the movement of goods and people.
But those aren’t the only environmental issues to consider. Back in 1985, when the Eaton’s workers found themselves on strike for a first contract, I was joined on the picket lines every weekend by a construction tradesman named Neil Borland. Neil was an insulator who worked on massive pipes and boilers, applying coats of the miracle fibre know as asbestos. He would die, as many of his workmates did, of mesothelioma.
Today, thousands in the global south are being condemned to a horrible death sometime in the future due to the asbestos that Canada has mined and exported. Across the world, Canadian mining companies are rocked with controversy over their environmental practices and disregard for the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Industrialization has had huge health impacts—pesticides, chemicals and asbestos have created the epidemic of cancers that sweep my generation. For every advance made, such as cleaning up the Great Lakes, we in turn wipe out fisheries in our oceans. Whether it is the Tar Sands, agribusiness, or fish farming, capitalism cannot help but gorging on every opportunity to exploit nature. Capital drives the commodification and commercialization of all things—from water to genetically modified food and seeds.
The most fundamental threat to humankind is the environmental crisis, particularly climate change—and this threat comes today from corporate behaviour and corporate power.
How to respond?
I believe the key responsibility of all Canadians is to help constrain and defeat corporate plans for this planet.
To do that, we must strengthen the labour movement and other forms of collective representation to match the obscene power of transnational corporations and their politicians. Just as unions were built by one-to-one conversations, it will take that same kind of patient dedication to build a fighting union movement for the 21st century. Labour and our social justice allies need to develop a co-ordinated global campaign to re-regulate capital and production—and not be afraid to use the word socialism when we talk about our common future.
Bread—and roses, too!
Just over a century ago, thousands of women poured out of the textile factories in Lawrence Massachusetts demanding a living wage, dignity and union rights. Their cry—in a multitude of languages—for bread and roses, is captured forever in the anthem celebrated every year on International Women’s Day. In a way, that has always been the goal of working people, faced with the greed and power of the 1%—no matter what the century. But we can neither grow roses nor wheat for bread unless this planet is able to sustain itself, and humankind.
We need to shape history together, as we confront the crises of globalization, and seek to unlock the power that will truly make another world possible.
John Cartwright delivered a longer version of this speech as the 2012 Sefton Memorial Lecture at Woodsworth College, University of Toronto.
About the author
John Cartwright
John Cartwright is a labour climate justice advocate and chairperson of the Council of Canadians.
