Unionomics

It's been a long time, but I've written before about my ambivalence about unions, first questioning the left's automatic support of them in times of labour strife and then acknowledging a commenter's point that the hard-line mentality of labour organizations is at least in part a response to hard-line stands by employers and governments (if you're going to dig your heels in, I'll dig mine in deeper - that sort of thing).

Now, with my home city of Toronto into the second day of a strike by city employees, including sanitation and community centre workers, and the province of Ontario facing a strike by LCBO staffers, the union issue is top of mind again. But I find myself no clearer on the subject than I was more than a year ago.

Part of that is selfishness, of course. Having these workers off the job is a (pretty minor) inconvenience, so on a personal level it's difficult to summon any rah-rah feelings for either the picketers or the government officials whose unsuccessful negotiating is equally responsible for the strike. Another reason for my indecision is ignorance. I simply don't have a deep enough understanding of the issues in play, other than knowing they involve usual suspects such as job security and benefits, to pick a good guy and a bad guy in these confrontations.

I'm going to give Graham F. Scott, editor of This Magazine, the benefit of the doubt and assume that he does have a better understanding of the issues. I certainly hope that this post in support of the striking city workers isn't just the knee-jerk reaction of a dutiful liberal foot soldier. Now (full disclosure), I know Graham a little bit and I have every reason to believe his opinion is more considered than that. And I certainly agree with his statement that the union movement has been an overwhelming success in improving the rights of all workers, even those that don't belong to a union.

However, when he writes that the city workers' union shouldn't just "roll over and die every time management has a cashflow problem" and that the union "exists to preserve existing benefits, negotiate for new ones and stand up for their members' job rights," he loses me just a little. Not because they're incorrect or controversial in and of themselves, but because they paint a grim picture of what a union stands for, one that I have a hard time rallying behind.

Here's why. In the documentary The Corporation, the filmmakers argued that corporate entities, with their utter disregard for anything beyond their own narrow self-interest, fit the clinical definition of a psychopath. Fair enough. But when I read Graham's description of what a union exists for, it's just far too easy to substitute the word "corporation" for "union" and words like "revenues" and "profits" for "benefits" and "rights" and come up with the same conclusion. Employers and union employees may be adversaries at the bargaining table, but both seemed to be governed by the same principle of more, more, more - regardless of who gets harmed in the process or of mitigating circumstances that might make their objectives unreasonable.

The current economic situation calls for compromise at both ends. As I've said, I don't have a good enough sense of what's holding up negotiations for city or Liquor Control Board workers to know who is and isn't bargaining in good faith. But if there's a psychopath at the table, I can't blindly assume he or she is sitting on the employer's side.