Port of Montreal: Capitalism needed a special law to put an end to the strike

The movement, which seemed so combative, lasted only a few days. This time, the federal government used its joker to violate the right to strike of workers across the country. This time, it was the longshoremen at the Port of Montreal who got a taste of the violence of the state, which has no qualms about abusing its powers to serve the interests of the bosses and crush the workers. The special law forced the workers to return to work or face fines of up to $100,000 per day of “violation. Now that the strike has been broken, a mediator-arbitrator will have the role of deciding the content of the next collective agreement. Faced with this reality, we must accept the following facts: for Canadian democracy, the right to strike is in fact a privilege that the state can take away at any time.

Anger and the will to fight

The 1,150 dockworkers at the Port of Montreal have not had a work contract since December 2018 and have never been able to come to an agreement with the employer side. The union’s demands were mainly opposed to changes in shift assignments that the bosses wanted to impose on its employees, who already have to deal with unstable schedules, making it very difficult to balance work and family. In August, the inflexibility of the bosses had already pushed the union into a strike (for a period of 10 days), which was then postponed after an agreement in principle was reached. However, with management unwilling to back down, 99% of CUPE Local 375 members voted for an indefinite general strike on April 26. Unfortunately, all this fighting spirit did not carry much weight in the face of the repressive measures taken by the Canadian government, which hastened to impose a special law with the aim of breaking the strikers. The latter was adopted by the House of Commons on Wednesday night, April 29.

Special laws are not emergency laws

Special laws have long been commonplace in Canada. A similar law had crushed the postal workers in 2018. In 2017, it was government lawyers who were victims of a law passed by the provincial government. 2015, it was CP employees, broken by the federal government. Since the creation of the Labour Code in 1964, no less than 42 special laws have been used to break various strike movements. So we see that the state, which itself has framed the workers’ right to strike as an essential element of democracy, has no qualms about taking it away from the most combative elements of the proletariat when they decide to fight to defend their working conditions. Many people are offended by these laws, which they consider undemocratic, and the fact that they have been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional reinforces their position. But this is not the case. Court overruling may indeed save some union sections or individuals affected by the laws from paying the hefty fines imposed on them. However, they do not prevent these laws from performing their real function of breaking the movement, which they do every time. Workers should be under no illusion that although the courts work hard to give the impression of impartiality and equality of all before the law, they are bourgeois institutions that serve primarily to consolidate the power of the ruling class. Workers cannot count on them to defend them.

In fact, bourgeois democracy is only following its normal evolution in this rotting capitalism. In the countries of advanced capitalism, the bourgeois state tends to centralize and impose tighter and tighter control over workers’ organizations and society in general. This interference in labor disputes will only get worse and the state’s repression will only become more violent. There is no point in hoping for a return to the “real democracy” (which has never existed) that some liberals dream of, and which calls on strikers to defy special laws and take the protection of the courts. In such a situation, workers should not be blind to the fact that the contradictions between labor and capital are becoming more and more severe. Therefore, the unions must be ready to take the struggle to a higher level.

Lack of combativeness of the union leadership

As has happened so often in the past, the longshoremen were left powerless when they were hit by the special law. As long as this situation continues, workers across the country will never really be able to defend themselves. In the future, it will take a convergence of struggles that brings workers together by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, to create a movement strong enough to challenge the special laws. This will only be possible by breaking out of union corporatism. Unfortunately, we cannot currently count on the union leadership, which tends to lack ambition, if not courage. We need the rank and file to fight to force leadership to act and change this unequal balance of power. In the context of the Port of Montreal longshoremen, the isolation of the movement allowed the government to crush it in a matter of days. This must stop.