Musings —07.07.2011 07:09 AM
—Fratboy Tim evokes strong reactions
…this one from OPSEU. Federally, we’re hearing more of the same is on the way there, too.
What does it all mean, beside the obvious political messaging? It means lots of unions, associations and folks are feeling that traditional media, and traditional means, are failing them. Interesting.
This add is Brilliant!
The easy rebuttal for Conservatives: This message was paid for with your tax dollars.
I can see where you are coming from. During the last election I think there was a disconnect between the narrative in the media and the reality on the ground. I’ll be very curious to see how social media has an impact on messaging in the future was well. I met some people on the campaign who were do research projects at university studying this very fact. This may be a key way to reach a younger electorate.
In terms of news, I love reading the live-blogs that they have on CBC. It’s a completely unfiltered way of getting information.
This is supposed to convince me of…..what? All stupid ideas may not be good ones but dressing them up in sepia colours and clever camera angles is still just putting lipstick on a pig. This is just downright lame – nicely shot – but lame. Next one will be all in black and white with school board administrators manning spotlights in towers around schools while cowering teachers are forced to use wire-cutters to sneak through the barb wire INTO the school to teach some social studies to the poor filthy abandoned child in ripped and soiled hand-me-downs rocking aimlessly on the floor in the back of a damp and dirty classroom gnawing on a trans-fat filled out-of-date twinkie whilst a cold wind blows through a broken window causing a map with Canada and the USA, USA, USA in the same colour to flap ominously ending by zooming in on the cold black eye of a crow staring at the child, laughing manically…..Tim Hudak He Wants to School YOU TOO!…WAIT I was just kidding!!!! At least give me royalties or writing credit.
Hey, I’m sure the Young Liberals have a few jobless Art History majors in the ol’ alumni pile to slap that turd together!
OPSEU did it, son. Got your reading glasses?
Tulk won’t be happy until everyone works for minimum wage. A very low minimum wage at that. Thank god someone is looking out for the multi-nationals.
The taxpayers of this country who (many of whom work for minimum wage and are struggling under high taxes, fees and energy prices) are not “multi-nationals.”
People living on minimum wage aren’t paying much in the way of income taxes. I agree that they do get hit hard by “user fees”, which is a favourite method used by Conservatives to raise taxes on the poor and middle class.
Dalton brought in a consumption tax (the HST). Although I’m a big believer in consumption taxes over income taxes as it stimulates investment and savings which no one wants these days for some reason (we must encourage people to spend is a stupid mantra), the fact that Dalton brought it in kinda blows your whole argument out of the water that the Cons are the enemy of the poor. If the Liberals had reduced income taxes enough so as to make the HST revenue neutral I would have supported them.
What this election is going to come down to in the end, is that people cannot afford to make ends meet. Telling them that there is a Cadillac (sorry a Lexus) in the driveway is not a good selling point when the folks can afford it. My wife and I are middle class and work hard, we cannot save, we cannot invest, we are putting quarters together at the end of the week for groceries and gas. This is the reality that the Liberals are facing. They need to address what is in people’s pockets and not their neighbours’ driveways.
Today’s front page of the London Free Press screams “Public Wage Whack Wins Support” with 47% in favour, 39% against public sector cuts. I can’t find it on the LFP site though.
This ad is too long, most viewers would have changed the channel when nothing was said….until too late into the ad. Like the Working Families Coalition ad that goes right over the head of many, it’s not going to work this time. The mood of the province isn’t against belt-tightening any more…..not when we’re still coming out an economic challenge.
This thrust by public sector unions might just get Hudak his majority. I don’t think so in my gut, but, the sympathy for the public service, at the grass root level just isn’t what it once was.
Something else to consider is that with an aging population, we can’t keep feeding money into both education and healthcare and expect those to sustain. That older population at some point is going to have to make a choice between paying for healthcare OR education. Same pocket, different priorities.
The travesty is that very soon the only people IN unions anymore will be public sector workers. Every couple of years they will line up at the trough, then go on strike and cause untold hardship and finally the craven politicians will have to cave lest the public outrage harm their chances of re-election.
Then of course we will be told that we need to pay a “health premium” or other tax increase to address “increased costs.” Look, I’m all for people being paid a fair wage, and receiving pay increases when their job performance warrants it, but these automatic entitlements that unions expect are completely out of line with reality and common sense.
And don’t even get me started on the defined-benefit pensions that kick in as early as age 55 when guys like you and I are expected to invest and fund our own while working until 70.
They are more like mafiosi than public “servants” as far as I’m concerned.
Sounds like you need a union in your workplace.
That’s such a practical non-solution for so many people in today’s workforce. There are tons and tons of people out there who have no hope whatsoever of ever belonging to a union. E.g., there are the many self-employed people out there. It is impossible for them to be unionized, because they can’t be part of a “bargaining unit” in any sense of the word. There are all kinds of people in middle management who are workers in every logical sense of the word.
It all goes to a huge flaw in the North American system of collective bargaining that we’ve had ever since the earlier decades of the 20th century — David Beatty, who was a very left-leaning Labour Law prof at U of T a few years ago, was on to this problem. As he explained, the whole threshold question of whether you get the benefit of a certification drive and, ultimately, certification as a bargaining unit, is based on bargaining power (the typical example these days being if you are a public sector worker providing a monopoly service — that monopoly power = bargaining power). The other common example is certain skilled tradespeople. This is, ironically, the antithesis of egalitarianism. Some workers benefit from this system (a distinct minority), most don’t.
So “you should join a union” is, for most people, a pretty hollow, meaningless piece of advice.
