Thirty trade unions demonstrated Monday in Montreal against the “growing precariousness” of workers and for an increase in wages in a context of high inflation.
Posted at 2:48 p.m.
A few hundred people gathered in the early afternoon at La Fontaine Park before marching on Cherrier Street displaying banners with anti-capitalist messages.
The unions are launching “a call to make the bosses pay for inflation, by demanding a catch-up salary and the indexation of salaries to the cost of living”, can we read in a press release from the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN) . “Companies have taken advantage of inflation to raise their prices, which has enabled them to reap record profits”, it is denounced, which corresponds to the conclusions of a study by the Institute for Research and Development. socio-economic information (IRIS) published in August.
“We are here to decry this situation, but also to call for the maintenance and reinvestment in public services,” said the president of the Regional Council FTQ Metropolitan Montreal, Marc-Édouard Joubert, met on site.
Dominique Daigneault, the president of the Central Montreal Metropolitan Council of the CSN, has a more ambitious objective: “What we are calling for today is to put an end, no more and no less, to the exploitation of workers”, she said. She also claims “that we can live in a society where we are not based only on the profit that the richest of the population can reap, but on the well-being of the population. »
“The pandemic has brought to light the extent to which workers are poorly protected in the event of unemployment,” said Jérémie Dhavernas, of the Mouvement Action-Chômage de Montréal, quoted in the CSN press release. “The temporary measures have improved the situation”, according to him, but the union organizations denounce the end of the easing of the conditions of access to employment insurance at the end of September.
“It’s back to square one for those who have the misfortune to find themselves without a job: a one-way ticket to poverty,” he said.