Quebec Unions Strike Against Capitalist Austerity

Faced with the austerity attacks of the Quebec Liberal government of Philippe Couillard, hundreds of thousands of trade unionists have launched strikes, taken to the streets and blockaded buildings. Couillard wants to force public-sector workers to accept a five-year contract with three paltry one-percent wage increases plus a two-year freeze—a big pay cut once inflation is factored in. The Liberals are also out to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. For nurses, Couillard’s gang wants more forced overtime and an increased patient load. For teachers, they want overflowing classrooms, a longer workweek and cuts to resources for disabled students.

In response, the public-sector unions—whose 500,000 members have been without contracts since the spring—have staged a series of rotating regional strikes. In late October, they shut down schools, government offices and other facilities around the province. Another round of strikes followed in mid-November. Strikers have set up picket lines and staged demonstrations in dozens of cities and towns.

This level of labour struggle far exceeds anything seen in English Canada in recent years. Predictably, there has been almost no mention of the strikes in the capitalist media outside Quebec. Indeed, a huge 150,000-strong march of Quebec workers in Montreal on October 3 was virtually blacked out—a measure both of the deep national divide in this country, and of visceral class hostility to the thought that these labour struggles might encourage workers in the rest of Canada to emulate their Québécois class brothers and sisters. Tellingly, the union bureaucracy in the rest of the country has also been all but silent on the mass strikes in Quebec.

The struggles of the public-sector unions have resonated in broader layers of Quebec society. Other workers, students, parents, the elderly, the poor know that if the Liberals succeed in these attacks, it will be devastating to the social services, from health to education, on which they and millions of others rely. Four times since June, teachers, students and parents in the umbrella group “I’m protecting my public school” have formed human chains around schools. In early November, more than a thousand non-profit organizations whose funding is threatened staged a two-day shutdown and joined with trade unionists and others on a demonstration in Montreal. There have also been renewed protests by university and college students, though these have been much smaller than those held in the spring, let alone the huge protests of 2012.

The Couillard government has implemented anti-union measures which seek to criminalize the strikes. There is now an injunction to prevent the SFPQ public employees union from blockading government buildings. Rumours abound that the Liberals will impose a contract and ban further strikes sometime before the National Assembly breaks on December 4. In the face of such strikebreaking, Quebec labour must stand as one and mobilize its immense potential social power against the bosses and their state.

For a Class-Struggle Perspective!

While the workers are clearly eager to fight, they are saddled with leaders who are committed to the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy and merely seek collaboration with the bosses and their government. The Liberals’ current assault follows their successful imposition of Law 3, which attacked the pensions of municipal workers. Although there was a one-day shutdown at the Port of Montreal, the union leaders’ strategy was fundamentally legalistic, resting on challenging the constitutionality of the law in the courts. The judges and courts are tools of the bosses; workers can only advance their cause by wielding their own social power.

Today, the Common Front union leaders talk of defending the “welfare state” (or “the Quebec model”), push nostrums like campaigns against tax havens and alternate means for the government to save money, while pleading with the Liberals for “good-faith negotiations.” Refusing to mobilize the unions’ full strength, the labour tops have gone out of their way to bow before the government’s essential-service edicts, which notably bar most health care workers from striking. And on November 18 the Common Front leaders announced that the planned three-day Quebec-wide public-sector general strike on December 1-3 would be postponed in order to pursue negotiations. Seizing on this show of weakness, the government rejected the unions’ latest contract proposals mere hours after they were submitted. (The unions have since announced a one-day province-wide strike on December 9.)

The labour movement can prevail only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity. Past public-sector strikes have been the spark for major social conflicts in Quebec, notably in 1972, when a Common Front strike over public-sector contracts became a much broader class battle. When three union leaders were imprisoned by Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government for failing to heed strikebreaking injunctions, this set off a huge, spontaneous strike wave throughout Quebec. Workers in the mines, factories, ports—all the key industrial sectors—joined the strike, which saw workers briefly take over whole towns. The 1972 general strike demonstrated the immense social power of the working class and posed the question of political power: would the workers or the capitalists run society?

Though the level of struggle is much lower today, the issues posed are no different. Health care workers, teachers and civil servants are vital to the functioning of society, but they lack the ability of workers in manufacturing, mining and construction to choke off the profits that are the lifeblood of the capitalist system. A broader mobilization of labour power could turn the tide for the public-sector workers now in struggle and go on to pose a more frontal challenge to the ruling class. American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon put it well in an article written during a pivotal California maritime strike in 1936:

“…this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.”

—“The Maritime Strike,” November 1936, Notebook of an Agitator (1958)

The Enemies and the Friends of Labour

In contrast, the current union leaders undermine the workers’ struggles and consciousness by tying them to their class enemies. Thus in fighting Couillard’s attack on municipal pensions, the union leadership welcomed the cops as allies and fellow “workers.” Yet, to pick only one example, the police had only recently mobilized to prevent protests by dock workers at the Port of Montreal against threats to union jobs. The cops are not the workers’ allies, and their “associations” have no place in the labour movement. Together with the courts and the army, they are at the core of the capitalists’ violent and coercive machine of state repression. Their purpose is to uphold ruling-class “law and order” against the left, against immigrants and ethnic minorities, and especially against workers in struggle.

