Fighting back successfully against the government/corporate attacks that we BC workers face in 2010 is the best way for us to honour the men and women who took part in the Battle of Ballantyne Pier 75 years ago. They could not ignore the Shipping Federation lockout, the use of scabs, the abuses of the dispatch system, the need to re-establish a strong union on the docks. They would not side-step ruthless employers, government officials ranting about a communist insurrection, phalanxes of cops and vigilantes who clubbed and shot them after they marched to the pier, or the cowards who lobbed tear-gas among women tending the wounded in makeshift infirmaries.

They were not exempt from the responsibility to take on the struggles of their times, the indispensable struggles to push forward the wages and rights of working people while blocking the bosses’ and governments’ efforts to roll them back.

We are no more exempt from the duty to take on the indispensable struggles of our times. And we must soon start doing this, even if current union leaders prolong their last five years of hushed invisibility. Not even organizing periodic mass protests. Not even proposing “action plans” that go beyond voting for the equally uninspiring New Democrats.

For over a decade now Corporate Campbell’s Lie-beral government has been attacking the living standards, rights, and public services of BC working people to help boost profits for Business Council members and other domestic and foreign employers. The complete list of assaults on trade unions, the sick, the elderly, children at risk, women, Native people, the poor, the homeless, public school students, and others would fill this entire leaflet several times over.   

What will it take to stop these callous, profit-motivated attacks?

Eventually, it will take the unified, educated, mobilized might of unionized working people AND our allies to confront the bosses’ government and make them back down. It will take a real general strike (not a one-day holiday) by all BC trade unionists, who have worked creatively and tirelessly to gain support from the rest of the population, or significant parts of them.

That’s not just radical hogwash. It’s a fact. The greed-heads who have been attacking working people and robbing us for most of the last 30 years are not going to get tired. They’re not suddenly going to become ashamed and change their ways. They will not be stopped by the election of an NDP that wants to be friends with big business. The so-called pendulum is not going to magically “swing the other way.” It’s going to take lots of help—our help.

Only our ability to hurt the corporate bosses by reducing or halting their profits will give us the power to make them stop or even slow down their attacks. If we do that successfully once, we will be able to do it again, if and when it is necessary.

But we are not there yet.

Right now we need to start re-building a province-wide, all-inclusive fight-back movement—inside and outside trade unions, as we did in 2004. We need BIG solidarity with those who are under attack or fighting back. We need crucially to join the many existing fight-back struggles TOGETHER. We need mass demonstrations to show the government (and each other) how increasingly many of us oppose them. We need repeated acts of civil disobedience to disrupt “business as usual.”

If our leaders will not lead us, rank-and-file trade unionists will have to take the lead in our locals, our labour councils, our union conferences and conventions—and in our communities. Again, that’s just a fact, which we should recognize and get use to, until we develop new leaders who are ready to fight when necessary.

Then will we be worthy descendants of the heroes of Ballantyne Pier!

The Prepare the General Strike Committee (active in BC from 2002 until 2005) has been re-activated. We encourage anyone interested in pitching in to contact Gene McGuckin at 604-254-1421 or emcg3@telus.net, or Shane Calder at 250-590-2665