Quebec's strike wave rolls toward a showdown
Ashley Smith reports from Montreal as a new round of public-sector strikes begins.
November 9, 2015
Students march against austerity in Montreal
WORKERS IN the Canadian province of Quebec are mobilizing the largest struggle against austerity in North America.
Public-sector workers across Quebec have hit the picket lines for a wave of strikes to defend jobs, wages, working conditions and public services. In the first round of rotating regional strikes from October 26-29, more than 400,000 unionists organized in the
Common Front shut down schools, hospitals and government offices in and around Montreal.
Independently, the
Fédération autonome de l'eseignement (FAE) led its 34,000 French language teachers in three days of rotating strikes on October 26-28. A third union, the
Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ), which represents 65,000 nurses and health-care workers, has also staged a series of protests.
The Common Front called out its supporters for a second round of strikes this week, to be followed by a third round on November 16-17. If no settlement is reached, it plans to call for a general strike of public-sector workers on December 1-3 across Quebec. If the FAE and FIQ join in, that would mean more than half a million workers would be on strike.
The struggle led by the three union federations has found increasing support from the broader working class--despite polls that show as many as 50 percent of people in Quebec think unions have too much power.
"The picket lines were amazing," said one striking teacher in the FAE, Benoit Renaud. "Everyone driving by was honking their horns in solidarity. It shows that whatever Quebecers think about unions in the abstract, they like teachers, nurses and workers in local government. And they are realizing that our fight is also their fight."
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THE LIBERAL Party government of Philippe Couillard triggered this working class upsurge. Driven by Quebec's anemic economy and an ideological commitment to neoliberalism, Couillard wants to balance the budget by cutting government workers' wages and benefits and gutting the vital services they provide.
He has proposed no wage increase for the first two years of a five-year contract, to be followed by a mere 1 percent annual increase for the following three years. With inflation factored in, that would amount to a massive wage cut. In addition, he is attacking pensions and trying to increase the age of retirement for all public-sector workers.
In education, Couillard wants to increase class sizes; count children with special needs as one child, instead of three, as has been the norm; and increase the workweek from 32 to 40 hours. In health care, the government wants to raise the number of patients taken care of by each nurse, increase forced overtime and deny any increase in bonuses for working night shifts. Conditions are so bad that 47 percent of active nurses over 50 years of age are considering retirement.
The unions' proposals are in direct opposition to Couillard's. They want raises of 13.5 percent over the life of a five-year contract, increased investment in public services and improvements in working conditions.
Perhaps overconfident that he rules Quebec with a large majority in the provincial National Assembly and faces no election for several years, Couillard attacked not only the unions but also many other sectors of society dependent on government funding.
But the scale of his assault is backfiring. It is driving everyone together into mass struggle. As Philippe de Grosbois, a teacher and elected member of his local union executive, stated:
The government attacked everyone, pitting us one against the other, in the hope that each would separately agree to a rotten deal. But the opposite is happening. Everyone is realizing that we are in the same boat, and that austerity is hurting us all. That's why there is such solidarity among unions, students, community organizations and parents.
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THE STUDENT union,
Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), has played a pivotal role throughout the whole struggle. Indeed, ASSÉ initiated the fight against austerity with the famous Maple Spring protests of 2012.
The student union, organized in a broader student union coalition called CLASSE, staged an unlimited student strike that shut down colleges and universities for months to stop tuition increases and demand free higher education as a social right. The students even defied a special law restricting their right to strike and demonstrate, setting off an explosion of social resistance against then-Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Charest.
ASSÉ succeeded in stopping Charest from increasing tuition and drove him to call elections, which he and his party lost in their worst defeat ever. But the Liberal Party's successor, Parti Québécois (PQ), betrayed expectations of reform, continued neoliberal attacks and soon lost support again to a revitalized Liberal Party under Couillard.
Once in power, Couillard turned to austerity to balance the budget. Some activists organized a group Spring 2015 to get ASSÉ to call a strike in the hopes of spurring workers, whose contracts were expiring, to launch an unlimited social strike.
But the groundwork had not been laid among students for such a call, and unions were not yet legally able to strike. As a result, Couillard and his allies in university administrations were able to isolate and repress the militants, especially at one of ASSÉ's key bases Université du Québec à Montréa (UQAM).
Despite this setback, ASSÉ and the broader movement have recovered. They built successful May Day demonstrations and laid out plans for actions this fall in solidarity with the union strike wave. On November 5, ASSÉ staged a one-day student strike of 52,000 and led a mass march through Montreal of several thousand students. They rallied behind the slogan: "We Know We Are Not Alone: For a Massive Reinvestment in Public Services."
They are fighting to stop $70 million in cuts to higher education and are instead demanding that the government tax the rich, invest in the public sector and guarantee good-paying jobs that provide services to the broader working class and students. "Students are suffering both directly and indirectly from the government's austerity agenda," ASSÉ spokesperson Hind Fazzazi said. "We have to stand in solidarity with the unions in their fight because it is also our fight."
Importantly, union leaders lent their solidarity to the protest. In his speech at the rally, the FAE's Sylvain Mallette declared, "We support students because they are fighting the same battle we do as teachers, to protect public services and have more money for education."
