The almost level playing field

Well here's a spot of welcome news; according to the national newspaper of record, wages in Chinese manufacturing are rising so fast that before the end of this decade they will have passed manufacturing wages in North America! Yessiree Wei Long! And you know what's gonna happen then? All those jobs that went to China from Ontario, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois will be right back. The rust belt will shake off its scales and spring back to life. It'll be jobs, jobs, jobs baby! Just like the the golden age, when any shaggy-haired pot-smoking delinquent could drop out of high school, apply to the nearest factory, and make more than the teachers he just waved his middle finger goodbye to.

Wages in China's manufacturing sector have gone up by as much as 25% in the past year alone. Surely part of the reason is that our Chinese brothers have been gradually getting a little more militant. In fact, they're not averse to tossing the occasional manager from the factory roof just to establish their bona fides. There's a lesson in there that our labour leaders have forgotten in the past half-century or so; workers get power and influence by taking it, not by waiting for kindly corporate overlords or sympathetic governments to hand it to them.

C.S. Jackson was one of the best union leaders we ever had. He was a big picture guy, in the sense that he never shied away from the fact that management and labour were, at the end of the day, not in some noble venture together, but were destined to be adversaries at the most fundamental level. He was also a man of unimpeachable integrity. In his many years as top dog at the UE he never took more than a tradesman's salary. A lot of your union bigshots, once they get well up the ladder, they get to making boss-type salaries, join the same country clubs as the bosses, live in the same neighbourhoods, and before you know it they got more in common with the captains of industry than the folks on the shop floor. He was effective too. Hard to believe today, but the General Electric plant in Guelph was known as "Generous Electric" back in the fifties, thanks to the contracts he wrung out of them.

Alas, a curious phenomenon overcomes a lot of workers when they land a good union job. Take the typical aforementioned dropout. The reason he applied to Generous Electric is because he knows it's a good gig. He knows he's going to do better there than at the non-union place around the corner. He is so appreciative that for the first few months he even goes to union meetings. Talk to him a year later, and it'll be a different story. He's making the good wage because he deserves it. The union isn't doing a damn thing for him. He grumbles about his taxes being too high. Soon enough he'll be voting conservative.

Once enough of the union brothers were voting conservative we succeeded in helping the bosses re-establish the primacy of capital over labour. Not that the primacy of capital was ever seriously in doubt, but at least in the middle of the 20th century we were starting to get a reasonable slice of the pie. We let our guard down, the bosses sent the pie to China, and here we are, waiting for the level playing field.