Marx, Engels... Forbes?

I know!

There's a disconnect in that title. But take a read of this slam of uber-corp General Electric.

Turns out "Generous Electric" is one of the most polished practitioners in the art of looting employee pensions.

Here in Canada none other than Conrad Black was one of the pioneers of the practice when he went after the pension "surplus" of the Dominion Store cashiers and shelf-stockers back in the day.

Unfortunately, practices that were once seen as egregious violations of the social contract, if left unchallenged, eventually give rise to a revised social contract.

Which is how Canada's most liberal newspaper today came to publish an article called "Bankable sick days a perk past its prime."

They were not, regrettably, being ironic.

Canada's most liberal newspaper references both the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in a "news" article that argues vehemently that "perks" like defined benefit pensions and bankable sick days are relics of an era when unions had too much clout.

Thanks to the last thirty years of Reaganomics, bankable sick days and defined benefit pension plans are now almost exclusively the purview of unionized public sector workers.

That's because the private sector workers have been squeezed out of their unions and their benefits by the ever-present and all-too-real threat of having their jobs offshored.

As you may have noticed, most public sector workers are immune to that threat. You can't really hire out the township snow-plowing to China or Mexico. Or your teaching or policing.

But you can demand that they reduce their expectations to the emaciated level of the utterly gutted private sector.

And what a shameful spectacle it is to see Canada's most liberal newspaper leading this charge.