AGAINST
THE ANTI-UNION LAWS by CHARLES BEDART In the month of May 1975 a new stage was opened in the struggle between the trade-union movement and the state of Québec, through conflich that broke out in the construction industry. The National Assembly of Quebec voted two anti-trade-union lows: The first ploced under receivership four craft unions belonging to the construction sector of the Fédération des Travailleurs du Quebec (FTQ - Federation of Workers of Québec); the second provides for removing militants who have police records from their posts in trade unions. As for as the second law is concerned, it is worth noting that since calling for an "illegal strike" is a punishable offense, this low sets the stage for removing the most combative elements from the trade unions under cover of a struggle against crime and thus for transforming the trade-union apparatus into an anti-strike police force within the workers movement. According to Jean Cournoyer, the minister of labor, this law, which so far applies only to the construction industry, ought to be extended to the entire Québécois trade-union movement. In order to understand the meaning of the recent conFlicis in the construction industry in Quebec, certain aspects of the North American trade-union movement must be recalled.
QUEBEC: This movement is characterized by two central features: First, great importance is lent to demands for monetary wage increases (a theme developed in a systematic manner by Samuel Gompers in the American Federation of Labor) and second, the form taken by conflicts with the employers is generally violent. The convergence of these two features — strictly economic struggle voluntarily limited to the framework of the copitalist system and apolitical violence as a means of putting pressure on the employers - has given rise in some sectors of the workers movement (construction, longshoremen, teamsters) to genuine fiefs based on very specific bureaucratic apparatuses. In foct, the members of these apparatuses not only consider that the unions must be administered like capitalist companies, but also that all means are valid in strengthening the apparatuses, Including violence. These bureaucratic apparatuses rest essentially on the financial advantages that derive from the high salaries of the leaders and from the corruption instigated by the employers. In fact, when these bureaucracies practice class collaboration, if is not so much out of ideological conviction as because of the material advantages that go along with this collaboration. Corruption and violence quite naturally lead these trade-union leaders into close relations with organized crime.
QUEBEC This type of violently anticommunist bureaucracy does not tolerate even the physical presence of leftist militants in the professions they control. Brutal repression is a constant fact of life in these trades. Nevertheless, the bureaucracy sometimes demands a high payment from the employers for its services. Employers who are too greedy are rapidly brought to reason by means of sabotage and destruction of material. In addition, in order to assure their popularity among the union membership, from time to time the bureaucrats have to prove their effectiveness by winning significant wage increases. During the 1950s, the teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, utilized these methods and became the most powerful trade union on the North American continent. In periods during which the bourgeoisie wants to eliminate the influence of communist and socialist militants from the workers movement, it actively seeks an alliance with this bureaucracy, an alliance cemented through corruption. Thus, the anticommunist purge during the postwar period throughout the entire North American trade-union movement was the joint work of the bourgeois state and corrupt trade-union bureaucrats. Nevertheless, in the long run such an alliance is costly for the bourgeoisie, and when the demands of the corrupt bureaucrats go beyond the offers of the corrupting employers, a crisis breaks out. This occurs especially frequently during a capitalist economic recession, when profitability is the watchword of the employers. This is what has happened with the leading apparatus of the FT's construction sector, which had become the most powerful trade union in Quebec, grouping all the skilled workers of this industry together in a Provincial Council. The leaders of FTQ-Construction have engaged in fruitful collaboration with the various governments in Québec, on occasion not even hesitating to organize the electoral campaign of this or that influencial deputy. So long as social peace was not disturbed, so long as the anti-strike pacts were respected, the employers tolerated the presence of this powerful trade-union apparatus whether they liked it or not, since there was no better alternative. Moreover, the construction industry offered the employers the advantage of being the classic point of disunity in the Quebec trade-union movement. The FTQ-Construction, with government support, has sought to obtain a trade-union monopoly at the expense of the other national trade-union federation, The Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN — Confederation of National Trade Unions). Violent clashes between members of the two trade-union federations were common occurrences on construction sites throughout Quebec. This situation suited the employers quite well. