Lockout at Jean Coutu

ICP Leaflet in Quebec Oct. 2020

Lockout at the distribution center

The 680 workers at the Jean Coutu Drugstores distribution center, located in Varennes, Quebec have been without an employment contract since December 31, 2019. On September 24th, they faced closed doors as the employer decided to end negotiations using a lockout to try to undermine the morale of the workers. The Jean Coutu Pharmacy Warehouse Workers Union (CSN) deplores this contemptuous maneuver by senior management since the employees were ready to negotiate and a conciliator had even been added to the file to facilitate the process.

Among other things, the workers at the center are concerned about the call for subcontracting and the non-respect of seniority clauses since the Pharmacies Brunet joined the Jean Coutu “family”. And for good reason, the era is one of multiple work restructurings, of cheap jobs and a decline in the living conditions of the proletariat as a whole, the class that works and produces social wealth. They would like to sell us all the idea of bracelets in order to track us down, like at Amazon, where this bourgeois bureaucracy is today experimenting with ever more sophisticated methods of exploitation.

The lockout, this employer violence

While today all workers can no longer even use the strike as a means of pressure, with decrees and other special laws coming out of the government’s pockets as soon as shareholders’ profits are attacked, the bosses can still legally use the lockout to break our movement. Indeed, it is the right of capital to use its employees as it sees fit. For example, in 2018, the Bécancour aluminum smelter did the same thing with its workers for 18 months, pushing them into misery and financial stress. How do we escape?

The problem of corporatist unionism and regime unions

Nowadays, trade union centers are increasingly becoming bodies of employer co-management. They are called regime unions because they collaborate with the employers to preserve the health of the national economies and the capitalist regime. Also, despite the good will of the union locals and their leaders to lead the struggles in order to make gains, these unions unfortunately come up against a structure that does not favor our social class, let alone the struggle. We are thus grappling with the bourgeois legal structure, its laws, its decrees and especially its financial interests which it tries to protect at all costs. Thus, this legal – and trade union – structure confines us to carrying out our struggles in isolation. For example, two neighboring factories, which would fall into struggle at the same time, will lead the struggle each on their own side. Two different factories, two different labor contracts, two different struggles, sometimes even at the same time? This is the reason why workers are unable to protect their working and living conditions.

Solidarity, the workers’ only lever

The working class is numerically very large. It is the working class that produces the work on which the whole of human society is articulated, and it is therefore the working class alone that is essential. Those who manage production and profit are only parasites that gorge themselves on our blood. The bourgeoisie effectively forces the proletarians to overproduce and generate economic growth in order to create the wealth it monopolizes. This small class holds the means of production and reproduction of our work and it is this class that forces us all to destroy our environment and condemns us to exploitation and misery. Workers are the artisans of the world. The working class represents work – which is the center of our society – and therefore society as a whole. The whole of this class shares the same social interests, the same class interests; interests that are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeoisie. It is therefore necessary for it to join forces and show solidarity. This is the only way it can have a real impact and make the bosses tremble. Whether it be all public sector workers, represented among others by teachers and nurses, daycare workers, grocery clerks, longshoremen and employees of the Jean Coutu pharmacy distribution center. The workers are in perpetual combat. When it’s not their workplace that is locked out, it’s their brothers and sisters at a local grocery store who are being harassed for taking two minutes too long on a lousy coffee break.

Don’t remain isolated and don’t rely only on your union executive to lead the struggle. Organize as an Autonomous base committee; seek the support of other struggling workers, other combative union locals or workers’ organizations like the Immigrant Workers Center, which recently fought alongside the employees of Dollarama ; also call on solidarity unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which knows how to fight offensively and victoriously.

It is numbers and unity that are the real weapons of the workers in struggle.