Who signs the cheques, who’s got the keys?
There’s much online kvetching about all the power unions have as garbage piles up in Toronto, Windsor and as a strike deadline at VIA Rail approaches. But when I hear someone complain that unions have too much power, I understand they’re complaining that unions have any power at all.
I have a short verse written by Joel Emmanuel Hägglund (aka Joe Hill) on a poster on my wall:
If we workers take a notion
We can stop all speeding trains
Every ship upon the ocean
We can bind with mighty chains
Every wheel in the creation
Every mine and every mill
Fleets and armies
off all nations
Will at our command
Stand still.
All you employer types, investment bankers and right wing pundits stop reading here. You now know all you need to.
What a lovely concept. An end to war, greed and injustice. Hill wrote those words in the early 20th century. There’s been… ah… some drift since.
Would it were that unions actually had that kind of power. The above mentionned capitalist bastards no doubt know that only about 28 per cent of Canada’s paid labour force was unionized in 2007. So we can be pretty sure that many wheels in the creation will keep rolling for the forseeable future.
That whole ‘withdraw our labour’ thing is itself bound with mighty chains. Cordoned off behind ministry supervised votes, timelines, rules and, of course restricted to the process of renewing a collective agreement (another set of rules, restrictions and impositions). And then there’s back-to-work legislation.
Unions today hold to those chains and strictures because the legal system that enforces them is our only other real power, not having gained this world and its wealth, as Brother Hill predicted we would, so long ago.
(Sure some unions talk a good game about ‘building power’ and a smaller number are actually out trying to do that but these efforts pale compared to the effort and money put into administering contracts).
Even here, in this little boxing ring called contract adminstration, where worker and boss purport to fight as equals, tucked away in a corner of reality where 70 per cent of workers must take what they’re given and say ‘thank you’, the balance of power between worker and boss is largely an illusion.
See, we don’t sign the cheques. We don’t have the keys. This whole business about “job security” in “iron clad contracts” where it’s “impossible to fire someone” is a bit of an oversimplification.
The power to sign the cheques is quite something. If you don’t want to have someone working for you, stop paying them. The collective agreement can make it expensive for you – buyouts, severance, damages, etc – but if you really want to get rid of someone you can.
Sure an arbitrator might even give someone their job back after a year or two of delay, but you’ve probably thought of that too and have a plan – also costly – to make it so bad that the person wouldn’t want their job back anyway.
Or you can subcontract, outsource, contract-out or just shut down then re-open three blocks or an ocean away.
Don’t get me wrong. Making it expensive to fire someone or contract out their job can often be enough to keep it from happening. So contracts are effective. And important to the people they serve.
But do they trump the power of property and ownership? Most definitely not.
July 22nd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Exceptionally well-said.
August 12th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I came for the Algonquin park trip reports (very informative, by the way) and was pleasantly surprised by the thoughtful political commentary. People often forget, whether out of ignorance or ideological convenience, why it is that strikes happen in the first place. After decades of neoliberal pressures eroding the hard-fought gains in the manufacturing sector and the impending assault on the long-defended gains of public employees, workers are being pushed to the brink. Inequality in Canada has reached the point where many people can barely afford to survive, let alone move up the social ladder. Those individuals overhelmingly hold positions in the non-unionized low-wage service or non-profit sector. Attacks on an already low union density in the name of “freedom of movement” and “efficiency” are certain to lead to the same decline in wages, and this of course is what unions and their members are struggling against right now. Of course, the ideologues forgot to mention that the freedom and efficiency they have promised really only accrues to those who sign the cheques, as you put it.
January 8th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
The final solution to the problems you have mentioned is to rebuild the IWW and complete the historic mission of the working class to abolish capitalism that Joe Hill and his contemporaries did so much to promote a hundred years ago.
http://www.iww.org