Happy Labour Day. Or not.
In these anti-labour times, the latest salvo comes from Ontario’s Liberal government, attacking both teachers and collective bargaining.
True, the province’s teachers are well paid — average for average, better than journalists, for example — although most people understand that well-compensated teachers providing good public education are a sound social investment. And true, the austerity measures Dalton McGuinty’s government has in mind for teachers, particularly with regard to banked sick days, are not entirely unreasonable.
But bullying them? Using that convenient catchphrase, “tough economic times,” as a weapon to justify the unjustifiable and silence opposition to it? Removing teachers’ collective bargaining rights and kneecapping their unions?
That is worrisome.
Ontario’s move to unilateral imposition is, it seems, the new labour normal — eagerly embraced by both the left and right sides of the partisan divide. We see it in Republican policy in the U.S., especially as applied by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. And we see it repeatedly now in Canada, where the Conservative federal government threatens back-to-work legislation every time the word “strike” so much as drifts wispily across a union member’s brain.
Militant labour-bashing is all the rage.
But the truth is, unions are necessary. They’re essential for societal self-interest, and they play a crucial role in our fundamental humanity.
That’s because unions protect workers. (A good thing, too, because who else would protect them? Government? It can’t scramble together back-to-work legislation fast enough. Corporations? They’d lay off Mother Teresa if it meant boosting the profit margin. Workers themselves? No, sadly, because no matter how competent they are, the corporation’s bottom line invariably trumps their very existence. In the economic wars, employees are cannon fodder.)
And why do workers need this protection? They need it because bottom lines don’t have a soul, and we live in a human world where some degree of soul is essential to our daily existence. More practically, they need it because we also live in a world where real incomes haven’t gone up in decades, in terms of purchasing power, while corporate profits have increased manyfold and CEOs rake in mind-boggling sums.
Contrary to what Mitt Romney says, corporations are not, in fact, people — not unless you define “people” as soulless mechanisms built for greed and the single-minded acquisition of more money at any and all costs.
Romney’s belief in corporations and corporatism is a logical corollary to the Randism of his running mate, Paul Ryan. The “rugged individualism” preached by Ayn Rand (the “Ayn,” as she apparently used to say, pronounced like “swine”) is nothing more than me-first selfishness and, well, piggism.
And yet such piggism, with its anti-union bias, has only made things worse. The vast majority of employees, both here and especially in the U.S., do not belong to unions. Many are quite happy about that, having bought in, disastrously, to company propaganda promising lasting employee care and damning unions as mere pesky crap disturbers. (In that, they are not unlike those so-called suicide voters in the U.S., determined to oust Obama and kill ObamaCare, even though they themselves lack health coverage.)
And yet, ironically, if the vast majority had belonged to unions, huge numbers of jobs that are now offshore would not be offshore. Unions would have fought tooth and nail to keep the factories and the work at home, instead of some place where more profit could be wrung from the exploitation of third-world workers earning poverty wages.
Better still, the supposed trickle-down benefits from those corporations with the higher profit margins — benefits that somehow manage to stop trickling at upper executive levels — would instead trickle down into more jobs and more employed people contributing to the economy, a stream not dammed up by some board of directors.
Unions, battered and shrinking these days, would have fought for that. Just as they also fight for other social benefits.
But let’s be honest. Anyone who’s ever been around a unionized workforce knows that collective contracts often protect the lame and the halt. No matter how incompetent, a worker with seniority can expect union protection. So? That’s the pragmatic price to be paid. Unions are not perfect.
Then again, neither are corporations. Or (good grief) governments.
Still, by any standard, unions are incalculably more good than bad.
By forcing employers to recognize the value of their employees — whether autoworkers keeping a company competitive, or teachers educating a more productive populace — unions serve the larger society. And by protecting workers from corporate entities incapable of human concern — such as caring about the terrible communal effects of sudden unemployment on thousands of struggling families — unions remind us all of our human responsibility to one another.
So why do we need them? Why should we be outraged by the attacks on them? Why are unions necessary?
