Above photo: COPE candidate Sean Orr successfully secured the most votes in Vancouver’s 2025 by-election. COPE / Facebook.
Solidarity has always been key to workers’ struggles.
And even in today’s era of rising fascism and anti-worker rhetoric, it remains a powerful force for change.
They say that if we fail to learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat it. Recent events in my hometown of Vancouver and across North America call this warning to mind today.
On April 5 in Vancouver, a municipal special election saw two candidates from the more or less left end of the political spectrum, Sean Orr of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and Lucy Maloney of the NDP-adjacent One City party, elected to city council, a result that represents a stern voters’ rebuke to the developer-friendly regime of Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC party.
This is, broadly speaking, good news for workers and their allies in Vancouver, but a closer look suggests the results also imply some hard questions about the uses and misuses of labour solidarity.
First of all, it is notable that the Vancouver and District Labour Council (VDLC for short – an umbrella group of CLC affiliated unions in BC’s Lower Mainland) endorsed only one of the two progressive candidates who won. Instead of endorsing COPE’s Sean Orr, the VDLC endorsed Green Party candidate Annette Reilly, who only managed to rack up just over 15,000 votes, compared to Sean Orr’s first place 34,448 and the 33,732 votes won by Maloney.
Some observers will wonder if the VDLC endorsement of a Green candidate over the COPE candidate reflected nervousness about Orr’s history of involvement with Vote Socialist and Democratic Socialists of Vancouver or left over rancor stemming from earlier conflicts about election strategy between COPE and the VDLC. In any event, it left the VDLC, an important voice for BC workers, only half correct in its endorsements.
While most observers would see a vote for a Green candidate as less harmful than a vote for Sim’s ‘Always Befriend the Capitalists’ party, the class politics of the Green Party remain murky, and no one will be tempted to see the local Greens as reds. In balance, the VDLC decision to endorse Reily when a more genuinely pro-worker candidate like COPE’s Orr was available was unfortunate.
A union voice that endorsed both the progressive winners in the Vancouver byelection was heard from UniteHere, Local 40, which urged the election of both Orr and Maloney.
In addition to getting points for electoral prescience, Local 40 has, more importantly, racked up several impressive bargaining victories in the Vancouver area recently, illustrating the importance of solidarity.
In a November 21, 2024 press release, UniteHere Local 40 said that its members at Hyatt Regency, Westin Bayshore, and Pinnacle Waterfront will enjoy a cumulative raise of 34 per cent by 2027. Under the new agreement, a room attendant will earn nearly $32.50 per hour on January 1 and will make over $37 per hour in 2027. The improved wages won by militant struggle of a workforce that is typically female and brown compare favorably with this year’s calculated Living Family Wage minimum of $27.05 for this year.
The hotel workers followed up this impressive win by resolving a strike that ran for almost four years (the longest worker strike in Canadian history) and pitted the scrappy local against international hotel giant Radisson.
This victory was won by the tough, ongoing solidarity of Local 40 members and by support from community members, both within and without the labour movement.
The gains won are considerable. According to a statement from Local 40:
- “All former Pacific Gateway workers terminated during the pandemic have the right to return based on seniority; right of recall extends for 36 months;
- Highest hotel wages in Vancouver Airport/Richmond market; returning room attendants will earn up to $28.25/hour; returning cooks will earn up to $32.50/hour;
- No rollbacks on wages, benefits and working conditions. Contract gains include medical benefit improvements with lower eligibility requirements; new personal days; and sick days that may be carried over, and other benefits;
- The agreement adopts industry leading standards such as daily room cleaning to ensure high sanitation standards for guests and safer workloads, as well as new gratuity and transparency protections for tipped workers;
- and unlimited recall protections in the event of a pandemic, emergency or renovations, and other job security protections, including expedited arbitration to address disputes arising out of return-to-work issues, and training for all returning staff.”
So, as the UniteHere experience shows, solidarity helps workers win and sustains long term struggles.
It has been one of the key themes of the workers’ movement since its inception and remains a core value. But we live in an era of aspirational fascism and anti-worker propaganda, most vividly seen in the DOGE and tariff politics of the Trump administration but squalidly present around the world, including here in Canada. And in such times, solidarity can wobble and fail.
One heart-rending example of that failure occurred recently when Sean Fain of the United Auto Workers issued a statement supporting Trump’s tariffs on Canadian and Mexican built vehicles sent to the US market.
This betrayal of auto workers in other countries by Fain, who actively supported Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in the last presidential election, illustrates the limits and pitfalls of business unionism, the class collaboration strategy also known as Gomperism.
By falling into this time-stained and unprincipled approach, Fain dishonors the history of his union and earns absolutely just criticism from workers within and without his union.
Fain ignores the lessons of history, which show repeatedly that when leadership of workers’ organizations try to “ride the tiger” by collaborating with business class governments, workers usually end up inside the tiger.