Wearing Union Thug shirts with PRIDE

..or the story of UNION ❤️HUGS at Camosun College

Every Pride season, I’m reminded that our rights are not gifted by magnanimous leaders or nice administrators, and they are not guaranteed beyond the next government or collective agreement. Our rights are hard won, defended, expanded, and protected by people who are willing to stand together, even when doing so makes them unpopular with those who benefit from silence. Even when taking your power back is framed as an attack because it makes someone else uncomfortable. Our CUPE siblings know this. That’s why they had these Union ❤️Hugs t-shirts made in a small tribute to our local: shirts that all Camosun workers could wear during Pride.

This is a labour story. It is also a queer story.

The phrase “union thug” has long been used as a way to discredit workers who organize, strike, picket, protest, or refuse to accept unfair treatment quietly. It is meant to make collective action look offensive, unreasonable, or aggressive. It is meant to turn solidarity into something suspicious, dangerous. It is meant to suggest that when workers stand up together, they have somehow stepped out of line.

There is a powerful parallel here with the word “queer.” For many of us, queer was a word used to shame, isolate, and endanger people who did not conform to straight and cisgender norms. It was meant to label us as unacceptable. But 2SLGBTQIA+ communities have taken that word back and turned it into a banner of resistance, possibility, and belonging.

Accusations have always told us more about power than about workers.

Employers, politicians, and anti-union commentators have often used “union thug” rhetoric to separate “good workers” from “troublemakers.” A good worker, in this framing, is quiet. A good worker is grateful for being given work. A good worker accepts management decisions made behind closed doors no matter what. A “thug” is the person who asks hard questions, files grievances, walks picket lines, demands consultation, challenges discrimination, and says: no, we are not leaving anyone behind. It isn’t hard to see why the term might make administrators uncomfortable.

When workers are called “union thugs” for standing together, the insult reveals the fear behind it. It tells us that collective power is working, that solidarity is working. We do not need to accept the shame attached to the label. We can expose it, challenge it, and transform it into a reminder that people with less power have always been called names for refusing to stay quiet. But when you are in a union, it is our responsibility to hold managers accountable, especially when that makes them uncomfortable.

For equity-denied workers, that distinction has always been dangerous.

2SLGBTQIA+ workers know what it means to be told that asking for basic dignity is “too much.” We know what it means when people call inclusion “special treatment,” when they call safety “politics,” when they call human rights “division.” The language changes, but the strategy is familiar: when power makes the demand for justice look unreasonable, the status quo can keep calling itself neutral.

Pride began as a riot. It was born from resistance to policing, harassment, exclusion, medicalization, criminalization, and forced silence. It was built by people who were told they were indecent, disruptive, dangerous, and demanding. In other words, it was built by people who refused to accept the slurs those in power tried to label them with.

The labour movement has its own version of that history. Workers who fought for weekends, health and safety protections, pensions, public services, fair wages, parental leave, pay equity, anti-harassment language, and human rights protections were rarely praised while they were doing it. They were often mocked, threatened, disciplined, blacklisted (a whole other chapter of union history), or called radicals (some were even murdered). They were told they were asking for too much when fighting for basic human dignity. Then, years later, the rights they fought for were treated as common sense – or worse, taken for granted by those who don’t remember the blood, sweat, and tears shed to win them.

This is why Pride belongs in the labour movement, and why the labour movement belongs at Pride.

Unions are not perfect. Like every institution, unions have had to be pushed, challenged, and changed by equity-denied members. 2SLGBTQIA+ workers, racialized workers, Indigenous workers, disabled workers, women, migrant workers, and precarious workers have all had to fight within our movements as well as through them. But at their best, unions give workers something profoundly powerful: a collective way to refuse isolation and choose community.

That matters because discrimination often works by isolating people. It tells the queer worker to stay quiet if they want to be safe. It tells the trans worker not to make things uncomfortable. It tells the disabled worker to be grateful for partial access. It tells the racialized worker not to be “difficult.” It tells the precarious term worker not to risk their next contract. It tells each person that the problem is theirs alone to survive.

Solidarity says otherwise.

Solidarity says that your safety at work is not a personal favour bestowed upon you by kind supervisors. It says using your chosen name and preferred pronouns is not optional. It says your family is no less legitimate because it is found. It says your rights to bodily autonomy are not up for debate. It says your grief, joy, anger, love, and survival are not inconveniences. Equity is union work because dignity is union work, and no one knows that better than the queer community.

Solidarity is when your sibling union (CUPE 2081) designs a Pride T-shirt to show support for CCFA bargaining under faithless circumstances.

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So this Pride, when you join us wearing our UNION ❤️HUGS t-shirts, marching in the Parade with the CCSS, remember that term “union thugs” was tossed around to malign workers who organized and fought for what they believed in. Just like when people claim they are uncomfortable around queer people, those who object to unions are trying to use the same old trick.

We should recognize the attempt to shame people out of standing together in solidarity. We should recognize that they are demanding that workers behave and be good, even as their working conditions worsen and their rights are being eroded away. We should recognize the warning being sent to anyone who might speak up next. We should recognize the warning that they don’t like it when we own our power.

And then we should answer it clearly.

• If being a “union thug” means defending a coworker from harassment, we will do that.
• If it means insisting that 2SLGBTQIA+ workers deserve safety, recognition, and respect, we will do that.
• If it means standing against policies and politics that make equity-denied people more vulnerable, we will do that.
• If it means refusing to let management, governments, or public pressure divide workers from one another, we will do that too.

Pride is not just a celebration of who we are. It is a reminder of what collective courage can do. Rights are protected when people organize. Workplaces become safer when people refuse to look away. Communities become stronger when we understand that none of us are free alone.

That’s solidarity. That’s collective action. That’s Pride, and there’s room for everyone.

❤️HUGS in Solidarity, my friends.

#QueerSolidarity #LabourPride #2SLGBTQIA #2SLGBTQIA+ #WorkersRightsAreHumanRights #HumanRightsAreUnionRights #SolidarityForever #UnionStrong #EquityIsUnionWork #ProtectTransRights #QueerRightsAreHumanRights #NoOneIsFreeUntilWeAllAre

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If you’d like to learn more about BC’s Labour History, please visit https://www.labourheritagecentre.ca/