Labour day

Or labor day as our friends south of the 49th like to call it, because after all, there's no "u" in labor!

Not many of u anyway.

Dean Baker has an opinion piece at the AJE site today where he uses Canada as an example of how labour might be revived in the US.

I sort of lost him after he pointed out that in Western Europe union membership tends to be 80% of the workforce or more.

That's the example we should be following. On paper Canada's 31% looks impressive, but Baker forgot to mention that in the private sector it's closer to 12% and shrinking. In fact one of the prime items on the wish list for the Harper gang is to bring in US-style right-to-work-for-less legislation.

Big Unions in the US were flirting with self-destruction and irrelevance for years, but their wholesale acquiescence to two-tiered contracts was the kiss of death. How can you tell the new hire he's working for 14 bucks an hour but the old guy next to you is going to keep his 30? This is the antithesis of what unions should be about.

And the new hires know it.

I was listening to a couple of talking heads discuss Obama's lack of appeal to the so-called NASCAR vote. The Democrats are ostensibly the union-friendly party, so what's the problem with the blue-collar white guys? They think their interests are better represented by a guy who claims corporations are people too?

Unfortunately, that's exactly what a lot of them think. The complacency of union leadership over the past forty years has led them to that point. The seeds of that complacency were evident within the membership all along.

It was my observation on one shop floor after another that the rank and file were a lot more conservative than the leadership. On being hired into a union shop back in the sixties or seventies, the average worker would initially be very cognizant of the fact that their low-skill job payed four or five times the minimum wage because there was a union contract. Hell, they'd even attend the odd union meeting!

Talk to them a year or two later and it's a different story. They're not working class anymore, they're middle class. Their taxes are too high. And goddamn, what are they paying all those union dues for anyway? After a couple of years on the job the typical UAW member had succeeded in convincing himself that the only reason he was getting a mere four or five times minimum wage and not eight or ten was because the union was holding him back.

I've seen it a thousand times.

And that's the attitude that's played so nicely into the hands of the oligarchs and the corporate weasels who came up with "right to work". Sounds good, doesn't it? Of course you should have the right to work! And who needs unions? Aren't you man enough to walk into the boss' office and demand your due? Of course you are, and we'll help you out by moving your job to Georgia or Alabama where it's going to be a lot harder for those union types to hold you back!

How stupid can people be!

What hope I see on the horizon for workers doesn't come from the Canadian labour model, which I fear is meandering down the same road to irrelevance that their American brothers and sisters have already trod.

The hope is coming from a new generation of workers who will realize that what the Teamsters and the USW and the UAW have left them isn't good enough, and will take matters into their own hands.

In China militant workers have been known to toss recalcitrant managers from the factory roof. In America those managers will be joined by a few union bosses once the next generation gets their hands on the wheel.