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1974, when the functionaries of FTQ-Construction organized the destruction of the big construction site LG2 of the Bale James hydroelectric dom in northern Quebec (doing more than a million dollars worth of damage), the bourgeoisie found the bill too high. In addition, conscious of the fact that the context of political and social radicaliza24 tion now under way could soon affect determination of the targets of the violence of the FQ-Construction apparatus, the bourgeoisie decided to get rid of this apparatus and proceeded to dismantle it. American multinational firms such as Goodyear and Firestone loudly proclaimed their intention to slow down or cut off their investments if order was not restored not only in the construction industry but throughout the Québécois trade-union movement. According to these firms, the capitalist economic recession compels the Québécois government to seek social peace at lower prices. The Cliche commission In Canada and Québec, as well as in the United States, it is a traditional part of bourgeois morals to establish commissions of inquiry whose aims are not to shed light on some aspect of social reality but rather to lend on appearance of objectivity and neutrality to the government legislation inspired by the final recommendations of the commissioners of inquiry. In 1959 the Kennedy brothers, members of the Democratic party, led an inquiry into Hoffa's teamsters under the Republican Eisenhower administration. By lining up "public opinion" in favor of "civic duty" and "morality, " this commission led to the enactment by Congress of the Landrum-Griffin Act, a genuine police instrument within the workers movement. This glorious tradition of bourgeois politicians was explicitly recalled in the report submitted by the Cliche commission, which was created by the Québécois government to investigate "organized crime" in the construction industry after the Baie James incidents. Composed of personalities passed off by the bourgeois mass media as men of "integrity, " this commission was directed by Robert Cliche, a judge in Quebec and also a former leader of the Nouveau Parti Démocratique (New Democratic party), Canadian offshoot of international Social Democracy This judge was assisted by a member of the Conservative party and by a trade-unionist teacher who is a member of the Parti Québécois, another opposition party. Incapable of rejecting collaboration with these "impartial observers, *the trade-union leaderships, of both the FTQ and the CSN, continued to entertain illusions about the so-called neutrality of the state apparatus and of its occasional commissions, in reality assigned to fie a knot around the neck of the workers movement. More, the leadership of the CSN, which holds a minority position in the construction industry, openly called for police intervention against the FQ unions in this industry. The two trade-union bureaucracies naively tried to play one section of the provincial government against the other. The FQ counted on Minister of Labor Jean Cournoyer to maintain their past alliance, while the CN relied on Jérôme Choquette, the minister of justice and chief of police, to oust its rival. Believing that they detected antagonistic contradictions where actually there was only the mixture of integra-
tionism and repression characteristic of all bourgeois policy toward the workers movement, the trade-union leaderships led the workers movement onto a field on which the bourgeois politicians decide the rules of the game: the offices of the ministries and parliament members. As the investigations of the Cliche commission progressed, accompanied by police searches of the trade-union offices, the FQ leadership began to understand the extent of the danger and tried to mobilize its forces. On October 29, 1974, some 40,000 workers responded to the FIQ's call and demonstrated in the streets of Montréal. It was the largest workers demonstration of its kind in Québec's history. Nevertheless, the FTQ had mobilized in this way not within a perspective of broadening the struggles or of establishing trode-union unity. It was simply seeking to improve its bargaining position with the government. In trying to use the methods of business trade unionism, of negotiations kept secret from the workers (but not from the bourgeois ministers) in order to settle a battle whose stakes were clearly political, the FQ prevented the entire workers movement from responding to the scope of the government attack. Moreover, in proclaiming, against all evidence, its confidence in Minister of Labor Jean Cournoyer, the leadership of the FTQ could only foster cynicism and disgust among union members, since this minister was the very sponsor of the major anti-working-class bills. At the beginning of May, in an atmosphere of complete discredit of the trade-union leaderships, the recommendations of the Cliche commission were made public: receivership for the four unions of FQ-Construction, an "antiwrecker" law making trade-union leaders responsible for "illegal strikes, " suppression of trade-union negotiating power through the creation of a sort of corporatist office for the construction industry, and state surveillance of trade-union life, with trade-union statutes to be subject to government approval. A few days after the publication of the report, the first two recommendations were made into laws. To protest against this legislation, the FQ called in an improvised manner for work stoppages on May 21, supposedly in solidarity with an ongoing strike of United Aircraff (on American company manufacturing airplane engines). More than 100,000 trade-unionists walked off the job. But the mobilization, confused in its objectives and not explained to the workers, was a partial failure: Although new layers of the working class mobilized on this occasion, the government did not at all yield to the demands of the FQ. The May 21 mobilization When the recommendations of the Cliche commission were widely distributed, a protest assembly of 4, 000 members of the FTQ-Construction was held on the Rive Sud in Montreal not far from the United Aircraft factories, where the workers have been on strike since
