Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Rowlinson: No social value without social responsibility

At midnight on Sunday, Jan. 1, 425 unionized workers at London’s Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) were locked out of the plant by their employers on the expiration of their contract. EMD builds locomotives for mass transit systems; it is owned by Progress Rail, a subsidiary of the American heavy equipment company Caterpillar. There are currently no contract talks underway between the parties. The lockout followed upon the workers’ rejection of Caterpillar’s offer of a new contract only on the basis of a 50 per cent cut in wages and the elimination of the pension plan.

This offer is impossible to understand as part of a good-faith attempt to negotiate a new contract; it makes sense only as part of a strategy either to close down the London plant altogether and move production elsewhere or to break the employees’ union.

In either case, the big picture is Caterpillar is taking advantage of the current economic crisis to pit workers against one another and drive down wages.

No one should credit the company’s claims it is interested in negotiations; these come from the same PR firm that on Sunday, Jan.1, as the old contract was in its last hours, falsely announced the workers had struck the plant.

In fact, they hoped to continue working under the terms of the old contract while negotiating a new one. What happened was the employer locked them out when they showed up for work Sunday night.

Ongoing pickets at the plant aim to compel Caterpillar’s return to negotiations by preventing them either from hiring replacement workers or from taking equipment out of the plant to resume production at another location.

It is important to realize Caterpillar’s outrageous offer — how would you like to be paid what someone in your job earned in the 1970s? — is not part of a last-ditch attempt to save a business under competitive pressure. Caterpillar enjoys record profits, and the EMD plant is highly productive and known for its quality work.

The corporate strategy here is to increase those profits still further at the expense of workers.

I am writing to argue Western, as an institution of higher learning and a part of the London community, has a responsibility to denounce this strategy and to resist its implementation. At the most elementary level, this is so because the university and the city depend on each other. Without a vital and prosperous London, the experience of studying and working at Western is greatly diminished.

If it succeeds, Caterpillar’s assault on its workers will have incalculable knock-on effects — to begin with on the workers themselves and their families, but then on the 1,200 or so workers in firms that supply the EMD plant, and ultimately on every kind of activity in this city.

At a more fundamental level, the EMD struggle is ours at Western because the independence of scholarly work from the society that fosters it can never be complete.

I am a humanist; I work on literature. Economic justice is not my field of study. But my scholarship and teaching, like those of us all, are funded by the public as a collective enterprise. We cannot ask society to respect and value our labour if we are not willing to accord respect in return to the men and women on the line at EMD, who are being tossed aside by their employer like commodities that can be replaced by cheaper foreign substitutes.

Our responsibility in this respect is especially clear when we recall that some of the university’s income comes from its endowment, which, like the pension fund on which we rely for our retirement, is partly invested in corporate stock. Some may well be invested in Caterpillar itself.

If we are to argue for the university’s social value, we must accept social responsibility as well. In this case, that must mean, at the very least, we should not benefit from the profiteering that has led to the lockout at EMD.

I hope many members of the university community will be able to join the workers picketing EMD until the parent company returns to negotiations with a fair offer. And I ask President Chakma and the university trustees, as well as the trustees of the pension fund, sell any Caterpillar stock held in funds that they administer, and publicly undertake not to hold any Caterpillar stock in the future, until the company’s dispute with its London workers has reached a fair resolution.

Without this simple step, how can we look our fellow Londoners in the eye?

Original Article
Source: Western News 

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