By Neil Armstrong
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| Top officers of the Canadian Labour Congress, left to right: Donald Lafleur, executive vice president; Larry Rousseau, executive vice president; Hassan Yussuff, president; and Marie Clarke Walker, secretary treasurer. Photo contributed |
The Canadian Labour Congress made a historic step at its 28th
Constitutional Convention in Toronto on May 11 when the membership elected
three racialized people to serve among its four top officers.
After being an executive vice president of the CLC for 15
years, Marie Clarke Walker, a black woman of Caribbean roots, was elected
secretary treasurer; Larry Rousseau, a black man of Haitian heritage was
elected executive vice president; and Hassan Yussuff, a South Asian man from
Guyana, was acclaimed as president. Donald Lafleur, a Francophone but not a
racialized person, was re-elected as executive vice president.
This change is reflective of the majority of workers in
Canada – a fact emphasized by Clarke Walker and Rousseau.
“This is the first time ever. Having two of us there was
historic, having three definitely a day for people to celebrate, particularly
when, again, the majority of the membership looks like us. And so, the hope is
that we will now be speaking to a majority of workers. That doesn't mean that
if you don’t belong to any one of those groups you’re going to be left behind,
by no means,” says Clarke Walker.
She said it would also go a long way to pull in young
workers who have a different way of doing things and understand the diversity
and the intersectionality better than some of the people who have been around
for a long time.
Clarke Walker is proud to be a part of this team and if she
could change anything it would be to have the gender parity there, but “there
are three amazing people to work with that are extremely qualified, extremely
good at what they do.”
She is looking forward to the next three years.
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| Marie Clarke Walker, newly elected secretary treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress and the first racialized woman to hold that position. Photo contributed |
With 60 days from the elections for the incoming and outgoing
officers of the CLC to transition, Yussuff will assign files to his newly elected
team.
Clarke Walker says he could assign her anything on top of
her secretary treasurer duties.
“All of the secretary treasurers that I worked with had
files on top of it, so Hassan had antiracism and human rights, along with
political action, labour councils, health and safety he had at one time, so we
all have those files on top of our other responsibilities.”
She is happy that that she gets to continue the work that the
CLC started in the last three years.
“The last three years have been so different from the 12
years previous, different in the sense that the officers worked together to do
a number of things. We had more wins, I think, in the last in the last three
years than the entire 15 that I’ve been at the congress.”
SOME ACHIEVEMENTS
OVER THE LAST THREE YEARS
Clarke Walker said they came together and decided that they
were going to do Canada’s general elections differently with their members.
They crisscrossed the country twice holding different town
halls and forums and workshops about why it was important to get involved in
the elections to get rid of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
“We had to show them that we were on their side and we were
prepared to do anything that was necessary to get rid of him and get a new
government in.”
She said the difference between the previous ten years and
the last three years, in terms of government, was that the Justin Trudeau-led
government wants to talk to the labour movement.
“That open communication, I think, has helped to attain
things for workers that we didn’t think were possible in the previous ten
years. We didn’t really know whether or not they’d be possible even in these
three years. But there’s a big difference when you have open communications.
You can at least tell people what it is you want, what it is you need, and what
it is workers need.”
Clarke Walker said there is never a guarantee that the
movement will get everything that it lobbies for but they have been fortunate
over the last three years and have accomplished a number of things.
“We didn’t get everything we wanted with Canada Pension Plan
(CPP) for example, we wanted a higher increase but we got something – something
that was more a 30% increase in people’s pensions.”
She said this wasn’t as important for the CLC’s union
members as it is for people who are non-unionized and don’t have private
pensions.
“When people talk about the labour movement only being
self-serving, it’s far from self-serving. One of the things that came out of
the last convention was that we were going to make the union movement more
relevant, relevant to the general public and relevant to our members.”
She said when they had the win on the CPP it was the CLC
telling the general public that “we have a private pension plan but we feel
everybody should benefit from this.”
Regarding the rolling back of the age to 65 for Old Age
Security (OAS) and Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), she said a good chunk of
the CLC’s members would never qualify for either but “what we’re doing is
helping everybody else so we try and be inclusive in what we’re doing on behalf
of people living in Canada.”
She does not like to say ‘Canadians’ because there are
people who are working here that are not Canadians and should benefit from the
work that they do and the benefits that they’re entitled to receive, she said.
These are workers, like the migrant workers or temporary
foreign workers, who pay into employment insurance and the pension plan, and
don’t get to collect on it.
“Those are the kinds of things that I work on as well so if
I only include Canadians then I’m leaving a whole chunk of workers out. We have
permanent residents, landed immigrants.”
