New laws to break strike

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Canada's 'playboy' prime minister has other talents besides an ability to offend Her Britannic Majesty's refined sensibilities.

Pierre Trudeau may still be sporting 'casual' clothes, but he has been hard at work over the last month, making frantic preparations against a hard winter of confrontation with the Canadian working class.

Postal workers have been the latest target for his energetic activities. The 23,000 sorters and clerical staff of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers have been without a contract for 15 months, as management has attempted. to impose the kind of mass speedup and redundancies sought by the management of postal services internationally.

After months of evasion and delaying tactics from union president Jean Claude Parrot, pressure from members finally forced the bureaucracy to call a strike from midnight 16/17 October.

By late afternoon of the 17 October, new legislation had been approved by parliament to break the • strike: enormous automatic fines on the strikers, the union officials and the union itself, with the additional possibility of prison sentences, and compulsory arbitration to "settle' the dispute (the CUPW has over 52,000 grievances unanswered).

Unconstitutional The Federal Court itself declared the legislation unconstitutional, since it violated the postal workers' legal right to strike. But this minor embarrassment did nothing to deflect Trudeau from his purpose.

As the strike continued, pickets were established outside sorting offices and members of of the letter-carriers' union refused to cross. Faced with this total disruption of the postal service, the state began to throw out injunctions, and then ordered police raids on union offices throughout the country to seize documents.

While the government threatened to sack all the strikers if they did not return to work, Parrot and other union leaders were charged-with breaking the law passed after the strike began!

This assault proved sufficient for Parrot to order the lifting of pickets and a return to work after nine days of action. This was no tactical retreat.

Although the CUPW alone did not have the strength to smash government wagecontrols in the public sector and the new strike-breaking legislation, the postal strike could have formed the basis for national action from all sections of the labour movement.

Cowardice

But Parrot preferred to betray his own members rather than call on other workers in the public sector to strike alongside the CUPW on their own outstanding claims, and mobilise all Canadian trade unions in action against Trudeau's vicious new laws:

Such cowardice and treachery has weakened every section of the Canadian proletariat in the struggles it will now have to wage against a bourgeoisie desperate to survive its own crisis.

By their own actions, such bureaucratic leaders point towards the necessity for workers to replace them with a new leadership prepared and able to advance the independent interests of the working class as part of ing revolutionary He is one of the most obscure politicians in Europe-but since last week he has been a Prime Minister.

Of where? Of Portugal.

Carlos Alberto Mota Pinto was scraped from the bottom of the political barrel and appointed premier by military President Eanes in one further effort to give credible leadership to Portugal's ruling ciass now without an effective government for four months.

Justifiably obscure as he may have been, Mota Pinto is nonetheless a hardened Tory politician.

Disagreements

In 1975 he was parliamentary leader of the right-wing bourgeois party the Social Democrats (PSD)-the only party to have voted in parliament in favour of the previous government of former fascist technocrat Nobre da Costa.

Mota Pinto left the PSD leadership after disagreements with its notoriously arrogant top leader Sa Carneiro. announce his proposed cabinet.

The leaders of the Communist Party, who two weeks ago were making hypocritical noises about a CP-SP parliamentary government, are now saying they will reserve their position on the new regime until they find out what kind of government it is.

But that is a fact they already know only too well. It is a government of the bourgeoisie entrusted with the task of further undoing and reversing the limited gains won by the masses in 1974 and 1975.

But despite the treachery and collaobration practiced by the Stalinist and reformist leaders, the Portuguese ruling class continues to show its extreme weakness.

Mota Pinto's appointment is a sign of that. It is an implicit declaration of fear of permitting a general election (which if called now would be followed by another reguarly scheduled general election barely a year later).

All the political leaders fear that elections will simply worsen the splits and enmities within the working class and re-arouse the expectations and activities of the workers and