Canadian workers f@cked again!

Just happened to be reading about a mid-sized welding shop in North Bay that recently brought in a couple of guys from Tunisia, because apparently there are no qualified welders available in Canada.

Bullshit!

In the first place, there's plenty of folks among the 1.5 million unemployed Canadians who have those skills.

Furthermore, it's a very long way from rocket science to train up welders. If this government had the slightest interest in training unemployed Canadians, they could implement a training program at minimal cost that would have welder-helpers earning their keep within a few weeks, welder apprentices within a few months, and high-end welder-fitters within a couple of years.

We've got the training infrastructure available in high-school shops and community colleges. What we don't have is the political will. That's because political will in our government is shaped by the will of the Canadian Manufacturers Association and the Chamber of Commerce, and believe it or not those folks don't have much in the way of over-lapping interests with unemployed or underemployed Canadian workers.

What they are after is cheap labour. The government connives with them by establishing the incredibly opaque "Labour Market Opinion" as the magic key that opens Canadian jobs to foreign workers. All the employer needs to do is fill out a few forms to prove that they've tried really hard to find skilled welders in Canada for $16 dollars an hour with no luck, and therefore need to hire from outside the country.

Some cubicle lifer with a BA in sociology, toiling away deep in the bowels of Citizenship and Immigration, who doesn't know shit when it comes to skilled work, gives the application a cursory once-over. She has no clue that $16 hasn't been the "prevailing wage" for skilled welders since the mid-eighties.

Bingo! The rubber stamp comes down and the employer has the green light to bring in those keeners from Tunisia.

Sixteen bucks an hour is serious money in Tunisia.

Here's a telling headline from CTV News; Temporary Foreign Workers debate shines light on labour shortage in mining industry.

What's the debate? There's a one sided drone of platitudes from various employer lobby groups about how we've neglected training skilled trades. They've been complaining about it as long as they've been bringing in foreign workers; it's cheaper to complain than to train!

The employers as a whole (I know there are some exceptional employers who invest mightily in Canadians, but they are the exceptions) would prefer to see the foreigners come in, because a trained Canadian is going to want to work for a Canadian standard of living. The Tunisian is going to be happy with $16/hr, and he's already got the skill set! See why this is a win-win for the employers?

It's also a win-win for the government. They save those training funds while at the same time appeasing their corporate backers.

Contrary to what that headline would lead you to believe, there is scarcely a debate, nor is there a shortage of skilled workers in the mining industry. What there is, is a concerted and coordinated push by employers and government to drive down the wages of Canadians.

Here's another headline, this time from Fort Mac a couple of months ago; 300 Canadians replaced by Temporary Foreign Workers. There was no national outrage over this story like there was when the Royal Bank got caught playing the same game. There was no shortage of skilled workers; these Canadian welders and pipe-fitters already had the jobs and have been displaced by foreign workers.

And where is organized labour in all this? We don't hear a lot from them, do we? Sure, go to any union's home page and they'll be flat out against the TFW program, but where are the demonstrations in the streets? Those 300 Fort Mac guys could and should shut down the Husky project. We no longer have principled union leadership like we had in the day of C.S. Jackson and Bob White. What we have now is union bureaucrats who think getting their former members a better severance package when their jobs are off-shored or handed to foreign workers is all that is required of them.

If we continue on the road we're on, in a few short years our "labour market" will be the plaything of international labour brokers, and secure jobs at a decent wage for Canadians will be but a distant memory.

GE and me

GE and me go way back. Back to the C.S. Jackson era.

C.S. Jackson was for a long time the leader of the United Electrical workers union that represented the shop floor folks at GE.

He was also an unabashed commie.

It's probably him who I have to blame for my political awakening. Long before Jeffrey Immelt waxed eloquent about the need for unions to be "reasonable", his forbears at GE were giving us the exact same message.

Back in the mid seventies I'd been sitting in the shithouse at the GE plant on Woodlawn Road in Guelph, reading the financial pages of the Globe and Mail. Feature story was about GE and their record profits.

As coincidence would have it, later the same day the shop floor folks were herded into the cafeteria for a presentation by a big cheese from head office.

His message was all about how we the union goofballs had to lower our expectations and yadayada all the rest of the thank-your-lucky-stars-you-have-a-job bullshit that Immelt was spewing in Toronto just the other day.

