The passing this summer of former Quebec Labour Federation (QFL) President Louis Laberge was front-page news across Quebec for a whole week. Some media headlines dubbed him a 'pragmatic visionary', while others claimed that he was a true defender of the working class. Some stressed his past as a firebrand in the great 1972 Common Front strike, others spoke of the congenial, colourful worker who had kept in touch with his grass roots, and finally some also talked of the shrewd politician and businessman, the founder of the great 'worker's investment fund', the Fonds de Solidarité du Québec. All concurred that he was the greatest trade unionist in the history of Quebec. It would seem that Little Louis, as his friends would call him, was many things to many people. If history were to judge Louis Laberge by what was said and written about him at his wake and funeral there is no doubt it would accord him a prominent and comfortable niche. Thus he would be in death as in life: prominent and comfortable.

But while live television showed us an incredible agglomerate of the Who's Who of Canadian society assembled in the beautiful Montreal Cathedral of Marie-Reine-du-Monde to honour his memory, another vision of the man was haunting many workers in this part of the world. For literally thousands of workers, the memory of Laberge will never be a pleasant one. As the various local leftist publications have unanimously decided to shut up about this labour faker's life, we see it as our duty to go against the current and expose him for what he was. So, as ex-Prime Minister Mulroney, Bernard Landry and Lucien Bouchard, the present and the previous premiers of Quebec, accompanied by the mightiest and the haughtiest of Canadian capitalists and the whole 57 varieties of what Marx used to call the 'labour lieutenants of the capitalist class' offered Little Louis an official State funeral, these are some of the facts and memories that came to my mind while watching the golden clad ecclesiastics eulogize, bless and expedite the bum.

One of the only truths that ever came out of Laberge's mouth was what he said at his retirement: 'I never worked a day in my life. The way I see it is I was paid to hang out with my pals'. Laberge started out as an assemblyman at the Canadair plant during the war in 1943. At that time there were a number of Spanish Civil War anarchist refugees working there and they remember him as a company stooge. He started his union career by redbaiting the workers who led the local union then under the influence of the Stalinist 'Communist' Party. The old CNT anarchists had absolutely no sympathy for the Stalinists but despised Laberge for his witch-hunting tactics. After, having helped oust the old union structure, he was himself ousted for a time because of his cozying-up to the bosses. During the fifties, at the height of McCarthyism and its Quebec equivalent the Padlock Law, Laberge continued his redbaiting career as a City councillor. In 1955, he lauded the work of a certain Jean Boyczum, a cop who specialized in hounding radical workers saying: "a few years ago, in a mop-up operation in our unions, he was of great help."

In 1964, he was elected President of the QFL and kept the post until he quit in 1991. Laberge sometimes found it useful to portray himself as a radical. For example, in the months leading to the great Common Front strike of 1972, he once said that 'If it is necessary, we will smash the regime', speaking of course of the liberal government of the time, not the wage-slave system. The government tried to make something of a hero out of him by imprisoning him after that strike, even though the unions had been instrumental in breaking the movement. Though after thirty years a certain mythology has been created over his role in it, workers of the time were not fooled. For example, a couple of years later, he was booed out of the house when he dared try to speak at a huge mass worker's rally in a packed Montreal Forum. So much for Laberge's links to the grass roots... The late left-reformist worker Henri Gagnon, a mid-level leader of the QFL, best described the Laberge he knew so well: "The confusion comes from the fact that there are two Louis Laberge. One uses revolutionary chatter saying the system must be smashed. The other, the secret Louis Laberge has his regular back-stage pass to parliament!"

All through the sixties and up to the mid-seventies, he presided over huge raids on other unions, especially in the construction industry and in close alliance with the mob. During those years his gangsters and paid cronies, armed with crowbars and baseball bats, would swoop down on job-sites that where under the control of rival unions and beat up any worker that would resist buying a card. I witnessed one of those operations and am still revolted by the memory of workers forced to flee their own job with bloodied noses and dishevelled clothes. I witnessed the same violence in my own workplace at Noranda Mines when the workers thought we could 'democratize' the union and a good number of us were beaten or intimidated for it. Its not that the other unions don't practice the same violence against workers (they do), but Little Louis' operation was the crudest of the crude.

His closest friend and associate then was the famous mobster André 'Dédé' Desjardins; the same Desjardins who was gunned down a few years ago as one of the main moneymen of the Hell's Angels. Though in the recent years, the media would present Laberge as an honest workers representative, his fishing and hunting trips as well as his Florida vacations with just about every mobster you can think of were legendary. I suppose he just appreciated their company...

Perhaps Laberge's greatest contribution to his capitalist masters though was his groundbreaking work in tying the union apparatus even more to the State. His open participation to every single possible forum or organ of class-collaboration had his bureaucratic rivals huffing and puffing to catch-up. His most well known accomplishment in selling-out the working class though was the creation with the full backing of the State of his new organ of 'working class capitalism', the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Québec (Quebec Workers Solidarity Fund) in 1983. Through this institution, thousands of workers have been directly integrated in the process of their own exploitation and indoctrinated with the teachings of Adam Smith.

No wonder the man was given a State funeral! The capitalist class certainly owed him a lot. Every single day of his life was dedicated to violating, partaking in and planning the brutal exploitation of his 'fellow workers'. We communists do not believe in an after-life. Thus Little Louis, like all the exploiters from the past will never have to pay for his crimes against the working class. This is the reason behind this article. It is a duty to all the workers he sold-out, it is a duty of class memory that we register our dissent. The worker's history book is still being written, but Laberge's place in it is not the one he held in this summer's headlines. Whatever praise the state, the politicians, the capitalists and the priests have to heap on Laberge and his kind, we know that what he was and how he lived would even disgust a tape-worm.