The world was recently treated to images from China, where workers for contract manufacturers of mostly Western companies formed their own ad-hoc unions and rose up in protest at their working conditions. Even more impressive was the fact that many of them actually won concessions from their employers, and this trend has already begun to reach out to other popular outsourcing countries like Bangladesh. In fact, companies in the West are becoming increasingly worried that this avenue to cheap labour will soon be closed off to them.
In the case of China and other cheap manufacturing countries in South-East Asia, one can see the need for workers to have a strong and united voice. The same was once true of countries in the West too, as anyone who has ever read Charles Dickens and his depictions of working conditions in England knows. But while workers in many countries around the world need labour unions more than ever, in the West unions have ceased to be a force of good and are now clearly to be assigned to the category of “evil”.
The main reason why the American automakers got into trouble in the first place was the excessive burden resting on their balance sheets from outrageous and unrealistic concessions that had been made to labour unions over the years. Autoworkers, in particular, enjoyed benefits hardly seen anywhere else in private industry, and as is true of any outlandish pay arrangements, those fat and generous pay and benefit packages could last only so long before they would break the backs of those paying for them.
We have seen the same problems in the public sector too. For starters, government employees should never be allowed to form or belong to unions. They already get more than others by comparison and hardly need the kind of protection that unions used to provide a hundred years ago. Today public-sector unions and their never-ending demands for more and more and better and better have driven countries to the brink of bankruptcy. Not only do their members get 20 to 40 percent more in wages and salaries than those doing the same type of work in the private sector, but they also get to enjoy pension and health benefits that are not sustainable in the long run.
Most private-sector pension plans, for example, are defined-contribution plans, but those in the public sector get to enjoy defined-benefit plans. No government, and its taxpayers, can afford such plans. What is more, bureaucrats tend to retire at a much younger age than their private-sector counterparts, which means that they will have to be paid the defined benefits for twenty, thirty or even forty years. Taxpayers who earn a lot less and get much less in pension and health benefits cannot be expected to continue with this charade any longer. Why should a secretary making $20 in the private sector part with 45% of her annual income (which is the combined tax burden on Canadians today) to foot the bill for totally unnecessary and over-the-top benefits and pay of a secretary in the public sector? Particularly so as the former is usually more competent and more productive than the latter, because most people who work in the public sector are ones who aren’t competent enough to succeed in the private sector.
The call for abolishing all unions, starting first and foremost with the public-sector unions, is more pressing now than at any other time before. Governments across the Western world are sinking deeper and deeper into debt, making it absolutely impossible to continue giving in to the blackmail from unions. On this we must be clear: the tactics employed by unions on a regular basis are criminal in nature, and if you or I did what unions normally do, we’d be in jail by now. Just take the example of the union controlling Vidéotron staff in Québec: several years ago, union members destroyed vital phone lines, putting at risk thousands of innocent people who were cut off from 911 and other services. Without exaggerating the circumstances, many lives could have been, and perhaps were, lost at that time. Those are criminal acts, and anyone else would go to jail for that, but not unions. In their case, it’s chalked up to “industrial action” or “labour strife”. Or imagine what would happen to you if you walked into your employer’s or customer’s office and declared, “Give me more money or I’ll destroy your property and your livelihood.” You’d be apprehended by the company’s own security guards first and then quickly handed off to police waiting at the front door, who’d bring you before a judge as you faced charges of extortion.
Fair is fair
I believe in fairness in all respects. Regular readers will also know that I have often spoken up in favour of “guaranteed income” and “living wages”, as I don’t believe minimum wages to be sufficient for anyone to survive on. I expect to see fair and equal pay for all workers, whether they be involved in managerial, clerical or blue-collar activities. I simply can’t abide a system where, say, a secretary answering phones, writing correspondence and managing her boss’s agenda is paid $20 an hour, when another secretary in a unionized environment (private or public) gets $50 an hour (plus platinum pension and health plans) for the same work. Both should be paid exactly the same amount in my view, no ifs or buts.
By the same token, I find that many working in demanding jobs with immense responsibilities don’t get paid enough. I am thinking of police officers, paramedics, firefighters and even teachers. They all deserve to be paid $80 or even $100 an hour, and adding “danger pay” for teachers, for example, is not something I’d object to, seeing the kind of garbage teachers have to put up with in today’s classrooms. But such rates of pay could be easily legislated, as would living wages or guaranteed income. In our countries of the West we have, for the most part, excellent labour laws that have created reasonable working conditions. For example, we don’t allow child labour anymore. To this we could and should add clear pay schedules for different types of jobs and industries, taking into account how demanding a job is or how much responsibility it imposes on the person.
Thanks to the unions of today, however, we have created a system, and society, where there is more inequality and discrimination than in the past – the very things unions were supposed to eradicate. As a matter of fact, unions are the primary, if not sole, source of inequities in the workplace. Their constant extortion tactics, not to mention ubiquitous damage to property and even physical assaults on others, keep driving companies out of business and governments deeper into debt. Unless we are prepared to lose our public health care systems, social security, state pensions and affordable education over the next ten years or so, we must put an end to public and private-sector unions now, targeting at first the public sector. In Ontario, for example, the gilded pension benefits for public-sector employees alone account for 10% of the province’s massive deficit, and growing. We cannot allow this to go on, because as those unions’ demands rise, so will our capacity for funding vital services like health care or education be reduced to nil.
You should remember this: if in the near future you find yourself without health care or social security benefits, you can thank a relatively small portion of people, public-sector workers, who lived the high life at your expense, while rarely performing the work they were actually hired to do. We can say no to them now, but this window of opportunity won’t be open for long, which is why we must give our respective governments a clear mandate so that they can do what should have been done a long time ago: abolish, for starters, all public-sector unions and introduce private-sector pay and benefits before we reach the point of no return and start sliding into the bottomless abyss unions have dug for all of us.