Bernadette Workers Union:

Organizing On-the-Job

Organizing to Save the Job

by x341916

First published in the Industrial Worker. Spanish translation of this article is available on the IWW’s Spanish language publication, Solidaridad.

OTTAWA, CA–I’m the lead external organizer for the Bernadette Workers Union (BWU), a workplace-based, IWW-affiliated “dual union” representing all non-management workers at Garderie Bernadette Child Care center (GBCCC) based on the campus of the University of Ottawa in the province of Ontario. The BWU emerged from a hot shop scenario in early 2021 (the wrongful termination of a co-worker) that pivoted to strategic organizing very quickly. As a dual union, the BWU is legally established as an independent trade union in the province of Ontario, with its own bylaws and governing documents, officers, meetings, elections, etc., which is affiliated to the IWW through a section of its bylaws as a job shop of the local general membership branch. All of the members of the BWU pay dues to the IWW individually, which is kept by the IWW body to which they are affiliated. Though a trade union within the meaning of the Labour Relations Act and related jurisprudence, the BWU does not itself collect or retain dues. 

The BWU has succeeded spectacularly under difficult circumstances to build their power on the job as a union, persisting through the resignations of two executive directors as well as the mass resignation of the past GBCCC Board of Directors in December 2021, the latter following on their establishment of trade union status and a very successful union election. I recently sat down with some of the BWU members, along with Fellow Worker Alex, an organizer with the Ottawa-Outaouais GMB who is supporting the campaign, to discuss where they’ve been and where they are going.

By way of background, GBCCC provides up to 49 child care spaces to families with programs from infants through to pre-schoolers. There are 16 permanent and temporary staff (15 of which are BWU members, plus one interim executive director who is seconded from the union), and five regular on-call supply workers. As with elsewhere, the early childhood educator (ECE) workforce at GBCCC is predominantly women of color. 

Currently, GBCCC receives in-kind funding in the form of free rent from the University, in return for prioritizing up to 80 percent of child care spaces for members of the university community. For about two years now, with both past and present boards of the center, the university has quietly maintained that it will not continue this arrangement once the existing building in which GBCCC is housed is demolished to make way for new student housing. 

The BWU, IWW, and the new pro-union board, however, are not going to go quietly and are pushing the university to recommit to GBCCC as a vital part of the university campus, along with a coalition that has been built with all of the other on-campus workplace unions, student associations, as well as community child care advocates (including the organization that is hosting our e-petition). The BWU and its partnered unions and other organizations are running a public campaign to save the child care center and are looking to meet with the university administration to negotiate a solution that will secure a future for these workers and on-campus families seeking child care.

Fellow Worker VJ, a member of the initial organizing and later executive committee of the BWU, tells a story that will be familiar to many workers. “The number one reason why we started the union is that we were not appreciated as workers. We were always putting in extra unpaid hours. The old manager would play favorites, almost like a high school kind of thing, except that we were all adults. There was a fair bit of nepotism. Every day was a struggle and we were not happy with the management.”

Fellow Worker KF, a member who joined the union mid-2021 after the union had started organizing, adds, “One of our colleagues was wrongfully terminated. They spent all kinds of money on lawyers to settle out and to fight the union. Money was also not properly managed. We fought like hell for two years against the (old) board.” 

One of the unique characteristics of this group of workers (including teachers and a cook) is the relatively longer-term job tenure at Bernadette. As noted by Fellow Worker VJ, “The average length of time that ECEs (early childhood educators) stay at work is about three years. Some of us have been here for 8, 10, 12, 18 years.” Fellow Worker KF further notes that “we are a diverse group of people … (w)e had a child who came from a family of new Canadians who did not speak English or French, and we had an ECE who was able to speak their language.”

The main vehicle by which the workers organized was through creating and building their workplace committee, and implementing their collective decisions in the workplace. The committee provided voice and vote to all BWU members in good standing, whose bylaws established them as a job shop of the local IWW GMB and to whom they remitted dues from the earliest days of their organizing. Members were signed up to the union one-by-one by the job delegate and invited to attend the next union meeting. 

