FACE TO FACE: Should the posties be able to strike to back their demands?
Why do we go postal when Canadian Postal workers ask for a 3.5% wage increase and no contract clawbacks? Why do we instinctively vilify the union as it struggles to prevent its members' wages and working conditions from being Walmarted?
Why do we continue to tut-tut the aspirations of workers and blame them for our country's economic woes? Inordinate wage and benefit demands are not responsible for the economic woes of North America yet we continuously decry attempts to achieve and maintain reasonable wages and working conditions.
My right-to-work colleague, still excited about the union-busting successes in the U.S.A., wants this benign postal dispute to be a beachhead for an attack on Canadian public sector unions. He thinks they somehow bear culpability for hurting our economy by gobbling up government revenues and not living like paupers as they should. Nonsense.
According to Canada Free Press, Canadian governments gave grants and bailouts totalling $203 billion to corporations between 1994 and 2007, the equivalent of $30,000 per Canadian family. Did we complain or even whimper? No. Yet the spectre of public employee unions struggling to maintain their working conditions somehow makes our blood boil.
How about taking a billion or so from the corporate giveaway department to maintain the posties' wages and avoid Canada Post increasing of the price of stamps, which it threatens to do should the union prevail.
Does it not seem a bit ridiculous that Canadians happily coughed up $30,000 per family to bail out corporations yet we whine about paying a few cents more for a stamp?
My colleague bemoans the lofty status of public employees: Posties make $26 per hour! They shouldn't have collective bargaining rights! They should work for what we, their employers, decide to pay them! He incites private sector workers to rise up against the wrong foe. The real problem is that the private sector should offer good wages and pensions, too.
Canada Post is offering 1.9%, effectively a wage cut. It wants an 18% lower starting wage for newly hired workers. It wants a slashed pension plan, a 30% reduction in sick leave and the cancellation of the 900 hours-equals-tenure clause.
Come on, Canada Post, this isn't Wisconsin.
Face to Face columnist Jim Nelson is a retired Tri-City teacher and principal who lives in Port Moody. He has contributed a number of columns on education-related issues to The Tri-City News.