The questions should be rhetorical.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Janice Kennedy
In these anti-labour times, the latest salvo comes from Ontario’s Liberal government, attacking both teachers and collective bargaining.
True, the province’s teachers are well paid — average for average, better than journalists, for example — although most people understand that well-compensated teachers providing good public education are a sound social investment. And true, the austerity measures Dalton McGuinty’s government has in mind for teachers, particularly with regard to banked sick days, are not entirely unreasonable.
But bullying them? Using that convenient catchphrase, “tough economic times,” as a weapon to justify the unjustifiable and silence opposition to it? Removing teachers’ collective bargaining rights and kneecapping their unions?
That is worrisome.
Ontario’s move to unilateral imposition is, it seems, the new labour normal — eagerly embraced by both the left and right sides of the partisan divide. We see it in Republican policy in the U.S., especially as applied by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. And we see it repeatedly now in Canada, where the Conservative federal government threatens back-to-work legislation every time the word “strike” so much as drifts wispily across a union member’s brain.
Militant labour-bashing is all the rage.
But the truth is, unions are necessary. They’re essential for societal self-interest, and they play a crucial role in our fundamental humanity.
That’s because unions protect workers. (A good thing, too, because who else would protect them? Government? It can’t scramble together back-to-work legislation fast enough. Corporations? They’d lay off Mother Teresa if it meant boosting the profit margin. Workers themselves? No, sadly, because no matter how competent they are, the corporation’s bottom line invariably trumps their very existence. In the economic wars, employees are cannon fodder.)
And why do workers need this protection? They need it because bottom lines don’t have a soul, and we live in a human world where some degree of soul is essential to our daily existence. More practically, they need it because we also live in a world where real incomes haven’t gone up in decades, in terms of purchasing power, while corporate profits have increased manyfold and CEOs rake in mind-boggling sums.
Contrary to what Mitt Romney says, corporations are not, in fact, people — not unless you define “people” as soulless mechanisms built for greed and the single-minded acquisition of more money at any and all costs.
Romney’s belief in corporations and corporatism is a logical corollary to the Randism of his running mate, Paul Ryan. The “rugged individualism” preached by Ayn Rand (the “Ayn,” as she apparently used to say, pronounced like “swine”) is nothing more than me-first selfishness and, well, piggism.
And yet such piggism, with its anti-union bias, has only made things worse. The vast majority of employees, both here and especially in the U.S., do not belong to unions. Many are quite happy about that, having bought in, disastrously, to company propaganda promising lasting employee care and damning unions as mere pesky crap disturbers. (In that, they are not unlike those so-called suicide voters in the U.S., determined to oust Obama and kill ObamaCare, even though they themselves lack health coverage.)
And yet, ironically, if the vast majority had belonged to unions, huge numbers of jobs that are now offshore would not be offshore. Unions would have fought tooth and nail to keep the factories and the work at home, instead of some place where more profit could be wrung from the exploitation of third-world workers earning poverty wages.
Better still, the supposed trickle-down benefits from those corporations with the higher profit margins — benefits that somehow manage to stop trickling at upper executive levels — would instead trickle down into more jobs and more employed people contributing to the economy, a stream not dammed up by some board of directors.
Unions, battered and shrinking these days, would have fought for that. Just as they also fight for other social benefits.
But let’s be honest. Anyone who’s ever been around a unionized workforce knows that collective contracts often protect the lame and the halt. No matter how incompetent, a worker with seniority can expect union protection. So? That’s the pragmatic price to be paid. Unions are not perfect.
Then again, neither are corporations. Or (good grief) governments.
Still, by any standard, unions are incalculably more good than bad.
By forcing employers to recognize the value of their employees — whether autoworkers keeping a company competitive, or teachers educating a more productive populace — unions serve the larger society. And by protecting workers from corporate entities incapable of human concern — such as caring about the terrible communal effects of sudden unemployment on thousands of struggling families — unions remind us all of our human responsibility to one another.
So why do we need them? Why should we be outraged by the attacks on them? Why are unions necessary?
The questions should be rhetorical.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Janice Kennedy
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