As put by Fellow Worker VJ: “We are a small and tight group of people, and once we started talking together one on one, we learned that all of us were feeling the same. Many wanted to quit. After we joined the IWW, and after a few of us did the Organizer Training 101, we rapidly built our committee. We identified what kinds of things we have in common and built unity with all the workers around those things.”

One early tactic that built power on the job was as follows. A staff representative position for the board that previously had been filled as decided by the then executive director was voted on in an all-non-management staff meeting organized by the BWU, at which the BWU chair was nominated and acclaimed as the staff rep. The workers called their own “captive meeting” with the executive director in order to inform them that this was their selected representative, per GBCCC’s own bylaws, and they subsequently attended the meetings as the staff representative to the board meetings. In this role, the staff representative and BWU secretary brought forward the perspective of the workers directly, and provided a communications channel that previously had been more bottlenecked. Through this channel, the union was able to put forward its perspective, expectations and demands to the employer directly.

Another one of the ways that the workers attempted to assert greater job control was through drafting, finalizing and approving policies by the committee as a whole once it had the large majority of the workplace on board. While at first members of the then-board were receptive to meeting and considering these policies, the director and the lawyer provided advice to the board to not respond to the union as they had been doing. The BWU, perhaps by virtue of its association with the IWW or perhaps because it wasn’t a certified union, was called an “illegitimate union” by the employer’s lawyer. This was used as a pretext for not negotiating or even responding to the union on its workplace demands. 

Nonetheless, the employer continued to provide at least the appearance of consultation with the workers. Reality proved to be somewhat different. Following a request from the employer for staff input, the workers voted against hiring a new executive director by a motion at a non-management staff meeting organized by the new staff representative (who had, as previously noted, also been previously elected as the BWU secretary). The hiring proceeded in spite of the objection of a large majority of the workers. Fellow Worker KF observed that “it was a lazy effort to get applicants, and she wasn’t competent.” In terms of management performance, Fellow Worker VJ added that “it cost us more money than what she was being paid, the mistakes that were being made. For example, non-collection of delinquent fees from parents, not applying for available funding, and things like that.” Added KF: “She would rearrange things in the various rooms, even though these were our rooms in which we did our jobs.” In the end, noted VJ, “almost every worker signed a letter demanding that she resign.” This and related workplace pressure tactics eventually secured the desired outcome, while the board itself was reluctant to do anything, perhaps due to having to deal with the fallout of their abrupt termination of the previous executive director and other staff previously to that.

The pressure of an uncertain future with the University of Ottawa, which had been looking to end its relationship with GBCCC, combined with now having to deal with an insurgent union, led to a captive meeting held with all GBCCC employees in late October 2021 with the GBCCC board and executive director, as well as the executive director of Andrew Fleck Children’s Services, a large local child care provider with a bloated management structure that has been gradually taking over independent non-profit child care centers in Ottawa over many years. At this meeting, workers were informed that the only way that they would be able to keep their jobs and the center could be saved would be through acquisition by Andrew Fleck, and that this was the preferred scenario being put forward by the board, the university and the municipal government (which also provides funding to licensed non-profit child care centers). The workers were informed that they would no longer be able to keep their union or their seniority upon amalgamation — a statement which was both incorrect in terms of labor law as well as a likely unfair labor practice complaint in its own right. Workers spoke out against the proposal and came out even more unified, with many saying that they would sooner quit than work under Andrew Fleck’s management.

Going into Fall 2021, the employer was becoming ever more intractable in refusing to deal or communicate with the union. The membership of BWU pushed to file for certification, which was done as an independent trade union, in order to establish very clearly to the employer that the union represented a majority of the workers. When the employer’s lawyer proposed that the “deemed bargaining unit” for whom the vote would be conducted be broadened to include the 5-7 temporary workers – “padding the unit” being a typical tactic used by employers that want to reduce the chance of either a representation vote or a majority in a union election, the BWU accepted the employer’s proposal. (Unbeknownst to the employer, the union was already organizing the temporary staff.) This employer tactic backfired spectacularly when the BWU held a certification vote for a mutually agreed-upon bargaining unit of just under 20 that were all IWW red card holders and BWU members. The count was 100 percent Yes votes from all of the eligible permanent and temporary workforce, once the ballot box was unsealed in December 2022, following the BWU successfully establishing its trade union status before the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB).

