Collaboration addicts
Quebec's trade union leaders just can't say no to the Parti québecois!
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Bernard Rioux and Marc Bonhomme THE MACHINERY OF COSY CONSULTATION between bosses and trade union leaders might be starting to squeak in Germany, but it is still running as smooth as silk in Quebec. For the time being, at least.
Consensus between government, employers and trade unions returned to centre stage when the pro-sovereignty Parti québecois (PQ) defeated the federalist [proCanadian] Liberal Party in 1994 elections to Quebec's Assemble Nationale.
Hyper-mediatised tripartite consultations were introduced when the PQ came to power in 1976 after a decade of important labour mobilisations. These "summits" have been a major weapon in diffusing labour militancy.
In 1980, the PQ timed its nationalist "summit" during the referendum campaign for sovereignty. This time the summit comes after the heartbreaking defeat of the movement, which won only 49% of votes cast in the October 1995 referendum.
The Canadian government now realises that they cannot be sure to defeat the next referendum on Quebec sovereignty. So they are implementing "Plan B" - increasing the legalistic barriers to self-determination.
The Parti québecois has made a preemptive strike.... against the local population. Their goal is to eliminate Quebec's budget deficit, so as to be in a stronger position when the next referendum comes along, some time after the year 2000.
At the March 1996 Summit, the government told trade union leaders that reenforced nationalist government would be able to heal the wounds of unemployment and public sector cuts, provided that the unions accepted the employers" balanced Provincial budget by the year 2000. Union leaders were broadly sympathetic, but demanded this latest summit, to deal specifically with the question of employment.
Quebec's Prime Minister Lucien Bouchard opened the proceedings with an honest definition of the summit's real objectives: creating a social and economic environment which corresponds to the globalisation of the economy. Bouchard promised rapid deregulation. In particular, the government will abolish certain decrees which govern wages and working conditions in the clothing, wood products and glass industries. The Prime Minister also promised deregulation of the health sector and the workplace safety regulation system.
Bouchard will balance Quebec's Provincial budget by cutting social expenditure, privatising public sector enterprises, downgrading working conditions in the public sector, and introducing or increasing the cost of access to public services. The next budget alone will include cuts of about C$ 3 billion, which will cost us at least 36,000 public sector jobs.
The biggest mass campaign these last two years has been the Women's March against Poverty. One of the central demands of the Marches has been pay equity between men and women. This has obliged the PQ to propose a rather weak law on wage discrimination, to be voted by the end of this year, but coming into effect 12 months from now. Employers will have an incredible 10 years to bring their pay practices into line. Even this half-measure is too strong for the employers, who used the summit to warn government, union leaders and, of course, the media, about the unemployment risks linked to the new legislation.
Apparently, these "reforms" don't represent a burden for the working population heavy enough for trade union leaders to consider a re-evaluation of their quest for Consensus-at-any-price. These "consensus
Quebec/Canada * addicts" have accepted the government objective of bringing unemployment down from 12% (1H96) to 8% by the year 2002. And before the rank-and-file could react to this show of "realism," union bosses made further concessions, in reaction to the opposition of their "social partners" in government and the boardrooms. The new "realistic" goal is to only reduce Quebec's unemployment rate to the all-Canada average of 10%, by the end of the century. [Which] jobs for all?
In the summit declaration on employment, the trade unions accept that productivity and flexibility at the enterprise level are essential factors of economic growth, and that "one must" help Quebec enterprises to confront the competition in the world market. Quebec's employers were reticent about this employment summit when it was announced in March. But after sitting down with the current trade union leadership, the bosses are proving real masters of the mediatised summit game.
One proposal from the summit is voluntary job-sharing. In other words, the spreading of part-time jobs, and an increase in job insecurity. The only positive element is the reduction in the working week from 44 hours to 40, over the next four years. But there is no clause in the new agreement which obliges enterprises to compensate for reductions in the working week by hiring new workers. And, of course, the four year implementation period gives the government's new Secretariat for De-Regulation plenty of time to make more radical changes in labour legislation. Workfare not welfare
The government and the employers have discovered the "social economy". The unemployed of Quebec are to re-gain their dignity
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The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: an overview
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* Quebec/Canada and motivation by doing socially useful labour, in exchange for a small bonus on top of their existing benefits (which they will loose if they don't participate). The government is overjoyed at the prospect of progressively withdrawing from a range of sectors, and replacing paid employees by cheap, tied labour. The employers and the financial sector are hardly complaining at a measure that seems to buy social peace, at a price much lower than the "savings" though cuts in the public sector workforce. The health sector alons has lost over 13,000 jobs over the last 12 months. Tax the rich?
Apart from job-sharing, trade union leaders also had a lot to say about the need to redistribute wealth through a tax reform. But as the summit approached, these proposals were watered down into a single, negative demand: refusal of any reductions in enterprise taxation levels. The summit then negotiated a consensus position of reducing social security contributions for those employers who create new jobs. All the union leaders' previous talk of the iniquity of the tax system was forgotten once they entered the summit. Consensus requires no less.