There are many many others who could benefit from joining a union, but they’ve been brainwashed into thinking it would be bad for them, or have to deal with provincial legislation that creates insurmountable barriers to organizing. Others have to contend with endless neocon propaganda about how unions are so EVIL. Then there are places like Wal Mart who exploit cheap labour overseas so that we can all enjoy cheap shit here without having to think about that exploitation. I’m not advocating unions for every Mom and Pop operation, but I sure as hell don’t support Tulk’s race to the bottom of the wage scale.
I think a far more equitable solution — a far more egalitarian solution — is to focus on labour and employment legislation and regulation that benefits ALL workers, not just unionized ones. An example is Employment Standards Act legislation, which had nothing to do with unions or unionization, and has a far broader reach than collective bargaining legislation.
Professor Beatty also talked about other possible structures such as work councils, implementing mandatory representative bodies for workers that don’t depend on certification or unionization. Part of the problem is that we’re locked into these false dichotomies, thinking that the only possible structures for representing and enhancing the lot of workers are the ones we have now (and have had since the early 20th century).
That’s one of the things that bothers me about big labour unions — they’re completely bought in to the system we have (because their executives and rank and file benefit from perpetuating it). So we don’t hear a lot of talk about reforming and improving our system from them — the only answer is “we should all join unions” or “just make it easier to join unions”. It’s just a head-in-the-sand mantra.
And SR, I think it’s a tad insulting and patronizing to conclude that everyone who doesn’t want to join a union has been “brainwashed”. There are perfectly valid reasons (you may have heard of this arcane principle called “freedom of association”) for not wanting to do so. I personally have a lot of sympathy for those union members who object to their dues being used for political purposes that arguably have little to do with advancing specific collective bargaining rights. That’s what the Lavigne vs. OPSEU case was all about — as I recall the case, OPSEU was using checkoff dues to fund all kinds of political causes (e.g., support for abortion rights) that had SFA to do with advancing the specific collective bargaining rights of the OPSEU members.
I have no problem strengthening Employment Standards legislation. However such legislation is subject to the whims of the government of the day and easily changed to suit the prevailing political winds. Our current federal government, for example, could completely gut current protections and never think twice about it. People like Tulk would cheer them on.
Governments, federal or provincial as applicable, can just as easily gut collective bargaining legislation as well. I don’t see your point there as any kind of a refutation of the points I’ve made above. I still think the important bottom-line point is that collective bargaining law, and unions, only benefit a distinct minority of the workforce. And that will, practically speaking, barring some sort of miracle, always be the case. And that’s because our collective bargaining system isn’t really set up to represent or cover everybody in the Canadian workforce.
That’s why I think a far more productive focus would be on legislation and policies which benefit all people and workers rather than that minority which is unionized. Another shining example of what I’m talking about is with respect to pensions: to me, I’d way rather see the Canada Pension Plan beefed up to the point where it actually confers on Canadians a pension they can live on, rather than the thin gruel CPP confers today. That would be a beautiful example of something benefiting all Canadian workers, not just unionized ones. I’d way rather get behind that fight than some union’s fight to protect an already-existing defined benefit plan for a few hundred or a couple of thousand workers.
“…I’d way rather see the Canada Pension Plan beefed up…”
Yes, let’s make the taxpayers pay for it. We certainly can’t have Korporate Canada wasting money on the people they depend on to make them rich.
“Yes, let’s make the taxpayers pay for it. We certainly can’t have Korporate Canada wasting money on the people they depend on to make them rich.”
That reply has so many holes in it, I don’t know where to begin.
How the hell is corporate Canada going to fund the pensions of those millions of Canadians who don’t work for corporations? What about the substantial, and growing, number of Canadians who are self-employed?
In any event, nowhere in my post did I state that any CPP reform initiatives have to result in it being 100% individual taxpayer funded. There are many different ways in which you can fund a pension plan. Many pension plans have dual or multiple funding flows (e.g., a combination of employee and employer contributions, payroll taxes or deductions, etc.).
The fact of the matter is, though, that among wealthy nations (e.g., OECD countries), those with the best overall retirement benefits tend to have generous government pension plans (e.g., France). We’re talking social programs here. The beauty of social programs (as opposed, e.g., to corporate pension plans) is economies of scale — it’s the very fact that you can access the entire tax base that creates the economies of scale that make them possible. We could have the most generous corporate pension plans on the planet, and that would do precisely dick for those people who aren’t employed by corporations.
1. I’m voting Liberal
2. I’m no fan of Tim Hudak and his party
3. This ad is the same old same old
4. Most people will tune this ad out
5. Most people will just get angry — at “The Unions” for this ad.
5. Message most people will see in this ad: “Hey we’re union members trying to save our own job — not yours”
Three minutes and fifty four seconds, really ? Why not make a feature length film ?
I want a “greatest hits of campaign 2011” at the end, in mid-October after e-day —
So there’s “Tim Hudak: All-Most American”, this one …
Let me enlighten you as to what it is like to work in a non-union shop.
Promotions and pay are not based on merit, but rather on who you drink beer with, and how well you suck up to your supervisor.
Workers are forced to take a 25% pay cut while management takes home bonuses. The recession is used as a pretext to lay off and fire workers. New hires are done through a temp agency. Workers get no benefits and earn 50% less than existing workers.
So much for my right to work.
I work in the private field…I’ve worked my butt off and am not upper middle management.
In the private sector, merit in most cases determines advancement, as opposed to the union method which is whose desk has the most dust on it.
correction: I am now middle management