The union movement today is at a crossroads. Will it take up the challenge flung at it by the capitalists with their increasing anti-worker policies? Or will it let itself be dragged into collaborating with the bosses and the government, and drop major struggles as they would like it to do?
This crucial question presently faces the labour movement. The question is all the more urgent because of the severe economic crisis shaking the country and hitting workers with full force. While the capitalists try to make them shoulder the weight of the crisis, workers are fighting back – each day sees fresh strikes and other struggles breaking out. Workers are looking to their unions to firmly take up the fight for their rights.
In these charged circumstances a major problem has become evident: the top union leadership prefers to collaborate with management and the government, rather than fighting against them.
CLC president Dennis McDermott looks for ways to collaborate with the Conservative government, sabotages workers’ battles, like that of the postal workers, and tries to commit the labour movement to working alongside management in joint commissions and institutions.
In Quebec, leaders like the QFL’s Louis Laberge, the Steelworkers’ Jean Gerin-Lajoie, or the CNTU’s Andre L’Heureux do their utmost to support the Parti Quebecois and derail workers’ struggles.
A current of resistance has, however, come to the surface among many rank-and-file union activists. Criticisms of the leadership’s policies are coming in from many locals, opposition is vocal at union conventions, etc.
Many people are asking how can we fight these misleaders, what kind of unions should we have, and how has such a situation come about?
Members of our Party are active in this current of resistance and these questions are a constant subject of discussion with their fellow workers and unionists. They answer the scores of questions on the party’s line in the union movement and refute the slanders the top brass use to smear communist work.
This pamphlet sets out in detail the WCP’s position on unions – the problems affecting them as well as what must be done to strengthen the militant trend and change the unions into class-struggle organizations, unions that defend the workers’ interests.
Communists hold that unions are the broadest organizations the working class has, that they were created and grew through the hard work and struggle of millions of workers all across our country. We maintain that it is the duty of all workers, as well as of our Party, to defend and reinforce these irreplaceable weapons in the class struggle against attacks by the capitalists.
The aim of unions is to serve workers’ struggles and help push forward the fundamental battle to eliminate capitalist exploitation. That is why we fight the leaders that want to turn the unions away from this goal.
We hope that union activists will discuss this pamphlet with party members and sympathizers, and that they will find it useful in their work and struggles in the unions. We also hope that it will prompt them to look into the Party Program, which also includes our analysis of the main political issues of the day and the path to socialist revolution in Canada.
October 1979