Following the certification vote and related union and public pressure campaign, the board also came under intense criticism from parents at the GBCCC’s annual general meeting in December 2021. The BWU organized around this meeting and as a result a new, pro-union board was elected following the mass resignation of the 2021 board.*

In spite of the union’s wholesale victory in the shop, the future for these members is not and has not been for some time all roses. Bread is also a concern, in that these workers have not had a raise in four years and inflation is now running at seven percent this year. With the change in management, the books were also opened up to the union, and we conducted a fiscal and operational analysis to determine how to transition to a future worker cooperative for the workers at the center – which, along with matching or exceeding the best compensation practices for these employees in the child care sector in Ottawa, remains the central goal of the campaign. To get from here to there will be challenging. For quite some time, the auditor’s annual report on the books of the GBCCC have indicated that there has been ongoing concern about the GBCCC’s viability. The amount of funds spent on lawyers fees alone contributed to a financially precarious situation going into 2022, as did a number of poor management practices. Yet, under the management of seconded BWU members, the center’s operational performance has significantly improved in 2022, in spite of the ongoing challenges created by the uncertain future. Currently the union is looking to have more rotation of bargaining unit members into the interim executive director position, in preparation for future self-management.

While discussions continue outside of the labor relations framework on multiple matters, including compensation and the movement to a pay grid, formal collective bargaining is being put on hold while both the BWU and the new 2022 board of GBCCC work together to secure its future as an on-campus childcare center. (As long as there is a transition to a new governance model as a worker cooperative while existing interim management practices are pro-worker and pro-union with appropriate policies negotiated more informally with the union, it is unlikely that formal collective bargaining will ever be initiated, let alone a first collective agreement signed, as it will prove to be unnecessary.) The BWU has given a lead in building an on-campus coalition beginning in July, which has been meeting weekly and coordinating a pressure campaign against the university. This coalition, in which BWU is a continuous and active participant, now includes all of the campus-based unions for academic and support staff, as well as the two student unions, and meets on a weekly basis to coordinate its work. Most recently, there is a petition that was launched in October as well as information pickets planned for mid-November. 

Fellow Worker Alex, a member of the Ottawa-Outaouais GMB who has been working with the campaign since September 2022 observes that “me and my partner hope to send our kid to Bernadette in a few years. We think that it’s ridiculous that the university would not support a worker-run child care center on campus. Being an external organizer on the campaign has been really interesting. The external coalition initiated by the BWU and the campus inter-local has been working well. Clearly these workers are a tight group, with a supportive broader community, and have built up their organization democratically.”

We ask at this juncture for all Fellow Workers to sign and distribute the e-petition and to also send a letter to the university president calling on the university administration to deal fairly with the BWU and GBCCC and our large and growing on- and off-campus coalition who also have a stake in the outcome of this struggle. The BWU and GBCCC board will be sending out a letter prepared by the BWU to the university president and board of governors shortly with the most basic of requests: information and a meeting. We are hoping that signatures on the petition and your own letters of support will help to leverage this outcome. Please don’t hesitate to share your IWW and any other union affiliations!

The BWU will endeavor to keep our fellow workers in the union informed of further developments in the pages of the Industrial Worker. Stay tuned!

-John Hollingsworth, x341916

Nous demandons à tous les camarades de signer et de distribuer la pétition électronique et d’envoyer également une lettre au président de l’université pour demander à l’administration de l’université de traiter équitablement le BWU et la GBCCC ainsi que les membres de notre coalition qui a également un intérêt dans l’issue de cette lutte. Le conseil d’administration de le BWU et de la GBCCC enverra sous peu une lettre préparée par l’BWU au président de l’université et au conseil d’administration avec les demandes les plus élémentaires : des informations et une réunion. Nous espérons que les signatures de la pétition et vos propres lettres de soutien aideront à obtenir ce résultat. N’hésitez pas à nous faire part de vos affiliations à IWW et à tout autre syndicat !

