Organized Labour Must Be Ready for the Future of Strike Actions
The right to strike has never been granted freely, it has always been fought for. It was won by workers who stood together despite threat, intimidation, and punishment, and who refused to accept that economic power should rest exclusively in the hands of employers and governments. In Ontario, and across Canada, that right faces renewed and escalating pressure. Governments that once feared the political cost of interfering in strikes now treat strike suppression as routine governance. Whether through emergency legislation, the expanding use of the notwithstanding clause, or the empowered role of the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), the state is increasingly prepared to strip workers of one of the few tools that allows them to bargain with real leverage and dignity.
If workers do not defend the right to strike in practice, governments will erode it in law. That means organized labour must think beyond the courtroom and the lobbyist’s reception. We are entering a period that will require coordinated worker power across sectors and across the country, because the only counterweight to political authority used against working people is mass collective action. Province wide and nationwide general strikes cannot remain historical reference points or hypothetical threats, they are becoming necessary instruments of democratic defence.
At the federal level, Regulation 107 under the CIRB has fundamentally altered the terrain. In previous decades, when the federal government wanted to end a strike in a regulated sector, it needed to introduce back to work legislation. As flawed as that process was, it forced transparency. It created debate in Parliament, coverage in the media, and public space for workers to articulate the issues that had driven them to withdraw their labour. It often revealed employer behaviour and made governments justify their interference.
Regulation 107 replaces that public process with administrative coercion. It allows the CIRB to force workers back without the political inconvenience of legislation or debate. This shifts strikebreaking from the public sphere to a closed regulatory one. It muffles the voices of workers, eliminates opportunities for solidarity to build, and hides the political nature of strike interference behind procedural language. It does not simply end strikes, it obscures them.
At the provincial level, the threat is even more stark. The notwithstanding clause, once seen as a rare constitutional exception, is now being wielded as a standard tool to pre-empt labour rights. Ontario and Alberta’s use of it against education workers showed how quickly a government is willing to suspend Charter protections when workers are prepared to fight. It signalled that the legal right to strike is being treated not as a fundamental democratic principle but as a privilege the government may revoke when it becomes inconvenient to its political plans.
If fundamental labour rights can be discarded with a signature, then we cannot rely on legal frameworks to protect us. Rights are only real when workers are prepared to defend them together.
Recent struggles remind us that government power is not absolute. Ontario education workers made that clear when they refused to quietly accept legislated contracts and potential constitutional overrides. Their courage and clarity galvanized the broader labour movement, and solidarity arrived quickly and decisively. Within days, the government reversed course. It was not the courts that forced a retreat, it was workers prepared to act.
Likewise, Air Canada flight attendants showed that refusing to yield immediately to strikebreaking orders can shift public understanding. Their stand, even under pressure from the CIRB, made headlines, exposed unpaid labour and unfair scheduling practices in the airline industry, and generated sympathy from passengers and communities. These actions demonstrate that political courage in the workplace can create space for broader solidarity and expose the injustice of state intervention.
A back to work order is not the end of the story unless we let it be.
In the labour movement, we have long said that an injury to one is an injury to all. Too often, this sentiment has been interpreted narrowly, confined to health and safety issues or moral generalities. But when governments legislate workers back or pre-empt their right to strike, they are not just harming a single local or a single union. They are weakening every worker’s ability to bargain in the future. The injury is collective, therefore the response must be collective.
Solidarity cannot be symbolic or delayed. It must be fast, coordinated, and escalatory. It must treat every attack on a strike as a structural threat to the entire labour movement. We must develop shared protocols, shared timelines, and shared resolve. The faster we move together, the shorter these confrontations become.
Two generations ago, it was common for a single union local to take on a single employer and bargain effectively. As corporations grew across regions and countries, workers learned to scale up too, coordinating across cities and industries.
Today, the challenge has grown again. Workers are not only confronting multinational corporations, they are confronting governments acting in alignment with corporate interests. A single local, or even a single sector, cannot carry that burden alone. When the state intervenes to discipline workers, it is signalling that the fight is not about one workplace, it is about labour’s role in society.
If the scale of our opposition has grown, our scale of response must grow as well. That means more than statements of support. It means readiness for coordinated work stoppages of real size and duration.
General strikes are often spoken of as dramatic, almost theoretical acts. In the coming years, they will become practical ones. If governments can legislate workers back without consequence, unions become consultants in their own decline. To defend the right to strike, we will need the capacity to mobilize tens of thousands of workers quickly, then hundreds of thousands, then millions if necessary.
This demands infrastructure that reaches beyond union membership lists and bargaining tables. It requires community ties, shared communication networks, and a culture of solidarity that is lived, not announced. The point is not to escalate conflict for its own sake. The point is to ensure that governments think twice before attacking fundamental worker rights, because doing so risks shutting down the very economy they rely on.
The question is not whether governments will continue to test the limits of their power over workers. They already are. The question is whether workers will respond at the scale required. Courts and regulatory bodies will not save us. Political parties will not save us. Rights remain rights only when exercised and defended.
If we prepare, if we organize, if we commit not to leave any group of workers isolated, then the right to strike remains real and alive. If we do not, it becomes a historical footnote. We are at a turning point. And if we build, plan, and act with shared purpose, we will defend not only our bargaining power but our democratic power as working people.
The economy runs because workers run it. The country functions because workers make it function. It is time to build the solidarity and strength required to meet the moment. We can win. We have before. And if we move together, we will again.