Kootenay Crust

Watching the NHL pigfest drag on into a fourth month I am left reminded of the special idiocy that is the way we so often operate in our world; like spoiled assholes and rotten children.

It isn’t just the millionaires and billionaires sacrificing thousands of lesser financially balanced souls (NHL team employees and businesses that feed off and rely on NHL game days), it appears to be unions all over are stirring. Like great giant slugs fattened from inactivity and continued heavy feeding, unions are starting to stand up to the man again.

When times get tough, those on union wages need to make larger union wages and have even better benefits packages and pensions, while the rest of the working poor, not represented by a union or governments of any stripe, fall farther behind in the great race to not be a street person.

Listening to union workers whine about their lot is like hearing NHLPA members grouse to their billionaire owners, for those who are stuck in low wage jobs without benefits and no guarantees of hours or anything else (like say, if you’re a small business owner!). And most especially to those unemployed.

I’m not saying that unions don’t have positions to be heard – not at all. There is a reason unions are stirring once again, and it isn’t just because the NDP appear to be heading back to Victoria in May 2013 as the ruling party, unless Premier Christy Clark and her team start pulling some rabbits from the nether-regions.

What I am trying to point out is the disconnect that is growing more regular in its beat is symptomatic of our perilous fiscal conditions in this rapidly changing world, where one-time over-populated weaker sister nations are now over-populated business creation giants (China, India etc.). And don’t think for a second that they don’t have massive problems from this explosion of sudden pseudo-wealth.

Corporations in Europe and North America have been shouting warnings for several decades now about their inability to compete with the wildly cheaper labour forces pretty much everywhere else in the world. Yet, like the NHL owners who removed their brains right before signing ‘star’ players to contracts that fly in the face of their stated mission in this current pissing match between the NHLPA and the league (yeah, you Minnesota Wild), those corporations started reducing jobs here and started hiring the cheaper workers elsewhere. Outsourcing occurred at the signed approvals of CEOs in the west – and it’s no wonder as a result that unionism is rearing its often ugly head again.

Unions exist for good reasons. They started because the ‘man’ – the fat cat in the big office down the road from the mine/mill/warehouse/factory – enjoyed being a fat cat on their sweat and blood and took his workers for granted. The good ole out-of-touch gits who believed they could replace any worker at any time with someone else who is hungrier; and when workers rallied more and more, the fat cats often resorted to threats and intimidation, and sometimes terrible violence, to quell the rise of discontentment.

So unionization pushed back and before you can say Winnipeg 1919, they had established themselves as a regular part of doing business for many larger corporations and industries.

They helped ensure fair wages, benefits, pensions and safer work environments.

Sometime during the Reagan years (1980s), unions started to be viewed by many people as unnecessary, most especially on the right.

Indeed, living in Winnipeg, I often found myself gob-smacked by news reports of crazy strikes, where already highly paid workers wanted more, more and more and when they didn’t get their way, they went on strike and acted like hooligans. At least, on the surface that’s how it seemed.

I personally had a few physical run-ins with striking workers in Winnipeg. The first was when I had to cross a picket line as a non-union employee with CPR. As an office worker I was considered ‘management,’ even though I was a coffee-fetching file clerk and if I supported the union by not crossing the picket line, I’d be fired. This resulted in me driving up to a throng of placard waving people who surrounded my car and started vandalizing it. I ended up outside my car with my hands around some stringy old fool’s turkey neck, threatening to do things to him outside the realm of human civilization if he smashed my car with his placard again. When the dust settled, those strikers understood my position and they left me alone for the two or three days they were allowed to strike before government legislated them back to work.

Another time I was assaulted by some sluggo while leaving a SuperStore in Winnipeg. I had a big dog and spent a lot on dog food and SuperStore was the best place to get the stuff. While walking out of the store, through the picket line and hearing jabs of verbal abuse, some daring soul grabbed a corner of the 50 pound bag of food I had over my shoulder and tugged, pulling me awkwardly backwards.

This resulted in fisticuffs and threats of the police arriving, which ended the melee – me with a torn bag of food and burning red in my eyes.

Yet, those were not the things that turned me sour on unions. It was being part of one, for a few months when I first started working for CPR. I was a labourer in a car shop in Weston Yard and one night I came upon a car-man (workers who repair rail cars) struggling to weld a ramp onto the end of a flat car. I dropped my broom and grabbed the heavy ramp so the worker could do his job properly. Pa Cobb didn’t raise a lazy goof. A few minutes later the buzzer sounded for lunch and I was immediately set upon, spittle and obscenities flying, by the shop steward. I wasn’t part of the car-man union and if anything happened to me while helping one, outside my designated duties, I would not be “covered.” In other words, one union wouldn’t back another if something happened in the line of duty – two workers just trying to get something done. That made no sense to me and the rigidity of such rules does not allow for team-work to prosper.

I was pretty much anti-union after that, until I got into the newspaper business and witnessed, repeatedly, the screaming need for one as the fat cats abused a good thing over and over again. That started to make me believe again that unionism still has a place.

That said, there needs to be a re-tooling of the way we interact in our society.

Why are unions stirring? Because corporations and industry are acting like dicks. One does not need a degree in stating the obvious to see that.

Both sides, on the agreement circle, are usually just an inch apart, but their backs are turned to one another and they have to find agreement by going the entire distance back around the circle to come to resolution (ala the NHL/NHLPA).

In other cases, unions such as those representing teachers, government workers and health care workers in this province, for example, just want to keep pace with other jurisdictions. Meanwhile, government tries to keep up with an ever-growing population, an aging one at that, and balance its books. It’s tough to do when wages continue to ratchet upward past the point of balance in terms of what is available (tax dollars) to pay them.

Think of wages for a second – and not the ridiculous piggy stampede that is professional sports.

It’s one thing to be paid fairly and be treated squarely but there needs to be reciprocation. If the golden goose has given to you, is it right to demand more when you know, deep down, there isn’t more available?

When will unions and corporations/industry stop dead in their tracks and take a look around at the damage their battles inflict on our society as a whole?

Just like the NHLPA and the NHL, they just come across as disingenuous, self-centred and poorly grounded and led, or in other words: they act like spoiled assholes and rotten children.

Our changing world requires a refocusing of priorities and there is no excuse for a lack of awareness – for any side – about what is real and imagined.

What is real is the finite tax dollars available. What should be real to the NHLPA and league is the damage they are doing to their overall situation (alienation of their fan-base).

And what needed to become real after the crash of 2008 is the start of a long, painful paradigm shift in the way we conduct ourselves – as workers and owners/managers.

The old days are done. New days lie ahead.

We either work together and get the job done, or we can dig First World War-style trenches and slug it out. Meanwhile, we fall farther behind the giants in the Far East and end up falling into a spiral that eradicates the lifestyle that has helped make us spoiled and rotten.

That means BOTH sides must recognize each other’s challenges and be… and here’s the kicker… reasonable and conciliatory and, more importantly, genuinely caring about the entire big picture.

Narrow focus on the self has got us into this mess, whether it’s the worker trying to get more from the man or the man trying to screw the worker.

In short – to both sides in every labour scrap everywhere – get over yourselves, simmer the heck down and get real.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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