On March 21, we stand in solidarity with all those marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The day commemorates the events in Sharpeville, South Africa in 1960, when 69 people were killed by police during a peaceful protest against the pass laws of the apartheid state.
We carry that memory with us in our own union’s fight against the scourge of racism, which still permeates too much of our communities, workplaces and even the labour movement.
Yet unions have long recognized that racial justice is inseparable from workers’ rights. The work of CUPE Ontario focuses unwaveringly on what we must do together to counteract the racism that divides the working class and weakens our collective power to fight for dignity and justice for all.
It’s our duty as trade unionists to call out racism as and where we find it. One of its main dangers lies in its pervasiveness: we don’t always recognize racism when it is right in front of us. Racism is, for example, inherent in immigration policies, which overtly proclaim whose lives our governments value. Whether it’s ICE raids in the US that target racialized people regardless of their status, or Canada’s own immigration practices, which welcomed Ukrainian refugees but created bureaucratic barriers and delays for Palestinians fleeing genocide.
Tragically, we are also acculturated to accept killing of people in the Middle East, Soudan, Latin America and elsewhere in the global south as “necessary,” while the same dehumanization allows Canada’s prime minister to announce $900 million for drone research funded out of the Defence Industrial Strategy. Our country is openly prioritizing military spending – which funnels public funds to those who deal in death and destruction – over public services like hospitals, education and housing. Yet public services are the great equalizers, delivering some of the greatest benefits to Indigenous, Black and racialized people. And it is those benefits that bring true prosperity and security.
Our collective ability and success in eliminating racism lies in our solidarity, and our solidarity must be unapologetically anti-racist. We do not separate workplace justice from racial justice, and our work begins by identifying the obstacles to achieving it. Members can take CUPE Ontario’s guide Recognize and Resist White Supremacy as a starting point; use CUPE’s guide to bargain employment equity language; and take action with its guide about temporary foreign workers in our union.
Above all, we urge CUPE Ontario members and locals to engage with CUPE Ontario’s Anti-Racism Organizational Action Plan, or AROAP.
AROAP challenges racist narratives, organizes against racist policies, and asks that we live up to the promise of eliminating racial discrimination in practice, not just in principle. In recent years, the WILD (Women in Leadership Development) program has been a key part of this plan and we believe its success will be felt for generations to come.
AROAP is also tackling racism in our union on another front. In the coming months, members of CUPE Ontario Racial Justice committee will reach out to CUPE locals across the province, seeking to work with them and using local tools and practices to ensure representative participation, build stronger locals, deepen solidarity and increase union power.
We urge CUPE Ontario members and locals to re-commit to these goals on this International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