Le BWU s’efforcera de tenir nos camarades informés de l’évolution de la situation dans les pages de l’Industrial Worker. Restez à l’écoute !

*Much of this story is reported elsewhere, including in a local social justice magazine and the university student press, as well as previously in the Industrial Worker, which was also picked up on reddit r/ottawa. Solidarity letters sent in support of the BWU were sent by groups including the full-time professors’ union at the University of Ottawa as well as a local child care advocacy group. Members in Canada can also read the following threads on this topic on Wobforum, which includes all the relevant union documents as well as the OLRB decisions: Decision of the Ontario Labour Relations Board on Trade Union Status of Bernadette Workers Union and Fire Your Boss, Part 2.

Book Review: A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is the intensification of the influence and dominance of capital; it seeks to transfer power in the workplace from the forces of labour to the holders of capital, trying to strengthen, and restore the power of economic elites. As David Harvey notes: neoliberalism and the neoliberal state have been able to reverse the various political and economic gains made under welfare state policies and institutions. Progressively, the neoliberal regimes will erode institutions of political democracy since “the freedom of the masses would be restricted in favour of the freedom of the few“. Nicos Poulantzas believed that neoliberals do not support the return to laissez-faire capitalism, since the state continues to play a major role in the reproduction of capital. What they want to achieve is the collapse of welfare state which was the most important people’s victory in the 20th century.

The first historical instance of this “revolution from above“, according to Harvey, is Pinochet’s Chile. The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with CIA involvement and US government officials’ support. As Henry Kissinger remarked: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” The coup was followed by a massive neoliberalism of the state. Chilean economy was deregulated and privatized including the breakdown of state-controlled pension systems, state industries, and state banks. Even though Inflation was reduced and GDP growth spiked, massive inequalities emerged.

Noam Chomsky supports that the crucial principle of neoliberalism is the undermining mechanisms of social solidarity, mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy. As aforementioned, in the 1970s, welfare state, an achievement of the working class in the post war world, was becoming the target of economic elites, who were trying to re-establish the conditions of capital accumulation and to restore their power. According to Harvey, this revolution from above required a change in the political culture and social landscape that would spawn a widespread support for the new political project. Individual rights, property rights, a culture of individualism and consumerism arose first in Thatcher’s UK. Thatcher success in the, as Harvey notes “construction of consent“, turned her aphorism “there is no society, only individuals” into a reality.

His book is one of the best efforts for unmasking the rhetoric of neoliberalism and trying to spawn criticism against this barbarism. Harvey hopes that social movements will form a “broad-based oppositional program” that would gain political support and move society toward a social and economic change.

Book Review: Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian

Let’s mention some facts:

In 1598 Juan de Onate and his troops killed over eight hundred Acoma in what is now New Mexico. By 1630 the Puritan settlers were launching attacks against the Pequot tribe in 1637, massacring six to seven hundred men, women and children.

For two hundred years, merciless wars frequently broke out throughout North America. In 1832 one hundred and fifty Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox tribe) in Wisconsin were killed. In 1863 there was the Bear River massacre where two hundred and fifty Shoshoni were killed. In 1864 there was the Sand Creek massacre and in 1890 the infamous Wounded Knee, where over two hundred Lakota were slaughtered.

Michael Parenti, in his book Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies, describes the sobering devastation: “Estimates of the native population of America prior to the European conquest vary from 12 million to 18 million… but after four centuries of warfare, massacre, disease and dispossession, the original population was reduced by over 90 percent…whole tribes were completely exterminated or whittled down to scattered numbers.”

Why did this unmatched and largely unrecognized holocaust happen? Thomas King is clear: “Native history in North America as writ has never really been about Native people. It’s about Whites and their needs and desires… the Lakota didn’t want Europeans in the Black Hill, but Whites wanted the gold that was there. The Cherokee didn’t want to move from Georgia to Oklahoma, but Whites wanted the land. The Cree of Quebec weren’t at all keen on vacating their homes to make way for the Great Whale project, but there’s excellent money in hydroelectric power”.

