John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), recently posted the following on Facebook:
A common front of public sector unions in Quebec are engaged in a strike of historic proportions [my emphasis]. Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of the class struggle history of Quebec will appreciate the possibilities of this moment. From Global News.Striking Quebec public sector unions said Wednesday they were hopeful a recently appointed conciliator will help advance contract negotiations with the government, but both sides accused each other of refusing to compromise.Four unions representing around 420,000 workers, including teachers and health-care staff, were on Day 2 of a three-day strike that has shut schools and delayed surgeries. Calling themselves the “common front,” the four unions said they see a “momentum” in negotiations.A conciliator met with common front leadership Monday and was still at work on Tuesday, with the assistance of a second conciliator, said François Enault, a vice-president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions [CNTU in English and CSN in French], a common front member. Discussions are set to resume on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday in Quebec City, he told reporters.“What we’ve been hearing since (Tuesday) — nothing has been settled — but at the very least, a momentum is building,” Enault said. “The conciliators are doing the job that we wanted them to do, to get the government to sit down and give us answers that we’ve been waiting months for.”Thousands more workers are set to join the common front on the picket lines. Fédération Interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec, which represents 80,000 nurses and other health-care staff, plans to strike Thursday and Friday, further disrupting the health network. As well, 65,000 teachers with Fédération Autonome de l’Enseignement are launching an unlimited general strike Thursday.Éric Gingras, president of Centrale des syndicats du Québec, a common front member, told reporters Wednesday the government is negotiating in public.“The government has been talking through social media, through media, about getting a deal done before Christmas, but at (the bargaining table) we don’t see that willpower,” Gingras said.Unions have rejected the government’s most recent contract offer — which includes a 10.3-per-cent salary increase over five years and a one-time payment of $1,000 to each worker. They want a three-year deal that includes salary increases tied to the inflation rate: two percentage points above inflation in the first year or $100 per week, whichever is more beneficial, followed by three points higher in the second year and four points higher in the third.In Quebec City, Premier François Legault said that while the work of teachers and nurses is extremely important, the government doesn’t have the money to meet their demands. The province’s offer, he said, is equivalent to 14.8 per cent over five years — including extra increases for the lowest- paid workers and for those who work nights and weekends.Each additional percentage point increase is worth $600 million in taxpayer money, he told the legislature on Wednesday.“We forecast that over the length of the next collective agreement, inflation will reach 12.7 per cent. So, we’re offering 14.8 per cent. We’re open to reviewing the distribution of the 14.8 per cent, but for that the unions have to come to the table,” he said.Common front leaders said it’s too early to say what will come after their strike ends Thursday.
In what way is this struggle of “historic proportions?” Clarke refers to past Quebecois struggles, but he does not elaborate.
I doubt that this will be a struggle of historic proportions–with any real challenge to the existing class power of employers. Rather, it will probably be a struggle that is limited to better wages and working conditions–a struggle that should be supported if nothing else because even to maintain wages and working conditions requires struggle. However, Clarke provides no evidence that this struggle will not be confined to a struggle that fails to challenge the class power of employers in any significant way.
Why would I doubt that? Certainly, there have been organized oppositional movements in Quebec, such as the 2012 spring and summer struggle against neoliberal austerity. From Eric Pineault (2012), “Quebec’s Red Spring: An Essay on Ideology and Social Conflict at the End of Neoliberalism,” in pages 29-56, Studies in Political Economy, Volume 90, page 29:
The spring of 2012 will appear as a watershed moment in Quebec’s history. Montreal has now joined the list of metropolises—such as Madrid, Athens, Santiago (Chile), and Mexico City—where social movements have mobilized on a mass scale against the neoliberal politics of austerity. What started as a student strike became a popular struggle, and, after the provincial elections, this movement won a major victory because the proposed tuition fee hike was repealed along with Law 12, which criminalized student strike activities and limited the basic rights and freedoms to demonstrate in Quebec. The mobilization was unprecedented in Quebec’s recent history: the strikes lasted seven months, from mid February until mid August. On the day of action of 22 March 2012, 300,000 out of 400,000 full-time students were on strike. Four national demonstrations each surpassed 200,000 participants; night marches with thousands of participants were held every night
from May to the end of June; finally, spontaneous casserole marches, where participants banged pots and pans, were held almost every evening for several weeks in various neighbourhoods, towns, and villages.
However, the CNTU/CSN did not engage in an action of “historic proportions” at that time. Quite to the contrary. Page 50:
At this point, for many of CLASSE core leaders, trade unions were the only mass institutions that could carry the struggle forward. All three large trade union federations had positioned themselves against the austerity agenda imposed by the Quebec government in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 crisis. Many of the larger unions within the Conféderation des syndicats nationaux (CSN)– Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU), one of the three main union federations, had adopted resolutions concerning the launch of a social strike against austerity. Potentially this would have represented a radical break with the traditional neocorporatist orientation of organized labour. With hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers in the streets, daily and nightly marches, confrontations with riot police, and with the CSN staff and militants participating regularly in these various public demonstrations, a call for a social strike seemed imminent, but never came. Attempts by grassroots militants inside the CSN to engage local and sectoral union structures closest to the strike movement, such as the college teachers’ unions, were stifled by a leadership convinced that a majority of its members would not support mobilization against austerity, especially in the context of the student conflict. Although organized labour, and the CSN in particular, had done some mobilization and education work around the issue of a social strike against austerity as early as the summer of 2011, this was not taken very seriously by elected officials in these institutions. Organized labour was trapped in a neocorporatist approach in which there was no room for combative practices like social strikes.
Has the situation changed since then? Clarke provides no evidence to the contrary. Does not the radical left need to assess the situation concretely through inquiry into the situaiton rather than through wishful thinking?
Clarke, like much of the radical left here in Toronto, vastly underestimate the need to engage constantly in ideological struggle against social democrats in general and most union reps in particular. They limit the struggle against the class power of employers, and such an ideological struggle forms an essential part of a movement that questions the class power of employers–a movement of “historical proporitions.”
The Abolitionary 