Clarke Walker said the other things that the CLC have been
able to do in the last three years is to be more inclusive – changing the way
it does its politics.
“So when we talk about something like childcare, what does
childcare look like to racialized families, what does childcare look like to
indigenous families? What do environment and green jobs and the whole issue of
environmental protection and the green economy, what does that look like? What
does that look like to indigenous communities, particularly those communities
whose water is poisoned, the land is poisoned? By nature they live off the land
and water and can’t do that because poisons have leached into their land so
they can’t fish and do the things that they normally do.”
She said the government has said that it is banning asbestos
and putting resources into remediation for government buildings.
The new secretary treasurer wants all buildings done,
particularly in indigenous communities where buildings such as houses and
community centres are laden with asbestos.
“When we were doing politics on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership and other trade agreements we talked about those trade agreements
that the government signed tend to hurt poor communities, racialized
communities, indigenous communities.”
She said within the labour movement, one of the things they
did was to not just talk about the inclusion of all of those things, but to sit
down with their equity working groups and look at “how do we infuse equity into
every single thing we do.”
LAUNCH OF A MENTAL
HEALTH ONLINE RESOURCE
One of the other things they have worked on in the last
three years is the area of mental health, looking at it not just from the
perspective of getting people with mental illness into the work place but also
how a person’s mental health can be affected at work through racism, sexism,
homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other things.
“While the labour movement has done some work on mental
health, it’s usually from a health and safety perspective, accommodation
perspective, and again within the last three years we flipped that on its head
and said let’s look at this from a rights-based perspective. One of the new
working groups we have is a mental health working group looking at all of
that.”
They launched a mental health online resource at the
convention. It looks at a number of areas and helps people who need assistance
whether on the shop floor in the workplace, or looking for resources in their
community, or seeing what their union has that deals with mental health.
Clarke Walker says she can see that the labour movement is
becoming more relevant to the general public.
A group of organizers -- all women -- from Hamilton that
local councillor, Matthew Green, coordinated attended the convention all week
to see what the CLC does.
She said people hear all kinds of negative things about
unions and one of the things that she tells people is that “unions are more
than picket lines and strikes, we are involved and do things that people
wouldn’t think that we do.”
The CLC also did a lot of work on welcoming and resettling refugees.
“While everybody was focusing on the Syrian refugees we also
talked about the Eritrean refugees and the refugees that were coming from Sub-Saharan
Africa. So, lots of stuff that we do that the general public have no idea, and
again, I want to be able to continue that, grow the movement because I know
when you work in collaboration with others as a collective your voice is
stronger, the resources go a lot further and so I want to continue to do all of
that collaboration, not just in the union movement but also with community
groups.”
“It means that many people are going to say that it is a good thing that the leadership of the CLC is going to be particularly sensitized to the way labour presents itself to workers of colour. And, if workers of colour are seeing themselves in leadership positions in the union movement, and this is a beginning because the labour movement increasingly will have to reflect the workers that it serves, just like government, and in that case well, I think this is a good thing and I think that we’re on the right track.”
Previously, he was a regional vice president with the Union of National Employees, and an employee of Statistics Canada.
Rousseau’s first experience in the labour movement was when he started as a filing and stockroom clerk in the mailroom of the Canadian Labour Congress at the age of 18.
Asked if he had aspirations then to be in the leadership of the CLC, he laughed and said, “I don’t think I ever did.”
“I think I might have dreamed about it sometimes or simply said, you know sometimes how we think we might win the lottery or sometimes we might say wouldn’t it be nice to have such. I think that, realistically speaking, to rise to the position that I am in right now takes a lot more than luck.
“It takes a lot more than dreaming. It takes a lot of perseverance, and more especially, it takes a great amount of trust so that the various affiliates that are very important players in these affairs come around to say what kind of a person is this, does this person have the experience, will this person be able to do the work, etc. I’m just very humbled at this point but very proud.”
Rousseau said the CLC has to be instrumental in making sure that workers of colour will be able to integrate and join into unions, which also have their culture of exclusion, just by the very definition of trade union.
He said these kinds of things have to be dealt with and he thinks that the leadership team will work together.
Shortly after working at the CLC, he was elected shop steward for the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 225 (now COPE).
His involvement in the GLBT, peace and social activist movements has been an integral part of his engagement and commitment for social justice.
Rousseau’s parents were from Haiti and he said that they would have been extremely proud if they were alive today.
They raised all their children with progressive values, and he noted that his parents were pro-trade union and were very happy when he was working at the CLC.
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