On November 6, in all regions of Quebec, 420,000 workers from the Union Common Front will be on strike; a warning shot from the union movement which will cause disruptions in CEGEPs, schools, the health sector and social services.
A number of this magnitude for a strike movement has not happened often in the last 30 years, notes Barry Eidlin, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University who has compiled data for more than a century in Canada. The researcher notes that there has been an increase in the number of people on strike in the country in recent years.
A situation that he explains by several factors. “There has been an erosion of the quality of work in Canada for four decades, wages have stagnated and there is growing inequality,” he maintains. The pandemic has also crystallized these trends, he adds, and the current state of the labor market gives workers the opportunity to demand more.
In primary and secondary schools, employees and teachers will be on strike from midnight to 10:30 a.m. Monday. Professionals in CEGEPs will be on strike from midnight to noon, while in the health sector, workers are subject to the law on essential services.
“To use a fairly common image, it’s a warning shot,” analyzes Thomas Collombat, associate professor of political science at the University of Quebec in Outaouais (UQO). There have already been other strategies in the past, such as slow strikes or sectoral strikes, region by region and sector by sector, he says. “There, the Common Front decided to go all together for a day to play on strength in numbers and cohesion,” he underlines.
The former president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) Jacques Létourneau recognizes that this strike will not paralyze services in Quebec. “They are going there gradually,” he said. I have the impression that the question of public opinion has something to do with it, it can be fragile. »
But the workers “are quite upset”, “in a dynamic where they no longer have much to lose”, for having given themselves unlimited general strike mandates, he notes. The last time the Common Front unions issued indefinite general strike mandates was in 1983, but not all organizations implemented them.
A second strike sequence is already being considered by the Common Front if “their message is not heard” by the government. “We have a context which ensures that workers feel legitimate and justified in their demands, and that they have the wind in their sails,” thinks Thomas Collombat. So it would be difficult to imagine that we would not use all this balance of power. »