Native people were in the way of what the Whites coveted, and so the Whites needed them to disappear. In other words, the native peoples were slaughtered with merciless deliberation so that their land might be taken for the use of Whites.

Colonialism and its consequences in the lives of North America’s native peoples is the core of this astonishing book. Policies, treaties, agreements, government’s decisions and tribal reactions comprise the rest. The Inconvenient Indian is a book we all must read.  

1918: Raid and Internment

By S. Holyck Hunchuck and Peter Moore, as published in the Industrial Worker

On May Day 1918, 18 men identified by the local newspaper Ottawa Citizen as members of the “notorious IWW” were arrested during a meeting at 268 Rochester Street, meeting hall of Nove zhyttia, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party of Canada.

The arrested men included travelling lumberjack and brewer Petro Haideychuk, brewer Nicholas Mucciy, shoemaker Paul Shawliak, labourer Yuri Skypnychuk, and Toronto-based IWW organizer Stefan Waskan. Their ages ranged from 18 to 53.

The IWW in Ottawa agitated against child labour, Canada’s war-time ally the Russian Czar and the war, demanded bread or work in street demonstrations, and advocated the creation of public works programs and the end of exploitative immigration policies in the predominantly francophone and anglophone Canadian capital.

The arrests came as part of systematic surveillance and harassment of radicals across Canada by federal and local authorities during the First World War (1914-1918). Canada passed Orders-in-Council that targeted Enemy Aliens, especially those from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This Empire included a fifth of today’s Ukraine.

The Orders were in effect decrees that bypassed Canada’s elected officials, granting police extraordinary powers of seizure, destruction of property, arrest, detention, forced relocation, internment and deportation. The government interned about 8,000 people during World War One, two-thirds of whom were Ukrainian immigrants, a minority in Canada.

During the raid, police confiscated the branch’s library, files, musical instruments, theatrical costumes and even sheet music, which probably were destroyed. The men arrested, all immigrants, were sent to an internment camp in Kapuskasing in northern Ontario. It was a remote forced labour camp with the worst reputation among the 24 camps. Tasks included draining swamps, building roads, and logging in the Canadian winter. Private and government corporations enlisted this slave labour for their own profit.

“(Internment) was easy in Ottawa, pretty bloody hard in Kapuskasing,” said Canadian historian Desmond Morton.

Stefan Waskan was the only man arrested who escaped the internment camp, because he was a Canadian citizen and British subject. Orders-in-Council had stripped immigrants naturalized after 1902 of their citizenship, making them vulnerable to harassment, deportation, and internment.

On September 24, 1918, months after the Ottawa raid, the Canadian government banned the Industrial Workers of the World. Thirteen other primarily ethnic radical organizations were made illegal. Maximum sentence for IWW membership or affiliation with banned organizations was five years.

World War One ended on November 11, 1918, but the Kapuskasing prisoners were held into October 2, 1919. Petro Haideichuk, Nicholas Mucciy, Paul Shawliak, and Yuri Skypnychuk returned to Ottawa and began to organize in 1920 a branch of the Ukrainian Labour Temple Association, which affiliated with the Communist Party of Canada in 1924.

There is no record of what happened to the other thirteen Kapuskasing survivors or whether the IWW was revived in Ottawa. Today’s Ottawa-Outaouais General Membership Branch was chartered in November 15, 1993.

SOURCES: Articles typed in full or in part from Le Droit, Ottawa Journal, Ottawa Evening Journal, and the Ottawa Citizen. Please read these articles with a grain of salt – with World War I hysteria, it is possible these “IWWs” were never members.

Interview: The IWW and the Ottawa Panhandlers Union

Disclaimer – The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the IWW.  The image pictured to the right did not appear in the original article, we have added it here to provide a visual perspective. This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines.