Community activists made the fairly moderate demand that the summit pledge to ensure that the poorest 20% of the population should become no poorer than they are today, and that services to this segment of the population should not be cut. Activists hoped that by making a low demand, they maximised the chances of winning an agreement from
The government did promise not to worsen the living conditions of the disabled. But these are only 20% of recipients of social security. The other 80% have no promise of protection. A C$ 250 million Anti-Poverty Fund has been created. But disbursement guidelines suggest that it will finance workfare (forced labour for welfare recipients) and other measures supposedly increasing the "employability" of the worthy poor. Bosses' joy, youth revolt?
Employers left the summit visibly overjoyed. Prime Minister Bouchard has reinforced his position relative to his more populist rival Jacques Parizeau, who retired from the leadership of the PQ after blaming the October referendum defeat on "money and the ethnic [English-Canadian and immigrant] vote." Bouchard will now be more confident as he confronts the hard-line section in the PQ which wants to re-introduce legislation forbidding public commercial signs in languages other than French, and committing the party to a strategy of declaring independence quickly in the aftermath of any successful referendum, rather than first trying to negotiate a new form of partnership with the federal government.
Representatives of the major women's movements and withdrew from the summit just before the final declaration. Enough was enough, they said, explaining that their constituents had been marginalised, and hard-hit by recent income-support programmes, and that the summit had made promise to prevent further impoverishment. But they were careful to insist that they were not "slamming the door". After all, the employers had "come part of the way."
Students at Quebec's Cegeps (pre-university colleges and technical institutes) had launched a strike movement at the beginning of the summit. This movement dynamised the humble demonstration called to "support our representatives" inside the Summit. This breath of fresh air obliged student leaders, otherwise famous for their pro-PQ sympathies, to walk out half way through the summit. The strike movement may even spread to the universities: the summit not only failed to freeze fees, but promised to increase them in December 1997.
The Education Minister accuses the students of having "gone all the way" before she had even had a chance to announce her "reforms". And the major newspapers dismiss this youth radicalisation as the corporatism of little-rich-kids. In fact, beyond its immediate demands, this new student mobilisation expresses the frustration of a younger generation revolted by neo-liberal marginalisation, and the lack of a "project for society" which would nourish resistance to national oppression and the aspiration towards independence. The organised sector of the younger generation is expressing, in a confused way, the revolt of all the excluded.
In recent years, Quebec's angry women have taken the lead, with the marches against poverty. Now it is the turn of the youth. But unless the working class shakes itself out of its lethargy, Quebec's students might not have enough breath to go the full distance. *
Michel Mill Michel Mill (Michel Lafitte) was a revolutionary, a militant for Quebec's independence, for the rights of indigenous people, a trade union activist, and an active internationalist. He was also a brilliant orator, with wide cultural references. When it was time to organise something in Montreal or elsewhere, Michel was the man with 1001 contacts. Michel wasn't born in Quebec, or in a Frenchspeaking tamily. Though his French (and his Quebec accent) was so good that few people noticed. Michel joined the Fourth International in English Canada, but his Trotskyist education and experience helped him recognise that the Quebec national question was the weak link in the Canadian bourgeois system. For Michel and the other Fourth International comrades in English Canada, the full development of the national and social liberation struggle of Quebec was in the interest of working people in English-speaking Canada too. He moved to Quebec as a young man, and spent the rest of his militant life struggling to help the working class wrest control of the struggle for independence from the nationalist Parti quebecois (in power from 1976-1984 and again since 1994). The 1980s were hard for all of us in the movement, with the defeat of the referendum on sovereignty in 1980, and the subsequent downturn in abour struggles and other social mobilisations. Michel could have easily taken refuge in a well-paid cocoon (he was an excellent interpreter). But he didnt. Nor did he move back to Ontario when the struggle in Quebec died down, and large parts of the left in English Canada and in other countries lost interest in our struggle. In recent years, Michel was optimistic about the transtormation of the Quebec New Democratic Party (social-democratic) into the anti-capitalist, and pro- Independence Socialist Democracy Party (PDS). When the CIA dusted off their list of undesirables during the Atlanta games, Michel was turned back when he tried to fly to Mexico
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
Do the workers have a country?
(via Miami) to participate in this summer's International Meeting for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism [IV #281]. In the months before his death, Michel spent a lot of time encouraging the by José Iriarte "Bikila"
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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION by Catherine Samary
22 International Viewpoint recomposition of a serious Marxist revolutionary pole in English Canada, through the fusion of the Fourth International supporters in Socialist Challenge into the New Socialist Group. Michel devoted himself to keeping the embers of resistance alive during years ot passivity, so that oners could take up the struggle when the time came. We will remember him. * Gauche socialiste/Socialist Challenge