Workers of the world unite; cast off your chains…..

I have a lot of friends who earned their living as teachers, nurses, government employees and other similar jobs…most of them are now retired….and one of the great peculiarities that I run into from time to time is when one of them gets to spouting the evils of unions or worker collectives….and they always use the same example to explain why unions are bad for society. And it almost always involves the autoworkers in Windsor and how grossly overpaid they are for putting nuts on bolts. In the meantime, most of the professional folks I mentioned earlier have done wildly well throughout their working lives, and are now enjoying sort of a gold-plated retirement, totally because they have been members of some really super strong worker collectives that have rung enormously good working conditions out of employers – usually the government.

Seems it’s okay for professional folks who work mainly for the government to organize together to negotiate for decent money, benefits and working conditions, but it is not okay for ordinary working folks to do the same thing. Even the word “union” has an extremely negative connotation to it these days. And that is truly an enormous tragedy and has gone far to create the gigantic inequity in our societies. Put plainly but simply, there has been absolutely no one looking out for ordinary average working people for the last 40 years. And the result is that they have been raped and pillaged and assaulted in all sorts of catastrophic ways to the point where most working people have trouble even trying to eke a living wage out of a bloated and corrupt socio-economic system.

When I first started university back in the mythical seventies and started to take politics courses, one of the first things we were taught was about the balance of power that exists within an effectively functioning society….that balance includes big business, big government and big labour….all three have to be properly balanced for there to be any fairness or equity in our societies. So, you should be able to see the problem we’ve got these days….big business is huge beyond belief….big government has mainly a business agenda and seems controlled most of the time by the big business sector. Big labour is missing altogether. It has just been totally beaten out of society by a relentless and everlasting propaganda campaign carried out by the conservative elements in our world. And they have been totally and completely successful in discrediting unions and all worker collective organizations.

And the leadership of our worker collectives have done exactly nothing to fight back. They sit and collect their fat pay cheques and to live in grand mansions while there are increasingly large numbers of “working poor”, a term that should automatically be considered an oxymoron. If you work and do your best to make a positive contribution to society, you should never be “poor”……working and poor should never go together in the same sentence. In fact, a lot of people who know me know that I occasionally call myself a “communist” and I have this simple understanding of how life should work…everyone who makes a positive contribution to society should get relatively the same reward. It’s as simple as that. Whether you’re a brain surgeon or a lawyer or a sanitation worker or you stock shelves as a grocery store, if you’re out there bustin’ your ass, you should get pretty much the same benefits out of life. During this pandemic, it has been graphically illustrated that everybody in society is really pretty important in their own way. A grocery store worker and truck drivers are just as important as brain surgeons and lawyers. I know it’s a bit of blow to the ego for the folks who have traditionally been at the top of the human food chain, but it’s the way it mostly is.

Anyway, many, many working people in our society need worker collectives in order to restore some sanity to the world we’re currently living in. Big labour might be able to do something to protect all of us from big business and even big government, because it has become very clear in recent years that government sure as hell ain’t on our side. It has allowed big business to pretty well pluck us clean of every scrap of privacy that ever existed and has done nothing to protect us – when that’s pretty well its only job….

Workers of the word unite; cast off your chains….thanks, Karl…..