I still had those business pages in the back pocket of my Big Bill coveralls, and I remember this moment like it was yesterday. Management guy gets done his doomsday speech and one of his flunkies asks if there's any questions.

I had a question. First question I ever asked in a public meeting.

"How come we gotta tighten our belts when it says right here (waving paper) in today's Globe that the company is making record profits?"

Well, that sure sparked a commotion. Head office guy didn't have an answer. Sensing his weakness, the herd immediately backed me up, even though most of them hadn't spent an hour in the shithouse with the business pages that morning.

The first question was the last question. Meeting adjourned.

And while I never met C.S. Jackson, I like to think he'd be proud of me.

Squirrel hunting

Got hired at Budd Automotive on my eighteenth birthday. It was a UAW shop. Union rules. I'd been a dues-paying member of the USWA for awhile before that, when I worked at the Black Lung Foundry. The Steelworkers didn't mind having sixteen year olds on the roster. At the UAW shops you had to be 18. That was quite a few years before Bob White took the Canadian autoworkers out of the UAW and started the CAW.

Budd was the biggest employer in the Kitchener area at the time. Paid good too. Made car and truck frames for all the major manufacturers. Budd is long gone now. Either cars and trucks don't have frames anymore or the work went somewhere else. I'm guessing Mexico, but that's just a hunch.

Got my first lay-off notice just a few months after I started. Helpful Herb offered to let me stay at his place. He was heading off on a holiday. Needed a house-sitter. Herb had a nice place nestled on the crest of a hill on the edge of town. House sitting there was going to be a sweet gig.

That was an era when you couldn't open a paper without reading about racial tension and racial this and that. The Detroit riots and the Watts riots were a pretty recent memory. All I can tell you is this; when the black brothers and the white brothers and even a few Chinese brothers walked out of Budd with their lay-off notices, we were all brothers in unemployment.

Herb and Mrs. Herb were off to Europe or the Caribean or someplace. All I had to do was water the plants and keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder. I know! There's a gift from heaven just when you get a lay-off notice.

The deal with the squirrels was that they ate all the bird food and if they got a chance they'd eat the birds too. So Helpful Herb left me the keys to his gun cabinet and I went at it. Must have plinked off half a dozen the first day.

Bob White was probably the greatest union leader since C.S.Jackson. No nonsense guy. When Bob was negotiating for the UAW, or later the CAW, nobody ever made the mistake of thinking that the bosses and the workers were going to be sitting around the campfire singing Kum-by-ya together anytime soon.

So I dispatch the first round of feeder-raiding squirrels, and I realize that other squirrels, just waiting in the shadows, come zooming in to take their place. I take care of them, and there's another wave. And another.

The first act of working class resistance that I personally witnessed, I witnessed at Budd Automotive. There were eight welders working at an assembly station, two at each corner of a frame. The bumboys, unskilled labourers like me, would slap the frame parts in the jig, automated clamps would grab everything and hold it together, and these welders would weld it all up.

The automated clamps were all run off hydraulics. At each clamping cycle, which lasted about thirty seconds, one of the welders would stick the end of his mig gun into a hydraulic hose. Next cycle, the guy beside him would do the same. Enough cycles, and eventually the hydraulic hose would spring a leak and the station would be down for an hour or two. Eight welders, be they black or white or Chinese, would get a two hour break. It was a beautiful thing.

So eventually I got the squirrel problem winnowed down to one super-smart squirrel. Darwin's theory in action. But this guy is good. If you miss him on the first shot he's running zig-zag patterns to avoid the next shot. I swear he turns around and gives me the finger while he's zig-zagging away.

So I figure fuck Darwin, I'm gonna kill the furry fuck. I climb up on the roof, where I've got a downward shot at the birdfeeder. I'm peering through the scope, waiting for him to put his head up, and he's moments away from going to that big birdfeeder in the sky. Then, HOLYSHIT!!! A cross-country skier comes a-gliding through my field of vision! Then another one. And another...

Just lucky I had the scope. Without it I wouldn't have even seen the skiers! Can you imagine the newspaper headlines the next day? CARELESS HUNTER BAGS CROSS-COUNTRY SKIERS. Ya right. As if that woulda been my fault.

I eventually got the fucker with the twelve gauge, but I had to buy Herb a new bird-feeder.