By Dave – originally posted to anarkismo.net, January 27, 2008

(Dave interviewed Ottawa anarchist Andrew Nellis for Linchpin. Andrew is an organizer with the Ottawa Panhandlers Union.)

Q. What is the Ottawa Panhandlers Union and how was it started?

A. The Ottawa Panhandlers Union is a shop of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It’s a real union. What we do is run by the panhandlers themselves. The IWW has one paid member for the entire union. It’s entirely member run. The idea is to empower people on the street to fight for themselves.

Ideally despite coming in as an outside organizer I’ll be able to step out of the picture once the organization is up and running and there’s a structure in place to ensure that the organization continues. I was on the street myself. I’m not on the street now. So I do know something about the milieu in which I’m working.

Ideally it [the Panhandlers Union] should be run by people who are actually on the street but in practice we find that our most valuable members are those who have just come off the street or are in the process of getting off the streets. Their lives are somewhat less chaotic than people who are actually on the street although we do have some [key] people who are hardcore street. It always impresses me. I’m so proud of all of these people. For example, the guy who writes our press releases has to leave the room every 15 minutes or so to take a sip of hand sanitizer As you may be aware people who are heavily addicted to alcohol stand a one in three chance of death if they go through withdrawal so they have to drink alcohol continuously just to survive The fact that someone who is dealing with this many crises in his own life is capable of not only functioning but contributing something to the welfare of others around him. It’s just really humbling for me to work with someone like that considering the many sacrifices that he’s got to be making in his own life are so much larger than anything I’m expected to give.

Q Could you give some examples of some of the problems that are faced by panhandlers and homeless people in Ottawa that the Panhandlers Union was formed to help resist.

A I can tell you that although things were bad before the new police chief, they’ve become infinitely worse since. The new police chief has the “broken windows” philosophy. He believes that you can stop big crimes by stopping little crimes. He’s ordered his police officers to stop issuing tickets and begin arresting panhandlers. It costs $185 a day to keep someone in jail and they’re more than willing to pay that to keep panhandlers off the street than providing supported housing is infinitely cheaper they prefer using enforcement for something it was never designed to do.
We were forced to start a Copwatch program because the police are openly and blatantly breaking the law. We have had many cases where its been reported to us that the police have stolen the panhandlers’ money, roughed them up, and told them not to come back or they’d be beaten. One night I had to start guard under the bridge by the Rideau Centre because the street kids there had been informed by a police officer that if they were there when he came back he was going to – and I quote – “boot-fuck” them. So I went there with a recorder and I warned the police that I’d be there all night with my recorder. This is the kind of stuff that we do.

We do a lot of advocacy work. We have one member who is schizophrenic and he was picked up in an ambulance and he was [held] involuntarily at the Montfort Hospital in their psychiatric wing. And he requested our assistance in getting his doctors to agree to let him go to school since he has a law degree from Russia and he’s in the process of updating his credentials here in Canada. His doctors were concerned about letting him go by himself to his classes so we went there to tell them that we’d have a person willing to go with him to the classes if necessary to assure them that he wouldn’t be a danger to himself or others. What was particularly gratifying for me was that while the doctors did not want to talk to us, it took us several hours to buttonhole the doctor, once he heard the name Industrial Workers of the World, he was at great pains to assure us that that they very sensitive to his cultural and religious needs, and that they were not discriminating against him. When I tried to get a word in edgewise to assure him we were not there to complain about his treatment but to make sure that he was able to attend his classes.

This is the kind of work that we do. A lot of it is in the background. A lot of people think that because our most visible efforts revolve around things like marching in the street, or egging the BIA that this is [all of] what we do. In fact 99% of what we do is just quiet support work for the streets that particularly teaches people where to go, how to wend their way through the paperwork of police complaints, to make sure they turn in their tickets [under the Safe Streets Act] to the Ticket Defense Program and see benefits of what standing together can do.

We have one member right now who is an organizer with the IWW. He came to us because he had been beaten up by Rideau Centre security. Immediately after getting out of the hospital, he contacted us. We got our video cameras and documented his injuries, I got him in contact with a lawyer, Yavar Hamid. As a result, we sued the Rideau Centre in superior court for $70,000. The Rideau Centre settled.

