An open and shut case that everyone understands — or thinks they do. Consider the finger-wagging from pundits for whom the pathos at the plant was another chance to descend from the hills after battle to shoot the wounded.
In a high-minded polemic a day after the shutdown, one columnist harangued them for not cutting their wages, then hectored the workers for supposedly threatening violence during the dispute (which never came to pass, despite corporate bullying and bad-faith bargaining that surely violated the spirit of our labour laws.)
The workers conducted themselves with dignity throughout the lockout. They can hold their heads high for not stooping to the tactics of a company that refused to negotiate in good faith while playing jurisdictions off against each other.
Why stop at halving your wages from $34 to $16.50 an hour? Why not aim for the minimum wage and allow Caterpillar to reset Canadian pay scales? Why not seek parity with Chinese or Brazilian workers? The answer: our comparative advantage isn’t cheap wages, it’s knowledge.
In a follow-up column, that same writer assailed the Star (and me) for daring to suggest that Canada learn lessons from foreign Caterpillars that clean out our industrial heartland: Why invoke the issue of intellectual property, since it was an obviously ossified branch plant, with nary a patent within its Canadian confines, he argued — a mere assembly operation, staffed by overpaid, know-nothing workers, with all the brains back at head office in the U.S.
Caterpillar is the canary in the coal mine.
Not because the London locomotive plant necessarily held registered patents. It was a repository of intellectual property as economists now define it: savoir-faire, know-how, process innovation, incremental tradecraft, trade secrets. When you relocate a 60-year-old plant, it’s not only workers who lose their jobs, but a country that loses their collective expertise.
That’s not so much economic nationalism as it is national interest. We need to worry about the collateral damage.
Would Japan’s government sit idly if Toyota sold off its main Lexus plant to Caterpillar, to be replaced by an offshore facility? No, the Japanese would stand up if decades of subsidized know-how and tradecraft were spirited away.
So if Lexus matters, why not locomotives? We don’t always hold the patents, but we hold the knowledge.
Canadians consistently undervalue themselves — and the role of intellectual property, broadly defined. When Nortel went bankrupt, its executives had no inkling its patents would fetch $4.5 billion — after a century of subsidies from taxpayers. (The London locomotive plant also profited from taxpayer largesse — $5 million from Ottawa that lowered the purchase price for end users.)
If RIM ever goes on sale, shall we tell ourselves that we don’t need a national strategy to inculcate and preserve intellectual property? Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper has signalled he won’t let RIM slip through our hands. Certainly not after learning, on his trip to China, about how that country hoards intellectual property — notably by setting up branch plants for all those clever American companies that are now being outmuscled after years of incremental innovation on the factory floor.
Among the many responses to my last column on Caterpillar, I heard from a London professor, Peter Rogan, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Genome Bioinformatics at Western. He founded a startup and holds 11 patents, but told me it’s hard to attract investment here. The Caterpillar case struck a chord because it symbolizes what’s wrong with our corporate culture.
Canadian business continues to undervalue our startups, while others ignore the value of our so-called branch plants. They are selling our country short.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Martin Regg Cohn
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