Make Foreign Corporations Prove Their Business Models are Viable if their Employees Unionize
Unions are a basic value of Quebec society.
Politicians of different stripes in a number of places including Quebec have over the last while floated or instituted the idea of requiring immigrants to make some sort of pledge to uphold the civic values of their new country, or to pass a test showing that they understand and support these values. Typically the values in question are things like the equality of men and women, the rights of queer people, and the secular character of the state. The argument in Quebec is that people who move here should at the very least not be hostile to principles considered basic to our society, and as far as that goes, I don’t have very strong opinions one way or the other. I can see that this urge to grill immigrants on their values often comes from a place of underlying nastiness, and I roll my eyes a bit at the narrative that human rights are inherent to ‘Western values’ and so on because as a civilization we discovered universal human rights about five seconds ago. I can also see that it’s fundamentally better for everyone if there’s somewhat of a consensus on the concept of women having rights and the state not being run by religious lunatics, and I don’t see any reason why immigrants trying to move here permanently shouldn’t be expected to be on board with that kind of thing. So: whatever. I don’t care that much either way.
However -- I am in the habit of always, always, always asking: what about class? And as usual things immediately start to get more interesting when you do that.
First of all, here’s a value that I consider pretty fundamental to my society: we have the right to unionize. We have the right to a decent wage. We do not, in Quebec, expect people who work a normal, legit job to live in poverty. We do not expect there to be a destitute underclass available as a permanent source of cheap labour for foreign corporations. As a society we remember when Quebec looked like that because it wasn’t very long ago, and we remember that we transformed our society completely so that it would never look like that again. Labour in Quebec has rights. Working people live in some dignity. Dire poverty is an outrage. The belief that this should be so is part of what makes us who we are as a people, and the widespread and deeply-held nature of that belief is part of what sets us apart in North America. Yet labour rights are never mentioned in discussions about immigration and Quebec values.
Second of all, here’s a group that regularly comes into Quebec and sets up shop and considers itself above our laws and norms and, for some reason, never has to sign any solemn oaths to uphold our values: foreign megacorporations. In particular, there have been repeated instances of giant American companies moving into Quebec, setting up stores and warehouses and so on, and then shutting down sites or even pulling out of the province when Quebecois workers organize themselves into unions. Most recently, Amazon decided to permanently shut down all its worksites in the province of Quebec and lay off all its employees after warehouse workers in Laval organized, forming the new Amazon Labour Union-CSN. And yet, no one seems to be accusing Amazon of having failed to integrate and learn about the democratic values of Quebec society.
In both cases, the reason is fairly obvious: class rule by the rich. Even the progressive elements of the ruling class, such as they are, obviously have no real interest in enshrining the rights of labour into any official catalogue of national values. And they would of course never dream of forcing American billionaires to respect the basic norms around labour rights that were established in this province following the Quiet Revolution. But just because it’s obvious that rich people and their pet politicians in the liberal and conservative parties are traitors with alien values doesn’t mean we need to accept this situation as normal.
An embarrassing thing about the right-wing nationalists who rule Quebec right now is that they are enormous pussies who cannot even imagine standing up for normal people and who love nothing more than getting pissed on by Americans. They think of national dignity solely in terms of bullying broke immigrants and they clench their pimply asses and whimper whenever the possibility of standing up to foreign capital presents itself. Luckily, Quebec has a strong left which understand that Quebec’s self-respect as a nation is inseparable from our self-respect as a class – as a society we refuse to ever again be nothing but cheap labour for foreign capitalists. As the Americans continue to spiral further and further into imperial dementia and their billionaires take ever more formal control of the American government, the need for a socialist government in Quebec grows ever more pronounced.
Once in power, the left in Quebec needs to set down some red lines and not allow them to be crossed. One of these should be that foreign corporations who engage in blatant union-busting, such as Amazon, should simply have their assets in the province seized and distributed to new crown corporations operating with government charters. And moving forward, foreign corporations trying to move into Quebec and do business here should, at the very least, be asked to prove that their business model is viable should their employees choose to unionize – because labour in Quebec has the inalienable right to unionize and because our values as a society include this right. If your business cannot operate with unionized labour then your business obviously cannot operate in Quebec, nor should it. You’re trying to run a business premised on conditions – permanent non-unionization – which, by law, cannot exist in this province.
It makes no sense to obsessively scrutinize immigrants over their commitment to democratic norms while allowing infinitely more powerful foreign corporations to operate here with values that openly contradict our own, and it makes no sense to omit something as basic as the right to unionization from our conception of our fundamental values. When we think about enforcing our values, putting all the emphasis on individuals, the majority of whom are workers, and completely ignoring corporations is a classic blind spot made possible only by the massive and overwhelming quantities of ruling-class propaganda to which we are subjected. In order to stand up for ourselves on a very basic level, foreign corporations must be asked to show that they understand and support the democratic values of Quebec, which should include the right of labour to organize itself, and on this they must be held to account, if anything more stringently than individuals. Their business models must provide for the existence of unions and their actions must align with Quebec values and Quebec laws. And if they can’t? Good riddance: no amount of American cash is worth the stripping away of the rights of Quebecois workers.
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