Q. How is the Panhandlers Union structured internally?

A. The IWW is not an anarchist organization. Our constitution actually forbids us as members from promoting and political or anti- political party. The organization itself runs in an anarchist manner. We have no hierarchy. At meetings everybody takes turns, everybody is expected to be either the chair or recording secretary and at every meeting it changes so that everybody gets to see and develop the skills necessary for running a meeting. It’s very important for the continuation of the kinds of traditions that we are trying to build for the organization.

For many people this the first time they’ve ever had any responsibility in a social sense, and its very gratifying to see someone who started out at the beginning of a meeting very nervous and unsure of themselves actually telling someone like me to shut up and let other people talk.

Q. Earlier [before the interview] we were talking about the backlash that has been felt by the Panhandlers Union and yourself. Could tell me a little about that?

A. We’ve experienced some amount of backlash from the police towards the organization. It’s become particularly bad lately since we’ve started the Copwatch program. It started in earnest perhaps a year ago when someone logging in from the Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton [IP address] vandalized the Panhandlers Union Wikipedia article saying that “Mr. Nellis,” that is myself, “really, really, really needs to get a life” and saying that the members of this union are a “parasitical blight on the city of Ottawa.” These changes were edited back fairly quickly but it was only discovered as a result of the release of the Wiki Scanner tool. The official response from City Hall was “No Comment.” I’ve subsequently discovered that the police use the same system that City Hall do. Whoever made these changes might well have been within the police station as well as inside City Hall.

Since then there have been posters put up on Ottawa city streets saying things like “Don’t feed the human pigeons” This is in response to Mayor Larry O’Brien’s statement in which he compared panhandlers to pigeons stating that if you don’t feed them they’ll go away. During the election campaign he [O’Brien] compared panhandlers to seagulls at the Carp Dump saying that in order to keep the seagulls away, occasionally you have to shoot one.

The second set of posters that went up, we believe by the same people, featured myself with a gun in my mouth in a circle with a line through it saying “Panhandlers follow your leader” with [a picture of] the mayor standing in the background grinning. I can only take this as a death threat.

We’ve recently had the Panhandlers Union [Wikipedia] articles deleted by a false flag campaign launched by someone who also we believe hijacked my internet account. Someone contacted Sympatico, my ISP, identified themselves as me and asked for my password. We know that that the first time this did not work because Sympatico Security contacted me to tell me my password which I informed at the time them that it was not me [requesting the information]. We put a special password on my account which was supposed to prevent anything like this from happening and which would require the person to give a password to identify themselves as me if they called. Apparently this did not work because within a couple of weeks someone had hijacked my e-mail, deleted a week worth of personal e-mail, vandalized my blog, attacked an anarchist IRC channel I founded and helped facilitate, and generally made my life very miserable on the internet. Whoever did this used servers they had hijacked in Pakistan and Hong Kong.

The Wikipedia campaign to delete the Panhandlers Union article – someone identified themselves in the discussion as a member of the Panhandlers Union, gave details of his arrest records, the fact that he was Hepatitis C positive, details that only the police would know about this man. We know it was not the panhandler himself who posted this because he was at the time homeless. And we know that whoever posted this was [also] using servers in Pakistan and Hong Kong. We have reason to believe it was the same person [who hacked Andrew’s internet account] who posted these messages. And in these messages he ranted about fascists and police and said that he had voted numerous times to keep the article. This gave Wikipedia administrators the excuse to delete the article out of hand by ignoring all calls to keep it. The Wikipedia article is currently deleted and no record of it ever having existed remains including the evidence that the City of Ottawa or the police had vandalized it.

Q. Do you think that the Panhandlers Union in Ottawa is a model that could be applied to other cities? Has there been interest in trying to develop Panhandlers Unions in other cities?