Parents have also joined the protests against Couillard. They have organized a group called
Je protège mon école publique, with over 20,000 members.
Most have never been involved in activism before. But they are creative and militant. On the first day of September and October, they formed human chains in front of schools to symbolically defend them against Couillard's budget cuts. This month, on November 2, they again formed chains at over 250 public schools and are promising more direct actions in December.
In perhaps the most unprecedented development, 1,300 community organizations went on strike on November 2-3. These organizations are not unions and don't have a tradition of work stoppages. But faced with facing drastic cuts in government support, they shut down their services for two days, culminating in a mass march in Montreal on November 3 numbering more than 10,000. Couillard's government was shocked enough by the protest to promise to restore some of the threatened funding to certain community organizations.
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DESPITE THIS gesture, Couillard has largely dismissed the rising tide of strikes and protests, refusing to relent from his hard-line stance in negotiations with the unions. He continues to maintain the fiction that there is simply no money to meet workers' demands and expand funding for public education and services.
But his actions completely undermine his claim. Just last month, Couillard came up with $1 billion to bail out Quebec's troubled plane manufacturer, Bombardier. Just like during the 2008 financial crisis, the state finds the money that capital needs, while it sells workers and social services down the river.
Ironically, Couillard's determination to balance the budget is out of step with his own Liberal Party, which just won federal elections. New Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to reverse Stephen Harper's austerity program and instead pursue three years of deficit spending to get Canada's economy out of recession. Couillard could do the same and find the money to meet union demands for good jobs for public-sector workers and social services.
But he remains intransigent, and as a result, negotiations are at a standstill. The FAE recently walked out of the negotiations, announcing that the government's "obsession with austerity" risks "sacrificing an entire generation of students." At a press conference, FAE President Sylvain Mallette declared, "We hope to send a clear and strong message. We will not accept a deterioration of our working conditions."
Last week, after the first round of strikes, Couillard claimed to present a new offer to the unions. But it was a public relations stunt. All he did was repackage the same proposal, keeping two years of wage freezes and three years of 1 percent increases, but changing the sequence. "It is essentially the same proposal," President Daniel Boyer of the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (FTQ) told reporters. "We understand that a zero was moved, from the second to the fifth year, but for us, it is really not something that is significant--far from it."
Couillard tried to bait the hook of his offer by promising to gear wage increases to workers' education levels and introduce what is in essence a two-tier wage structure, with lower pay increases for new hires. He hoped to lure union leaders and higher-skilled, better-paid workers with seniority into selling out the rest of their brothers and sisters.
"What the government is saying is, 'I'm not going to add money, I'm going to play in the salary scales, create new scales, and freshly hired nurses will be paid less,' countered Régine Laurent, president of the FIQ. "The government is telling the older, more experienced nurses 'you are going to get more, but it will be financed by the younger nurses.'"
Leaders from the FAE and FIQ declared that the government's most recent proposal was merely posturing before the government turned to hardball tactics. They suggested Couillard was pretending to bargain in good faith, while planning to impose a contract through the provincial parliament and pass a special law banning the unions' right to strike before parliament closes on December 4.
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WHERE THE struggle will go from here is unclear. So far, both sides have refused to budge, and each has cards to play.
Will Couillard stonewall negotiations and follow the precedent of state repression like Jean Charest did to the students in 2012? Is he willing to risk the social explosion that toppled Charest's government? Or will he make concessions in the hopes that the union leadership in the Common Front, FAE and FIQ will agree to a less severe but still concessionary deal? What will the union membership do if union leaders do agree to such a proposal?
These questions will be answered in the next few weeks. Everyone in Quebec's union, student and social movements are now engaged. Flush with popular support and growing in confidence, union leaders have continued to prepare for regional strikes in the run-up to the threatened general strike in the first week of December.
Union militants organized in
Lutte Commune are organizing in the rank and file to push the unions to stick to their promise to lead an unrelenting fight against austerity. They initiated a letter signed by over 400 union militants calling for unions to form local strike committees to unite workers locally and plan actions democratically.
These militants have also organized panel discussions in Gatineau, Montreal and Quebec City to discuss how unions should respond if Couillard imposes a special law. While they remain a minority current in the movement, they are agitating for union locals to follow the example of ASSÉ and, if Couillard imposes a special law, organize a broader social resistance.
If the union leaders accept a concessionary deal, they are also planning a campaign for a "no" vote to continue the struggle for a better contract. Their organizing is gathering some of best union activists in the beginnings of a rank-and-file movement to develop combative, social-justice unionism, in which unions fights not just for their sectoral interests, but for all workers.
The broader social forces in the movement are also planning further actions. The
Red Hand Coalition, which brings together unions, community organizations and ASSÉ, has called a march and rally against austerity on November 28 in Montreal. If the government imposes a special law, the coalition has promised to turn this into a demonstration against it and in defense of the unions' right to strike.
If no deal is reached by the end of November, the Common Front, most likely to be joined by FAE and FIQ, will shut down the province with a public-sector general strike, almost certainly the largest in decades. ASSÉ has also announced a student strike and rally in solidarity with the general strike in Quebec City for December 2.
