MONTREAL — Members of the Communist League here and the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. recently visited the picket lines of 550 striking Metro supermarket warehouse workers in Laval, just north of Montreal, and the 105 locked-out Siemens Electric workers in Trois Rivieres, to extend solidarity and cover their battles for the Militant. Workers told us how the bosses’ government, its courts and labor boards are being used against workers and our unions to try to defeat efforts to win wages that keep up with inflation.
In the first few days of the strike Metro obtained a court injunction barring workers from picketing within 5 meters (15 feet) of facility entrances. Their union, the United Grocers Workers Union, part of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), later lodged a complaint with the Quebec Labour Tribunal because of the company’s illegal use of scabs.
“Even though the labor board ruled in our favor in April,” picket captain Mathieu Klein told us, “they’ve never done anything to enforce their ruling. This shows that the government is on the side of the bosses, not the workers.”
“You’re right about who the government supports,” Craig Honts, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Congress in New Jersey, said. “The government is not just on the side of the bosses, it’s the main instrument the capitalist class uses to protect their interests, along with their courts, labor boards, cops and other institutions. This is why workers need our own party to fight for a workers government to put a different class in power than the capitalist rulers in both Canada and the United States.”
During a July 28 solidarity visit to the locked-out Siemens workers’ picket line, Stephane Cote, one of the Steelworkers unionists locked out there since April 15, told me they face the very same anti-union tactics as the Metro strikers.
Days after Siemens locked workers out, the company got an injunction against picketing. Compliant judges regularly oblige company demands for anti-union injunctions. These rulings open the door to bosses using scab labor, as both Metro and Siemens are doing.
Workers’ right to strike and picket
When workers withdraw our labor power in a strike, effective picket lines are needed to prevent the bosses from using scabs to maintain production in an effort to force workers to accept substandard wages and working conditions.
In 1977, the Quebec government passed a law barring the use of replacement workers during a strike. But it’s almost never enforced.
The unions at Metro and Siemens filed complaints against the two companies for using strikebreakers. Inspectors from the Ministry of Labour agreed that both companies had broken the law, but the Labour Tribunal has done nothing to stop them to this day.
It took 14 months after a strike had begun in December 2024 by workers at two Quebec City stores of Renaud-Bray, Quebec’s biggest bookstore chain, before the Labour Tribunal imposed a piddling 7,000 Canadian dollar ($5,000) fine on the company. Such penalties are “peanuts for wealthy companies,” Cote said.
Even bosses “convicted by the courts, like Blaise Renaud [owner of Renaud-Bray], can multiply their anti-union tactics and trample on workers’ rights without fear of real consequences,” Katia Lelievre, vice president of the CSN, said in a June 27 press release.
Workers across Canada and the U.S., as well as in all other capitalist countries, face growing attacks on the right to strike in defense of working people’s class interests. In the past two years the federal government in Ottawa has used its Canada Industrial Relations Board to rule illegal almost every single major strike under its jurisdiction — including strikes by railroad, port, postal workers, as well as Air Canada flight attendants.
The flight attendants pointed the way forward by defying the back-to-work order, keeping their picket lines up and making important gains in their fight.
Like all capitalist governments, the Canadian rulers in Ottawa and provincial rulers in Quebec City claim they rule in the interests of “the people.” This is a total fraud.
They act on behalf of only one thing — the class interests of the tiny handful of billionaire capitalist families who run the economy and control the government.
Workers need to break from any reliance on the capitalist rulers, their governments and their political parties and build a working-class party of our own that can organize to fight to defend our class interests and to win political power. The Communist League is the vanguard of such a party.
We can advance that battle by joining the striking Metro workers and locked-out Siemens workers on their picket lines, fighting against the bosses’ use of court injunctions and strikebreakers against their just fight for wages that keep up with rising inflation, and opposing Ottawa and Quebec’s attacks on the right to strike.
François Bradette contributed to this article.