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    Vol.60/No.19           May 13, 1996 
 
 
Need To Demand Jobs For All, Not `Canadian Jobs'  

BY MONICA JONES

STE.-THÉRESE, Quebec - The announcement April 9 that Paccar of Bellevue, Washington, was shutting down their Kenworth truck plant here has provoked a huge discussion across the province of Quebec.

"Kenworth will double production in Mexico," blared the French-language Montreal daily La Presse April 11. In the Gazette, the English-language daily, it was "Kenworth closing kills 900 jobs - Strike at Sainte-Therese truck plant partly to blame." Since Aug. 8, 1995, 850 production and office workers, members of Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 728, have been on strike for better pensions.

Faced with losing jobs and the media campaign against us, the union reacted immediately. In a meeting April 10, striker after striker rose to propose how we could fight back.

Since then, Kenworth strikers have gone far and wide campaigning to fight the company's layoff plans. We have blocked highways and had car cavalcades. We traveled to the federal capital in Ottawa and the provincial one in Quebec City, demanding government intervention. The biggest demonstration so far was held April 24 when over 400 strikers and their families filed by the plant.

Why is Kenworth closing up shop in Ste.-Therese? How can we continue to organize to defend ourselves against employers that throw us out of work? CAW president Buzz Hargrove says, "The real question for us as Canadians is, do we have the political will and guts to stand up to the U.S. in defense of Canadian jobs?" Buying into this nationalist framework, some strikers have carried anti- Mexican picket signs.

As a worker who stands to lose my job at Kenworth I don't see it that way. We need to forge links with U.S. and Mexican workers, not fight with them over jobs. Employers use borders and language to divide us. They try to create competition between workers in different factories. We built our unions to overcome these divisions. The only effective way to combat unemployment is to fight for jobs for all-worldwide.

Last Tuesday, April 23, when strikers gathered to collect our strike pay we discussed these questions.

Roland Tison suggested, "We should all go down to Mexico and help them bring in the union. People in Mexico have nothing. Those that work have no health and safety protection. They are exposed to chemicals that cause birth defects."

"It's free trade among other things. We'll never know for sure," said Claire, an office worker for over 20 years at Kenworth.

"Charles Piggot is a big capitalist. For him it's all money. If he can make more money he'll go to Mexico," stated Lucie Robert. "It benefits workers in Mexicali but what does it give us? The company is playing a game. I think they intended to close all along. They let the strike go on so they could get everything in place in Mexico," she concluded. The Piggot family is Paccar's major shareholder.

I pointed out that it's not workers in Mexico or the United States who decide to close factories and go after our jobs and pensions. It is the bosses and their governments, of any nationality. And they are doing it more and more in today's depression conditions, where the capitalists in each country face sharper competition for markets where they can turn a profit.

Paccar, Kenworth's parent company, says the plant is being closed because of a 30 percent drop in orders. Their share of the North American market has shrunk from 19.2 percent in 1992 to 15.3 percent in 1995. They have stopped assembly work at one of two plants in the Seattle area, laying off half of the workforce, more than 800 workers. They cite the eight-month strike as a factor in the decision to close the plant here.

Our starting point as workers can't be whether the company is doing well or not. The bosses will always say one plant is more profitable than another to justify squeezing us more or as a way of convincing us we will be worse off if we fight. Our interests lie not in saving capitalism, let alone a particular company, but in protecting the working class from the ravages of this system in its decline.

Our main strike demand to improve pensions starts to address the major problem of unemployment. If Kenworth workers were able to retire with a decent pension more would have done so. This would have opened up badly needed jobs.

Our CAW brothers and sisters who work at General Motors and Novabus are sympathetic to this fight for better pensions and to save our jobs. Workers at Firestone recently returned to work after a long strike that coincided with our own. They were fighting for relief from the long hours they work. We have allies among the unemployed and students who are also under attack.

But working people cannot win against the capitalist class factory by factory. The labor movement needs to fight for jobs for all, on an international scale. Rather than hoping the Quebec and Canadian governments rescue Kenworth - the Quebec government is currently discussing with Paccar a proposal for loans to modernize the Ste.-Therese plant - we should demand they implement a shorter workweek, with no loss in pay. This would spread the available work around.

Unions need to champion the struggles of Quebecois, Natives, and other oppressed nationalities. We took a page out of Mohawk history when we blocked the highway, like they did in 1990.

We should find ways to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters in Mexico, and elsewhere in the world, such as calling for canceling the third world debt to the imperialist banks in Canada and the United States.

A working-class struggle along these lines can build the kind of solidarity that we will need to build a movement to overturn capitalism and establish a government run by the working class, run in the interests of the vast majority of humanity. It's the only way to stop for all time the likes of the Piggot family.

Monica Jones is a member of CAW Local 728, on strike at Kenworth.  
 
 
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