 |
Articles From
 Quebec |
| There’s
No Negotiating
With the
Couillard-Coiteux
Gang – Extend
the
Mobilization
to the Private
Sector,
Prepare a Real
General
Strike! Shut Down Quebec to Bust the Union-Busters! The Only Way to Get Rid of Austerity Is to Overthrow Capitalism Build a Revolutionary Workers Party! For more than a year, public sector workers in Quebec have been mobilizing to defend themselves against the abuses and anti-worker austerity policies of the Liberal Party government. After the massive mobilizations of the Refusons l’Austérité (We Refuse Austerity) coalition and the student marches this spring, throughout the fall there have been a series of rolling strikes, demonstrations and picketing in response to calls by the inter-union Common Front. Following the postponement of the strike planned for December 1-3, and faced with the refusal of the government to negotiate anything concerning wages and salaries, a strike by the 400,000 unionized public sector workers was called for December 9 in conjunction with a three-day teachers strike. In the course of the struggle against austerity in Quebec, there have been quite a few plans presented to redistribute wealth, for “more equitable taxation,” etc. They are all doomed to defeat. There is no solution to austerity under capitalism. The question of leadership is key. For a an all-out fight it is necessary to replace the pro-capitalist bureaucracy with a class-struggle leadership and to forge a revolutionary workers party. Shut Down Quebec to Bust the Union-Busters! (December 2015) In the Face of the War Measures of the Liberal Government, Mobilize the Heavy Battalions of the Working Class! Quebec Student Strike: Defeat the Capitalist Attack For more than three months, Quebec students have been on strike against the plan of the provincial government of Liberal Party premier Jean Charest to impose a massive tuition increase. Mobilizing up to 300,000 strikers, the students have rocked the Quebec nation. This is the largest student mobilization in the history of Quebec and one of the fiercest social struggles in Canada in recent decades. It is of prime international importance, together with the eight-month-long Chilean student strike last year. These are among the main current struggles against the capitalist war on public education, and on working people in general. Hoping to put an end to the strike, Charest rammed through, in less than 24 hours, en emergency law which amounts to a lockout of the student strikers plus a “Riot Club Law” to prohibit picket lines. To win a struggle against this international offensive of capital, it is necessary to wage a class struggle that goes beyond the bounds of phony bourgeois democracy, which is now revealed as a police state, and to forge a leadership based on a revolutionary internationalist program. Quebec Student Strike: Defeat the Capitalist Attack (20 May 2012) A “Declaration of War” Against the Student Strike Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Quebec Police State Law! The militant Quebec student strike, now in its fourth month, is under massive attack. Up to 300,000 students have struck against a huge tuition increase (originally 75%, now raised to 82%), braving vicious repression, including more than 1,600 arrests. On May 17 the Quebec government introduced Bill No. 78 which shuts down struck colleges and universities until mid-August (a lockout of the students and teachers) and gives police arbitrary power to ban pickets and any demonstrations. It intends to pass the law in one day. This is a frontal assault on democratic rights and a threat to labor: workers’strike pickets are surely next to be banned. Quebec students are in the front lines of an international battle against the capitalist assault on public education. They need our active solidarity and support. The three main Quebec union federations have condemned the new law, but what is needed is action, now, to shut down Montréal and other major Quebec cities over this vicious police-state law. Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Quebec Police State Law! (18 May 2012) See
also the web site of
Class Struggle Education Workers on Solidarity
at
CUNY with Quebec Student Strike (11 May
2012)
Showdown in Alma: To Win, Mobilize the Power of the Entire Workers Movement Quebec: Lockout at Rio Tinto Alcan On January 1, the bosses of the Rio Tinto Alcan aluminum plant in the city of Alma, in northeastern Quebec, imposed a lockout in order to stifle the will to struggle of the 787 working men and women. By means of a sharp increase in subcontracting, the world leader of aluminum production wants to drastically reduce the wages of several hundred workers to less than half of what they earn today. The locked-out workers have received many gestures of solidarity, but what counts is action. It is necessary to strike and occupy all of the RTA installations in Quebec and the rest of Canada to cut off its profits at the source. For the workers to win, they must break the chains imposed by the bourgeois courts and undertake determined class struggle to impose the law of the workers against that of the bosses. Quebec: Lockout at Rio Tinto Alcan (20 February 2012) |
 It’ll Take Hard Class Struggle to Beat the Labor-Hating Giant On August 2, workers at the Wal-Mart store in Jonquière, Quebec won a union, making it the only unionized installation of the notoriously anti-labor chain in all of North America. With the support of a solid majority of the 170 employees, 80 percent of them women, the workforce is now represented by the Canadian United Food and Commercial Workers (TUAC in French). It is no accident that the first union victory against Wal-Mart should come in Quebec, where on May Day some 100,000 workers marched against the union-busting laws of the Liberal Party government, and in the northern Saguenay-Lac-St.-Jean region, which has seen a series of militant labor battles over the last year. In January, aluminum workers in Jonquière took over an Alcan plant for almost three weeks when management announced the shutdown of a foundry. Union officials look to Quebec’s more liberal labor laws to aid them, but these same laws were used to declare the Alcan plant occupation illegal. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in both the U.S. and Mexico, and union militants can learn important lessons from the struggle in Quebec. The Internationalist traveled to Jonquière to speak with the workers. Here is our report. Attention Wal-Mart Workers, Union Victory in Quebec (September 2004) |
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