[The following two articles appeared in the January 1 and January 24 issues of La Brèche, fortnightly newspaper of the Ligue Marxiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary
Marxist
League), the Swiss organization in sympathy with the Fourth International. The articles originally appeared under the headlines "Slave Dealers" and "Counter the Third Anti-Immigration Bill." The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
On Friday, December 21 [1973), in Lausanne a series of measures affecting seasonal workers was denounced at a joint press conference of the Vaudois Reception Center and the United Committee of Swiss Citizens and Immigrants.
As a matter of fact, of the seasonal workers who are leaving Switzerland en masse at the end of the year to return to Spain or Italy, a number of them will be taking. off without the guarantee of being able to return in 1974. Although they've agreed to return next year, their employers haven't given them return permits, as they used to in previous years. Once again this situation sheds light on the serious problem of job security, which is totally lacking for seasonal workers.
The July 6, 1973, federal decree had for the first time limited the number of seasonal workers by instituting a canton [province] quota system; but in the present situation the construction industry bosses themselves seem to be contemplating an even tighter restriction: They are considering a 25 percent reduction in the total number of seasonal workers for 1974 in the canton of Friburg; 40 percent in the canton of Vaud; and as much as 50 percent in Geneva.
This leads to an absolutely insufferable situation for seasonal workers that the Reception Center denounced in its press release:
"The worker goes back to his native country without knowing if he'll be able to return. He doesn't worry about looking for work in his country, 206
because despite everything, he still has hope of returning to Switzerland. If the seasonal worker who has already spent several months in Switzerland cannot return, he loses the right to change his status from seasonal worker to year-round worker; the same thing will result if he can't return in time."
This state of affairs calls for a certain number of observations.
1. The role played by the masses of immigrant workers, particularly seasonal workers, as a reserve labor force that can be cut back in case of an economic crisis becomes rather clear in this situation. The bosses are eager to preserve seasonal labor precisely because of this "flexibility." (Since 1968, the proportion of seasonal workers and border workers has increased, while year-round workers have decreased.) Brugger [head of the Federal Department of Public Economy] cynically illustrated the bourgeoisie's use for this labor force when he recently hinted to Italian members of parliament that Switzerland might forgo plans for clamping down on seasonal immigration (as West Germany has done), provided that Italy makes certain concessions on petroleum deliveries. (Corriera della Sera, December 14, 1973.)
2. The July 1973 decree had already put into force a flagrant violation of the Italo-Swiss agreements, as it established a category of seasonal workers who are deprived of the right to improve their status. The present abrupt reduction tends to limit as much as possible the number of longstanding seasonal workers eligible to obtain a B permit (year-round worker). We have already explained in La Brèche why the bosses are opposed to long-standing seasonal workers gaining year-round work status.
[See Intercontinental Press, November 5, 1973, p. 1276.]
years. This means that the bosses protect their future by applying for as great a hiring quota as possible, but then putting the contingent on ice until they have a better picture of theoverall economic trend. During this period the worker is left absolutely in the dark. It is significant that applications for seasonal labor allocations were submitted this year only in December, after the vote on economic plans, and not in October or November as in the past. This means that the bosses, aware of the relative squeeze on the construction industry that passage of the federal decree implies, have closed down the flow of immigration, fearful of a slow-down in the building trade.
Can one really talk about the threat of a recession?
Of course a real economic squeeze exists. There are signs of a recession: The economic downturn (or more exactly, the end of a boom and the beginning of a downturn) in the United States since June 1973 and in West Germany since August could mean a coinciding of the recessions in 1974. (The clear signs of coming economic difficulties for Spain around mid-1974 would tend to confirm this.) The bourgeoisie is thus trying to insure itself against any substantial drop in the profit rate by freezing wages, abolishing jobs that produce too little revenue, increasing productivity by tightening supervision, etc.
