With their latest set of proposals on “flexible labour markets,” the Ontario Progressive Conservatives want to cut the heart out of labour unions.
Why they are even bothering to take their knives out, when unions in the private sector are dying a slow death anyway, I don’t know.
The Conservatives have produced a paper (which you can read for yourself by going to the party’s website at www.ontariopc.com — it is on the home page) saying that productivity in Ontario is being stifled by “rigid” labour laws, which give unions too much power.
The Conservatives want workers to have a choice in whether they pay dues or not. It’s a radical proposal that hasn’t been tried anywhere else in Canada, but is common in parts of the United States with “right-to-work” laws, such as South Carolina.
Currently, in almost all unionized environments in Ontario, workers have to pay dues to the union, whether they actually join the union or not. (Exceptions are made for people whose religious beliefs prohibit them joining or supporting unions; these people must make contributions to a mutually agreed-upon charity, of an equivalent amount.)
The reasoning for this is simple. All employees, members or not, get the benefits that are achieved when a union wins an agreement covering that workplace. People who choose not to join the union get covered by the same pay, benefits, service and treatment as those who belong, so they should pay for them too. It’s the same idea as making landed immigrants to Canada pay taxes, just as Canadian citizens do.
If employees have a choice of whether to pay dues, many will choose not to. Unions would be seriously weakened by the existence of a pool of non-union workers that have made their own deal with management. The union’s ultimate bargaining tool, which is to go on strike, would be dealt a death blow.
Nobody likes strikes. But the threat of a strike has been the way that unions have vastly raised the standard of living of their workers. Unions have helped create a strong, stable middle class by improving wages. They’ve ensured safer working conditions and they have provided rules that protect employees from being exploited or overworked.
The Conservative proposals amount to “neutering” of unions, says Len Carter, the president of the Waterloo Regional Labour Council. “They want to eliminate any rights for workers.”
Conservative labour critic Randy Hillier, an electrician turned MPP, says the problem with unions is that they make the workplace too “prescriptive,” unable to adapt to change — and that’s part of the reason so many manufacturing jobs have been lost in Ontario.
“The important thing is, do we recognize the trends we are living in and take advantage of these trends to maximize our prosperity?” he said. “Or do we just accept we’re going to have an ever-decreasing industrial workforce in this province?”
As a union member myself, I see that they have many flaws. I sympathize with members who dislike their dues being used to support certain political parties and causes. I see how cumbersome the bargaining and grievance processes are between union and management. The report from the Conservatives also rightly points out that public-sector unions have not shown enough willingness to help balance the province’s books
But all those problems are outweighed by the fact that unions are the only counterforce that protect workers in a global economy in which business interests hold almost all the cards. Investment dollars can move to another country in the time it takes to execute a few keystrokes on a computer. And no matter how “flexible” we try to be in Ontario, how can workers compete with a Chinese factory that makes its workers sleep in dormitories on site, so that they can be woken up in the middle of the night to carry out a last-minute design change in the product?
Meanwhile, belonging to a private-sector union in Ontario is a diminishing privilege, as manufacturing jobs decline and as the labour force becomes more transient, part-time and harder to organize. In 2010, only 16 per cent of Canadian workers in the private sector were unionized. Ontario has a lower rate of overall unionization than any other province in Canada except Alberta. The emerging high-technology sector in Waterloo Region has hardly any unionized workplaces. And so I wonder why the Ontario Conservatives have come down from the hills to shoot the wounded.