I’ve been working as a painter in the construction industry for some time now. Negotiations to renew our collective agreements began a few months ago. Since the start of negotiations, union leaders have tried to keep workers in the dark. A colleague told me that when she tried to find out more about the subject, her union representative replied in an irritated tone, “Don’t worry!”
So it came as no surprise that when the Alliance syndicale de la construction suddenly announced a tentative agreement in the commercial institutional sector that falls far short of our needs, a large proportion of workers felt betrayed.
Most of the comments on the Facebook post about the announcement were negative. I also took the time to write a comment denouncing the lack of involvement of the workers and the lack of information, while calling on them to vote no and ask the union leaders for a real plan to fight back. My comment ended up being one of the most liked on the post.
Following this, a representative of CSN-Construction, the union with which I’m affiliated, wrote to me in a private message to ask if we could talk. So I decided to take the opportunity to ask some questions to hear him out, in an attempt to understand how the union bureaucracy thinks. That call ended up being very revealing.
The rep seemed to have two main goals for the call: to convince me that I should be happy with the sell-out deal, as well as to convince me that the CSN leadership is better than the other unions. When I asked him why we hadn’t heard anything about the negotiations and why a tentative agreement had come out so suddenly, he revealed that, in fact, the agreement was reached towards the end of January, but they waited until March 5 to reveal it in order to “avoid misinformation”. When I asked him why members hadn’t been mobilized, he replied that workers simply weren’t interested, and essentially that workers are ungrateful. “I go out to the sites every day to explain to them that it’s thanks to us that you all have what you have,” he explained.
So I told him I disagreed, and that workers are capable of seeing their purchasing power decline, while they work like dogs, which generates a lot of discontent. And that if unions were able to channel this discontent, workers would want to participate in their unions. To this, the representative replied: “Yes, but we mustn’t feed the anger”, since the role of the union is to work within the “ machine ”, and it’s very difficult to change things through this machine. He then defended the government institution of the Quebec Construction Commission, saying that it represents “half management, but also half labour”. He ended the conversation by defending the CSN-Construction’s record, while attacking the leaders of the other construction unions, the FTQ and the International.
What we see in this discussion is the narrow mindedness of the union bureaucracy. These people are completely out of touch with the members they represent, and are primarily concerned with their own interests within the bureaucratic machine. We must turn our backs on this stale bureaucratic tradition and revive the revolutionary democratic fighting methods. This is the only way to we will be able to fight back and win against the attacks of the bosses.
