On the usefulness of unions

It’s time for the annual Labour Day union op-ed audit!

For most of us, Labour Day is a chance to soak up the last warmth of summer. So pity the pundits who spend the first weekend of every September writing op-eds about the state of Canada’s labour unions. Here’s what they had to say this year:

In the National Post, Adrian McNair laments the findings of a recent Ecomomist study that says Canada loses the most workdays per year to labour stoppages. “We are leading the world in dragging the economy down with whining about things like benefits, annual wage increases, and bankable sick days,” he says, beating out notoriously strike-prone South Africa and France. It’s astonishing that Canadians “find ways to lose 2.2 million days to labour stoppages in order to complain about worker conditions that exceed the standards of nearly every other country in the world.”

A much different picture of Canadian labour is painted by a Toronto Star editorial, which declares “(t)hese are tough times for unions,” noting that unionization rates are down from their 1980s peak. Still, the editorial argues somewhat contradictorily, unions remain “a force to be reckoned with,” and in Ontario have “succeeded in getting the reluctant politicians to agree to a major expansion of the public Canada Pension Plan,” which will be the biggest social program expansion since medicare.

Unions’ detractors often deploy the argument that all the important concessions have already been won and unions are no longer necessary. Not so, writes president of the B.C. Federation of Labour Jim Sinclair in the Vancouver Sun. “With globalization, stagnant or declining wages, increasing economic uncertainty and a shrinking middle class, we need unions today more than ever,” he writes.

A Sun Media editorial predicts the end of the cozy relationship between Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and the public sector unions. It’s all in the math: the Ontario government desperately needs to balance its budget and “in a province where 80 per cent of spending goes toward salaries, it’s hard to look elsewhere for a solution.”