Recommendation 1: Defending the Right to Strike, Empowering Workers Everywhere

Our progress as workers is dependent on free and fair collective bargaining, which includes the right to strike. Throughout history, working people in Canada have fought for and won the right to strike. Through strike action, workers have collectively won improvements to their working conditions, fought for historical and generational gains and secured a fairer share of the profits they generate from their work. Despite this fact, some Unifor members in sectors such as health care know all too well the challenges of bargaining in a context where the right to strike is severely restricted or entirely prohibited.

The use of scab labour by employers during labour disputes undermines the right to strike, undermines our right to fair and free collective bargaining and to freedom of association. It is union busting. This is why our union has been fighting for many years for anti-scab legislation in every jurisdiction of the country. In 2024, thanks to sustained efforts by our union and the broader labour movement, Canada’s first federal anti-scab legislation was adopted.

We must celebrate this historical achievement. It was only possible because of the countless workers who stood on picket lines while their employers blatantly employed replacement workers to do their jobs. It was made possible because workers and their unions never stopped fighting, never stopped organizing.

But this is no time for complacency. Even with new powers granted to us by the House of Commons, corporations are retaliating. They are working together to carefully target workers’ rights, to promote anti-worker laws and measures, to undermine collective bargaining, and to eliminate our constitutionally-protected right to collectively withdraw our labour. Our right to strike cannot be taken for granted.

In the face of growing corporate power, and at a time when workers and their families face increasing economic headwinds, collective bargaining and the right to strike must be strengthened, not undermined.

As Unifor National President, I recommend that Unifor:

• Pursue the fight for anti-scab legislation in every Canadian jurisdiction so that it becomes a standard for fair and equitable labour relations across the country;
• Demand that political parties in every jurisdiction recognize and pledge to support the right to strike;
• Oppose measures to impose compulsory interest arbitration and fight to expand the right to strike by challenging illegitimate designations of “essential” work, wherever possible; and
• Actively support actions by global union federations in their legal defence of the right to strike enshrined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87).