A. Yes. In fact I’ve been in a number of presentations on street organizing. It’s a very different milieu from what most organizers are used to. The street has its own rules. It’s stylized and ritualized not all that different than lets say a medieval Chinese court. It’s a very different place.

When you’re dealing with people as oppressed as people on the street are, it’s extremely important not to come across as an authority figure. Often the temptation is there to present yourself as leader and this must be resisted at all costs because the street will try to turn a person into a personality and it will become a cult of personality in which the personality is more important than the movement. While there can be short term results, eventually the organization falls apart when this person leaves.

The street is extremely hierarchical. There is usually a dominant alpha male. It’s very patriarchal. Often it’s racist and homophobic. I should add that it’s probably no more so than any other sector of society but because people live much closer to the bone there’s not as much lying about it. People are very straightforward about their prejudices.

So because of all these things which exist on the street, it’s important that the organizer establish from the very beginning that its about the organizational structure and that its not about the individual. If it’s about the individual, the structure is never going to survive. The reason to have an organizer when one is organizing on the street is to make sure that there is a structure.

The entire reason [many] people are on the street is that they cannot live in a highly structured scenario. There is nothing wrong with this but it is very difficult to keep an organization going when there is no structure to it. In order to ensure that it survives it’s necessary to create a tradition. And this takes many, many years. There is no short way to do this. And the way you do this is by giving people successes, by showing them that what you’re doing works. On the street people don’t have enough resources to take risks so they tend to do what works for them. If it’s already working they are loathe to change it. In a very real sense they are very conservative. In order to break through this it is necessary to give them successes and show them that working together is better than working by themselves. The only way to do that is by slowly building people’s trust and to show them that if they work together there is an advantage to them personally.

Q. Could you tell me a about your own politics and how you became an anarchist.

A. I identify as an anarcho-syndicalist and I am a member of the IWW. I believe that the union structure provides a very viable means of building resistance to the current system. Anarcho-syndicalism I believe is important because it will not only allow us to build an army within capitalism itself while continuing to function but will allow us to create a structure which will continue to exist when capitalism will have been destroyed.

A lot of the problem we face is that there’s always a sense of immediacy. We’re always looking at the next battle and never at the longer strategic plan. And we see the results of that in what’s happened thus far in anarchist movements. For example in Spain and the Ukraine where people were not careful about who they chose as allies and were crushed as a result. Anarchists have a history of winning on the battlefield and losing in the halls of power. I think its very important that we develop long-term strategic plans for dealing with our success rather than planning for our failures.

Q. What do you see as some of the strengths and weaknesses of anarchist organizing in Ottawa?

A. It’s interesting. I often get the feeling from anarchists that they really don’t believe that anarchism works. It’s a strange thing to say but often people seem to feel that anarchism is something you need to weave life into, that it requires extra effort to put a slather of anarchism across whatever structure it is that they create but it gives me a feeling that people don’t have faith that anarchism itself works. It’s not a chore that you need to apply to whatever it is you’re actually doing. Anarchism works. I’ve seen it in action. I’ve seen people who are oppressed and beaten down and frightened empowered by what anarchism has done for them. I’ve seen people on the street who’ve literally been beaten down. We have a man who was beaten so badly be Rideau Centre security that he nearly lost the use of his eye and yet through solidarity through what he saw anarchism was able to do for him he is now today an anarchist organizer himself. And its gratifying to see that he’s taken control of his life. He has a good paying job. He has a permanent home. And he’s using these advantages now to teach other people the value of anarchist organizing. These techniques don’t need to be grudgingly applied. They need to be lovingly embraced. They work. If you actually use them they work. It is such a thrill the first time you see it actually working, not just in theory but in practice. It’s easy to see why those original anarchists were so passionate why they continued to work into their eighties and nineties why they sang on the gallows, because anarchism is a revolutionary idea in every sense of the word. It gives a person such joy to see that it is capable of empowering people to take control of their own lives.

Abbie Hoffman said that a revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power and that’s perfectly true and valid but the opposite is also true. A revolution in the distribution of power will be meaningless unless there’s also a revolution in consciousness, It starts inside and continues on into the world outside of us.