Now, the oil crisis has come just in time to make it easier for the bourgeoisie to dish out this medicine. Behind certain objective economic difficulties generated by the oil crisis there is also an especially broad campaign of deception being orchestrated by the capitalists. Our energy resources are supposedly threatened; the price increases and the sacrifices that everyone will have to make are therefore supposed to have resulted from natural calamity, the bosses having nothing to do with it. To confront this misfortune, bosses and wage workers, producers and consumers, are supposed to show their great solidarity by sharing the difficulties. And then suddenly they slip in a few price increases and freeze some wages!
The measures against seasonal workers fall into this context: In a climate of insecurity, by first striking out at foreigners, the bourgeoisie hopes to close the ranks of the "Swiss community" and deepen the division between Swiss citizens and immigrants. The climate of insecurity thus created among immigrant workers is put to use to instigate a pernicious rivalry by threatening a weeding-out process. As the Friburg construction firm Immoparticipation, Inc.] stated bluntly: "We will be obligated to use a method of selection so as to employ only the best workers in 1974."
The task of revolutionists is to explain the totality of the bourgeoisie's devices and schemes so as to prevent the holy interclass alliance from consolidating a response "in the face of hard times," which would reinforce anti-immigrant sentiment in the name of national self-interest and in the last analysis weaken the working class as a whole- immigrants and Swiss - in confronting the bourgeoisie's attacks.
But the present measures probably have a specific political aspect too: to prepare the bourgeoisie to react to a third anti-immigration bill that will come up for a vote in 1974. Actually, as this bill calls for a reduction in the total number of seasonal workers from the current 190,000 to 150,000, one can regard not only the July 1973 decree (which for the first time limited the number of seasonal workers), but also the restrictive measures currently being taken, as a bourgeois attempt to discount the impact of the bill.
In addition, our counterthrust can only be an overall response: a struggle to eliminate the category of seasonal workers by showing that its elimination would do away with one of the tools of the bosses' "divide and conquer" policy, and would strengthen the working class as a result.
At the beginning of 1974 immigration is becoming one of the dominant issues with the opening of discussion on the third anti-immigration bill of the MNA.
In fact, the recent Federal Council report has just launched this campaign, which might well continue until 1975 if during its spring session the parliament is able to convince the Federal Council to introduce a counterproposal to the bill, a move the Council has refused to make for the moment.
Let's briefly recall the substance of this bill: It sets a limit of 4,000 to February 25, 1974
the total number of annual naturalizations. The total number of immigrants cannot exceed 500,000 (12 percent of the Swiss population in the cantons, 25 percent in Geneva); the total number of seasonal workers must be reduced to 150,000 and border workers to 70,000. The total reduction is supposed to be completed before December 31, 1977, which means that some 180,000 applications for immigrant status, including permanent residency, would be rejected annually.
In its proposal to reject the bill, the Federal Council paints a catastrophic picture of the consequences of such a reduction in the number of immigrant workers. It is an established fact that in the advanced capitalist countries immigrant manpower has to a considerable degree become a structural component of economic growth. This implies that a drastic and sudden reduction in the size of the immigrant labor force would put in question the very functioning of the mechanisms of the economic system. Obviously, when the bourgeoisie talk about a catastrophe they avoid pointing up the role immigrant workers play in the expansion of Swiss capitalism. In the coming year, the conditions of the 1972-73 boom will persist; therefore, the bosses will look favorably on increasing immigrant labor, so as to expand the labor market. This would limit wage increases even more. But it is possible that part of the immigrant labor force will be turned away — or their contract renewals withheld — if the recession that can already be seen in West Germany spreads to France and the United States and hits Switzerland at the end of 1974 or beginning of 1975. However, it would be absolutely incorrect to believe that the bourgeoisie can readily use immigration as a shock absorber if a recession were to occur. In reality, the only sector that could give new impetus to the Swiss economy during a recession is the basic industry sector, public works, etc. So in order to guarantee the revival of this sector, it is essential that immigrant labor, which makes up the major part of this sector, be used as a "crisis reserve."
Hence the bourgeoisie's opposition to the third anti-immigration bill, sometimes cloaked in a humanitarian veil, expresses the bourgeoisie's fear of any tendency toward altering the system's machinery, in which largescale immigration plays an important part.