If this was not already crystal clear, just look at the role of the police accused of rampant sexual violence against Native women in the mining town of Val d’Or. In the face of overwhelming evidence, eight Val d’Or cops were put on leave or “administrative duties.” In an act of racist defiance, the cops organized a reactionary “work action” (a sick-off) on the weekend of October 24. The labour movement must defend indigenous and all oppressed people, not least against the bosses’ thugs in blue.

The social struggles that rocked Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s ended up being channelled into bourgeois nationalism, and for decades the union leaders have given tacit, or often explicit, support to the capitalist Parti Québécois. Going into the current strikes, Jacques Létourneau, president of the CSN union federation, again appealed to the PQ for support.

The PQ is an anti-working-class party whose record of strikebreaking and austerity attacks dates back to its first governments in the 1970s and early ’80s. Its current leader, Pierre Karl Péladeau, is a notorious right-wing capitalist who used to run the Québecor media chain. He became known as the “lockout king” for throwing unionized workforces out on the streets no less than 14 times in order to impose concessions. His reply to Létourneau’s grovelling plea was a predictable “no.” “This is not unusual. It happened in the past,” Péladeau said of the PQ’s flat refusal to back the unions.

The hold of nationalism over Quebec workers flows from the Anglo chauvinism that is a pillar of capitalist rule in Canada. Serving to constrain and paralyze class struggle, chauvinism and the nationalism that it fosters and deepens have sharply divided the working class along national lines, undermining its ability to wage the necessary struggles in its own defense. For this reason, Marxists advocate independence for Quebec. By taking the national question off the agenda, this would create far better conditions for the workers to see that their own respective capitalist exploiters are their enemies, not their “allies.”

Québec Solidaire: No Alternative

Unlike the PQ, the left-nationalist Québec Solidaire has backed the Common Front strikes. For years, a host of reformist groups—Alternative Socialiste, La Riposte, Gauche Socialiste—have immersed themselves in QS, giving it largely uncritical support. But far from fighting against the capitalist system, QS is a petty-bourgeois populist formation that seeks only to paper over the irreconcilability of the class struggle. Its model has been the Syriza party in Greece, a capitalist party that took over the government in that country after winning elections in January. Originally elected on an “anti-austerity” program, Syriza quickly backtracked on most of its already limited promises, capitulating to diktats by the imperialist European Union. This summer Syriza accepted, and is now enforcing, even more vicious austerity attacks against the Greek working people.

Closer to home, despite its rhetoric against racism and discrimination, QS has given a “left” face to the capitalist rulers’ demonization of Muslims. It has called to ban women who wear the full-face veil (niqab) from receiving government services. During the recent federal election—in which the Tories, supported by the nationalist Bloc Québécois, waged a vile racist campaign against Muslims—the QS deputies in the National Assembly voted in favour of a resolution that called to “ban voting with a covered face” during elections. Two weeks later, seeking to cover its tracks, QS put forward another motion that condemned “Islamophobic statements.”

What hypocrisy! While the Islamic veil is deeply oppressive to women, workers must oppose any attempt by the racist capitalist rulers to ban Muslim women from voting or receiving government services. This is an attack on basic democratic rights that is being used to fuel reaction against immigrants and ethnic minorities. The fight for women’s liberation is a fight against the ruling class and its state.

The struggles of the working class can only go forward through championing the rights of all the oppressed. Immigrant and second-generation workers from North Africa and the Near East make up a growing proportion of the Quebec working class, especially in Montreal. To unite itself across ethnic and religious lines, the labour movement must actively fight against the anti-Muslim backlash, which is a classic divide-and-rule ploy by the ruling class, and against the broader “war on terror,” which is being used to step up state surveillance and shred the rights of workers and oppressed minorities. This perspective points to the need for a new class-struggle leadership of the unions.

Fighting Austerity Means Fighting Capitalism

The strikes of Quebec’s public-sector unions give a taste of the social power that can be wielded to throw back the capitalist war against workers and the poor. It is a damning indictment of the bosses’ profit system that ever increasing numbers must struggle for the basic necessities of life: jobs, food, housing, decent health care and pensions. While fighting to defend—and vastly improve—existing social programs, the labour movement must take up the fight for jobs for all through a shorter workweek at no loss in pay, for massive public works programs to rebuild decaying infrastructure, for big pay hikes linked to inflation. It must demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

Such vital necessities require an assault on the whole system of production for profit. As we stated in an earlier leaflet distributed to striking Common Front workers and others:

“It is the workers who produce the goods and services that make society function, but a handful of capitalist parasites steals all the riches. To try and shore up its rate of profit, the bourgeoisie has to constantly cut wages, lay off workers and reduce public services. Since austerity is intrinsic to capitalism, the fight against it must be linked to a fight against the capitalist system.”

—“Mobilize the Social Power of the Working Class!” (translated in SC No. 185, Summer 2015)

In Quebec, across Canada and internationally, the working people need a political party that will defend their interests and those of all the victims of decaying capitalism. Such a party will strive to make the workers conscious of the need to sweep away capitalist rule and replace it with a rationally planned economy based on the needs of the workers and their allies, not of profit. That is the only road to an egalitarian socialist society based on material abundance for all the peoples of the world. Based on the class-struggle perspectives of Marxism, the Ligue trotskyste/Trotskyist League, Canadian section of the International Communist League, dedicates all our efforts to the reforging of the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, the necessary instrument for emancipation from capitalist barbarism.