At last Sunday’s meeting of the Cross-Canada Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, participants voted to support a resolution backing the campaign of rank-and-file auto worker and socialist Will Lehman for president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the United States. To get involved with the CERSC, contact the committee at cersc.csppb@gmail.com.

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The Cross-Canada Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee (CERSC) salutes the campaign waged by William Lehman for president of the United Auto Workers. Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker from Pennsylvania, is providing a voice and program for the growing rank-and-file rebellion against the corrupt UAW bureaucracy, which sees its twin tasks as suppressing working class anger over decades of concessions, job cuts, and horrendous working conditions, and protecting its corporatist relationships with big business and the state.

As education workers from all parts of Canada who have united to oppose the homicidal pandemic policy pursued by all levels of government and supported by the education trade unions, we know from first-hand experience that the union bureaucracy is hostile to defending the interests and very lives of the workers they claim to represent. The criminality and self-enrichment that pervades the upper echelons of the UAW is no less rife in Canada’s union apparatuses. A sordid faction fight over control of the multi-million-dollar assets of Unifor, the country’s largest industrial union, has brought to light rampant corruption by its top officials, including its now disgraced ex-president and Trudeau Liberal government confidant, Jerry Dias.  

The CERSC provides political and organizational leadership to help workers take control of their struggles into their own hands through the establishment of a network of rank-and-file committees independent of the anti-worker syndicates that call themselves unions.

The CERSC unequivocally supports Lehman’s campaign demands, which include:

1. A mass mobilization of rank-and-file UAW members to fight for pay increases to keep pace with the cost of living, an end to all tiers, full funding of pensions, and the transfer of all temporary and part-time workers to full-time contracts.

2. The abolition of the bureaucracy and its privileges, and the placing of the UAW’s resources under the control of the rank-and-file.

3. The unification of workers internationally to launch a counter-offensive against the corporations’ global predatory drive for profits. The rejection of the poisonous nationalism promoted by the UAW and all union bureaucracies through the construction of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.

We pledge to do everything in our power to make Will Lehman’s campaign known to Canadian education workers and working people across all economic sectors, and to build a powerful rank-and-file movement to join the upsurge of workers’ struggles around the world against gruelling working conditions, the impossible cost-of-living, and mass infection with COVID-19.