In this context the bourgeoisie must cope with two contradictory needs: On the one hand, the bourgeoisie is inclined to preserve an immigration policy that protects the growth mechanisms of the capitalist system; on the other hand, the bourgeoisie must modulate xenophobic sentiment (that its nationalist ideology helped create) in order to avoid any major political crisis and to keep the anti-immigration movement from becoming crystallized on the political plane and unsettling its system of political domination (the alliance between the three bourgeois parties and the social democracy). The quota system is the product of this dual need: On the one hand, it limits the entry of new workers each year; and on the other hand, it strives to increase the number of "permanent residency" workers, workers who have been "integrated into the productive process," while preserving an important reserve labor force of seasonal and border workers.
But this is a most delicate balance: In the political arena the anti-immigrationists carry things much too far, even challenging the number of seasonal and border workers-who up until now were not regarded as a part of the "Ueberfremdung" [foreign penetration], because their rights were so limited, eroded, and suppressed. And in the economic arena, the imposition of a quota system reduces the bourgeoisie's margin of maneuver and tightens the labor market.
In fact, in the face of the immigration question and its political and economic effects, the Swiss bourgeoisie is at an impasse. While traditionally the bourgeoisie pressured the tradeunion heads to popularize among the workers its campaign against the antiimmigrationists (as in the June 1970 Schwarzenbach initiative), it is aware that this can no longer be done. It isn't that these trade-union heads have taken any clear positions against collaboration. But rather, as the January in metallurgy — would rather not say anything to the antiimmigrationists, rather than take the risk of antagonizing their own union members. Moreover, the objective tensions generated between boss and trade-union organizations by the inflationary trend threaten to undermine the "common front" against the antiimmigration movement.
Unable to check the anti-immigration movement, confronted with difficulties in ensuring the collaboration of the trade-union leaderships (or at least these leaderships as a whole), and faced with the fact that the bourgeois parties are in crisis (a reflection of all the tensions among the various cantonal cliques and sectoral interests), the most conscious layer of the bourgeoisie is seeking to set up an "independent" arbiter, a sort of Swiss Bonaparte who will stand above these conflicting interests.
This part of the bourgeoisie asked Brugger to play the role Celio played in establishing the current policy. So, the Handelzeitung states: "Most of the weight of this fight [against the antiimmigrationists] will now fall on the shoulders of Switzerland's bourgeois president— as it did during the vote on the emergency economic decrees."
As we square off against the antiimmigration movement, and against both the bourgeoisie's calls for "national unity" and the labor bureaucracy's disgraceful "Schwarzenbachism," our main task is twofold.
First, we will have to denounce the false solutions advanced by the trade unions- namely, a strengthening of the quota system "while necessarily foreseeing the need to resort to stricter regulatory measures against foreigners" (Lutte Syndicale, January 15, 1974), as suggested by the FTH in their support of the Federal Council's policy. Here we will have to underscore the narrow nationalist character of this position, which supports the preservation of most of the discrimination linked to the position of an immigrant at the present time. And second, we will have to counterpose the defense of the right of everyone working in Switzerland to full and equal political, civil, and trade-union rights.
Moreover, given a perspective of certain future economic difficulties, it is clear that the issue of guaranteed jobs could presently gain support. Around this issue it will be necessary to put forward the most strongly felt demands, such as demards concerning social security and wages. In this way we will have established a field of concrete action against the anti-immigration movement and against the bourgeoisie's "divide and conquer" politics; and we will have established the possibility of shedding light on the conditions for a common struggle of Swiss citizens and immigrants against the bourgeoisie and the anti-immigrationist reactionaries.
Our campaign against the third antiimmigration bill will be waged on these two fields.
Notes
3. While the workers have not been guaranteed work permits, the bosses on the other hand have applied for hiring quotas: In response to a survey, state agencies reported that there have been as many applications for hiring quotas this year as in other
17 Handelszeitung put it, because "the SP and the trade unions are no longer clearly ready to collaborate, as in 1970, to meet head on the simplistic ideas of some of their members." In other words, the trade-union leaders - especially