December 1973. A group of thirty-four workers got into the factory during the night with the aim of occupying the buildings and demanding a settlement of the conflict. Construction workers went to the gates of the factory to demonstrate their solidarity with the strikers; they clashed violently with police forces. Later, members of the anticiot brigade of the Quebec security services arrived at the factory and fore into the strikers, clubbing workers who were negotiating their surrender. A reporter on the spot described the scene live on the radio, and his testimony was widely reproduced in the press during succeeding days. The leadership of the FTQ then decided to use this event to call for a "general strike" on May 21 in solidarity with the victims of the repression. While the government offensive in construction was reaching its peak, the FQ officially said nothing. Work stoppages in the industry were proliferating, but two days before this "general strike" Louis Laberge called on the workers to return to the construction sites; he did this so strongly that they stayed there on May 21. Even during the worst moments of the clashes, the FQ leadership continued to follow its road of class collaboration. The incredible incoherence of the FQ leaders strongly put the brakes on the mobilization, thus facilitating the application of anti-working-class measures by the Liberal government. Only the militancy and perspicocity of some elements of the trade-union movement prevented all this from being transformed into a total rout. The 1976 Olympies During this period the government, which was seeking to use all possible arguments in pressing forward its anti-union offensive, tried to lay the blame for the lag in preparation of the installations for the 1976 Olympic games on strikes by construction workers. In fact, since autumn 1974 preparations for the Montréal Olympic games have provided the basis for a reactionary ideological orgy on the part of various sections of the bourgeoisie and the state apparatus. Apart from the attempts to line up the youth behind celebration of the Olympic ritual, and apart from the prestige maneuvers by various government bodies - municipal, provincial, and federal - the Olympics are being used as a direct pretext for an offensive against the trade unions in construction. A vast purge of militants from the industry was undertaken during the first weeks of May (there were more than 500 dismissals). The Olympic construction site is now permanently guarded by private police of the Pinkerton Agency, infamous for many decades for their efficiency in anti-union repression in North America. The prestige operation represented by the Olympic games must not be challenged by a construction strike, according to the powers that be, who thus justify their anti-union repression.
QUEBEC The Olympics are useful to the bourgeoisie on all levels - economic, ideological, and political. Thus, it is quite probable that the period during which the games will be held (summer 1976) will permit the bourgeois state to deploy an impressive military and police arsenal. The statements of Minister of Justice Choquette are significant. Upon returning from Munich, where the 1972 Olympics were held, he criticized the authorities of this city for not having sufficiently openly deployed the "antiterrorist" repressive forces at their disposal. Drawing the lessons of the summer of 1972, the Montréal organizers have already stated that they will spare no effort in defending the games. In addition to the powerful municipal police and the Quebécois security services, Montréal will be tightly policed by the Canadian army, and the authorities have announced special "antiterrorist" measures that could well serve as a pretext for attacking the socialist and revolutionary organizations. In spite of the anti-union laws and in spite of the sectoral defeats (construction, for example), the Québécois workers movement has not been crushed. The partial retreats have been compensated for by sectors of the workers movement that had been relatively passive coming into action. If the bourgeoisie now takes the initiative in confrontations, tensions between the classes will only be heightened and the elements will be set in place for future explosions. In spite of the total bankruptcy of its leaderships, the workers movement is resisting and is organizing its responses locally as best it can. Nevertheless, such a state of affairs cannot last long. It is clear that decisive confrontations are on the way, and the present leaders of the workers movement would lead the workers to massacres or capitulation. weekly paper of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International 26
At this point, confrontations between the state and the workers movement can be expected to take place around two issues: 1. Against draft law 24: Presented to the Quebec National Assembly in the form of amendments to the Labor Code, this bill calls for subjecting trade-union leadership elections, Finances, and statutes, as well as strike votes, to the absolute control of functionaries of the bourgeois state. The passage of such measures would mean the direct integration of the trade-union movement into the state apparatus. In face of these projects, the workers movement must mobilize as a whole and force the government to back down; otherwise the passage of such a law will mean the crushing of the whole trade-union movement without a struggle. 2. The coming negotiations in the provincial public sector: The previous negotiations (in April and May 1972) led to a vast movement of work stoppages and occupations of cities (apart from Montréal) after the arrest of the leaders of the three Quebécois trade-union federations. Beginning next autumn the negotiations now going on will enter their active phase. The Liberal party, which controls the government, is carefully preparing for this confrontation by perfecting its judicial and police arsenal. The trade-union movement will be able to win only by preparing an unlimited general strike of all the workers, as was recommended in a resolution of the recent congress of the Montral General Council of the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux. June 9, 1975 RED WEEKLY SUBSCRIBE
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