Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak would have you believe that trade unions have outlived their usefulness and workers are better off without their right to work together.
In support of his White Paper, Paths to Prosperity – Flexible Labour Markets, Hudak concedes that “over time, unions have contributed to developing Ontario’s middle class and to improving safety in the workplace,” but he then calls on readers to overlook these “important gains” and recognize that the “world has changed.”
Instead, he suggests, what today’s workers really need is flexibility.
According to Hudak, improving wages for all workers and securing across-the-board standards for benefits, sick leave, maternity leave, pensions and injury compensation are outmoded notions in desperate need of modernization.
In the future he dreams for Ontarians, workers will shuffle from one low-wage, precarious job to another, competing with each other in a race to the bottom. This is what he means by flexibility, and it is the path to poverty, not prosperity.
But, then again, Hudak’s plan for gutting hundred-yearold labour laws has nothing to do with helping Ontarians find jobs or improve their livelihoods; it is about helping corporations turn a profit – no matter the human cost.
The Tories’ 20-page paper is cribbed directly from the ultraConservative playbook of governors in Wisconsin, Indiana and two dozen other U.S. states that have already stripped workers of their collective bargaining rights and public sector contracts.
All workers lose from this strategy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting a nearly two per cent drop in the real median earnings of union and non-union workers between 2010 and 2011.
Nowhere is Hudak’s pro-corporate bias more evident than when he laments the relocation of the Caterpillar plant in London, Ont. to Muncie, Ind. earlier this year and the 2010 transfer of John Deere’s Welland plant production to Mexico and Wisconsin. At the time they shut down Canadian operations, both companies were turning substantial profits – Caterpillar’s fourth quarter was up 58 per cent – but felt they could do even better south of the border, where skilled labourers earn poverty wages.
However, rather than challenging these greedy foreign corporations that made a bundle on Canadian corporate tax cuts before skipping town, Hudak blames Canadian workers for earning a living wage with modest benefits for their families.
Moreover, Hudak’s path to prosperity offers no concrete proposal for job creation or improving the collective prosperity of Ontario families.
If Hudak truly had the welfare of working people in mind, he would recognize that unions raise the bar – for all workers – on wages, benefits and working conditions, and that families with decent livelihoods have more money to spend on services and small businesses that help the economy thrive. This is the conclusion of the World Bank, which found that by every meaningful economic indicator, countries with higher rates of unionization have lower unemployment and inflation, higher productivity and speedier adjustments to economic shocks.
Union membership also reduces wage differences between men and women. So, in a nutshell, improving workers’ rights is the best way to reduce economic inequality. But to be swayed by that moral argument, one first has to see equality and fair wages as a priority.
Hudak’s vision is not about modernizing the labour market in the interests of prosperity for all; it is about ushering in an era of permanent uncertainty for all working people to the overwhelming benefit of corporations in pursuit of record-breaking profit.
Ontario workers deserve more rights, not fewer, and as for profitable corporations, well, it is time they start paying their fair share, just like working people already do.
Sid Ryan is President, Ontario Federation of Labour.
Originally appeared in the July 19, 2012 edition of the Windsor Star
Click here to see the original op-ed piece by Sid Ryan in the Windsor Star.
