Saturday, April 13, 2013

Globe and Mail back-pedaling on Royal Bank's foreign worker scandal

The Globe and Mail seems to be in damage control re: the story that embarrassed one of Canada's iconic bastions of capitalism last week. Two of the paper's heavy hitters have opinion pieces in today's edition that go to credibility-stretching lengths to downplay the substance of that scandal.

Doug Saunders has it neatly wrapped up. The real problem with outsourcing is that we need the foreign workers to stick around longer. After all, we were all temporary foreign workers at one time, according to Doug.

His fatuous reference to guest workers in Germany in the 1960's neglects to mention that the West German economy had full employment at the time, a phenomenon starkly absent from the Canadian situation today. Were Canada in full employment Saunders might have a point. It isn't and he doesn't.

Then we've got Margaret Wente, The Globe' s in-house plagiarist. She spins a compelling yarn about how it's not avaricious managers displacing workers with their opportunistic abuse of the TFW program; it's technology!

Yup, it's all about computers and algorithms. The entire effort smacks suspiciously of the glib foolishness that Don Tapscott has been peddling for at least twenty years.

Oddly enough, once we leave the opinion pages The Globe has buried another article about the Temporary Foreign Worker program deep in the business section.

Finally we get to the meat and potatoes of the matter. Quoting several actual economists, Tavia Grant informs us that the TFW program displaces Canadian workers and drives down Canadian wages... which is so blatantly obvious that even a pot-addled hillbilly blogger figured it out ages ago.

And that's why Canadians are pissed off about the Royal Bank firing Canadian workers and outsourcing their jobs.

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