For the rejection of agreement between the CAQ and union bureaucracies

It solves nothing of substance and blocks any hope of a new 1972

January 15, 2024 | by Marc Bonhomme

You have to listen to the Midi-Info interview (15/01/24, 12:43) of Radio-Canada with a teacher from Montreal’s Saint-Michel district to understand why she and, in her words, her colleagues at her school, following a meeting to feel each other’s pulse, are leaning towards rejecting the FAE’s tentative agreement unless they accept it “out of desperation”, as she puts it. The salary negotiated is not commensurate with their university training and responsibility, she adds. She could have pointed out that while it may compensate for inflation – the compensatory formula for the last three years is locked in at just 1% more – including the delayed 2022 increase, there will be nothing to catch up. The worsening climate crisis and, no doubt, wars do not augur well for inflation control. And we’re still a long way from matching the overall remuneration of employees in other public sectors, which at the outset was almost 23% higher.

According to the teacher, the problem lies in the sectoral improvements for which the FAE had high expectations. Let’s not forget that in the Greater Montreal area, which is unionized by the FAE, teaching conditions are generally more difficult than elsewhere, due to poorer backgrounds, higher levels of immigration requiring the learning of French and, last but not least, higher levels of cream-skimming by private schools. Firstly, the classroom assistants will not be the specialists required, for whom there is no commitment even at the end of the long five-year collective agreement, nor for the creation of new classes to lighten the burden of existing ones. Asserting that it is impossible to remedy the situation now does not excuse the failure to make a concrete commitment for the following years, nor does it make up for it with a compensatory bonus that solves nothing, concludes the teacher. Not to mention, adds the teacher, that the expected help, even if deficient, requires a complex score of difficulty that is difficult to achieve.

On the health side, things are less clear. But negotiations with the FIQ, also outside the  Common Front, are dragging on because, in addition to the inadequate wage offer, it wants nothing to do with the “flexibility” demanded by the CAQ as part of the takeover of the healthcare sector by the “top guns”. This suggests that the Common Front swallowed the pill in return for additional monetary compensation for difficult shifts and job types where the gap with the market was glaring. Are we to understand, too, that the Common Front also showed flexibility on the education front, which would be less of a problem for the CSQ unionizing outside the most difficult large urban centers? We must therefore understand that the CAQ did not play the unions outside the Common Front off against the latter, but rather the opposite, going so far as to institute an acceptable back-to-school policy to make the bitter pill easier to swallow. Realizing the maneuver, if they realize it, will the unionized women of the Common Front be able to show solidarity by rejecting the corporatism of their union leaderships?  Taking five weeks to vote on the agreement smacks of the manipulative will of the union bureaucracy that wants to frame all these assemblies. Let’s not forget that there is no organized trade union left to encourage them to do so.

If this agreement in principle goes through, this pseudo feminist victory, dixit Le Devoir, will leave the same bitter taste of improved status quo as the so-called victory of the 2012 Maple Spring. The air will give off the same nauseating smell of a missed opportunity with no other relay on the horizon. This strategic defeat, for that’s what it’s all about, will leave the people of Quebec, and even more their proletariat, facing the great existential void of proliferating wars against a backdrop of a spiraling climate crisis that will be hastened by the rise of the fascist far right, which is threatening this year in the United States and shortly thereafter in Canada. More than ever, we need a new 1972.