MONTREAL — “Workers have the same interests in the U.S., Canada and around the world. We need to stand against Washington and Ottawa’s efforts to use their tariff confrontation to line us up behind them and against each other,” Craig Honts said at a March 8 Militant Labor Forum here. He is the Socialist Workers Party candidate for lieutenant governor of New Jersey.
Honts spoke on a panel with Jean-Baptiste Uguelin, a leader of the effort to unionize an Amazon distribution center in Laval, near Montreal, and Joe Young, a member of the Communist League just back from Edmonton, Alberta, where he joined the actions of 6,000 striking school workers and reported on their strike for the Militant. Twenty-two people attended the forum.
The SWP “grew out of working-class opposition to the imperialist slaughter of World War I and in support for the Russian Revolution, which showed that the working class taking power was the road to ending the war,” said Honts. “And it did end it. Workers took power in Russia in 1917 and said, ‘We’re done fighting this war.’”
“The crises of capitalism that drove the convulsions and world wars of the 20th century are very much continuing today,” he said, “seen in the intensifying bare-knuckle competition, the raw imperialist arrogance, the march toward more and more wars.
“This sharpening competition among imperialist powers is reflected in escalating attacks on workers everywhere,” Honts continued. “Tariffs are among the ways the U.S. capitalist class is fighting to further its own interests against its rivals.
“And the attacks on undocumented immigrants are also aimed at promoting their own profit-driven interests. They have no intention of deporting the 11 million-plus undocumented workers in the U.S. today,” he said. “They aim to deport just enough to terrorize the millions without papers into working for even less under worse conditions, increase their exploitation, and divide the working class in the process. It’s why the SWP calls for an amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S.”
The SWP campaign, Honts said, explains that working people “need to break from the parties of the capitalist class and take political power into our own hands.”
Uguelin described the brutal working conditions that led 230 workers at Amazon to join the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN) last year, in the first of the company’s warehouses to unionize in Canada. “We could have up to 20 injuries every two weeks,” he said.
Fight to build unions today
Many workers there are immigrants who feared joining the effort, he said. Ottawa deports thousands of immigrants every year. Uguelin explained that it took a lot of face-to-face discussions outside the workplace to win a majority for the union. He said he had only come from Haiti two years ago and this was his first job here.
“In the middle of negotiating our first contract, the company announced Jan. 22 it was closing all its seven distribution centers in Quebec,” he said. The CSN estimates that close to 4,000 workers will lose their jobs at Amazon and related companies. Amazon workers in Laval are now fighting for improved compensation when they are laid off.
“Unionizing Amazon will be difficult,” he said. “But it is possible if we work at it. The working class faces many obstacles. We need to make progress toward taking power to end capitalism, the system that is exploiting us.”
School workers strike in Alberta
Joe Young, a member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, described what he and Communist League supporter Ned Dmytryshyn from Vancouver learned from their trip to Alberta.
What began in November as a local strike by school support workers in Fort McMurray in the north of the province has since expanded across Alberta, involving more than 6,000 workers, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
“These workers, mainly women, do everything but the teaching,” Young said. “They are librarians, janitors, educational assistants, cooks and more. They are grossly underpaid. They haven’t gotten a wage increase in nine years and have had no contract for four years. Workers in rural areas are paid 5 Canadian dollars an hour ($3.50) less than those in urban centers.”
It’s a hard-fought struggle. “The government offer is well under inflation,” said Young. “The schools are open as the teachers aren’t on strike. Strikebreakers have been hired. The government refuses to negotiate, hoping to starve the strikers out.
“But they are determined, and solidarity is substantial,” he said, urging forum goers to “make the fight known. Ask your union, student or other organizations to send solidarity messages.”
In the lively discussion that followed, one participant asked whether it is really possible to unionize huge outlets like Amazon and Walmart.
Yes, the panelists and several participants said. “In the U.S.,” Honts said, “some 400,000 workers went on strike over the last four years. Many won gains in wages and improved working conditions, and, in the case of hotel workers in California, in defending immigrant co-workers.”
“The Amazon workers in Laval,” Steve Penner, a leader of the Communist League, said, “have shown it is possible to overcome the divisions fostered by the rulers and organize the unorganized, an essential task for the labor movement.
“But trade union struggles are not enough. Workers need our own political party, a party of labor based on the unions that could mobilize our strength in a fight for improved working and living conditions, but above all to take political power and reorganize society on the basis of human needs.
“The parties leading this course forward today are the Communist League here and the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S.,” he said. “We ask you to join us in this effort.”