Unionism is the Enemy

by Jack Boulogne
April 1999

Over the last year or so I noticed something very strange about the political and economic scene, here in BC and in Canada as well. The people screaming for higher wages and better working conditions are much better off than those who are not screaming or holding ordinary people hostage, as we see in the so-called shortage of hospital beds, which we all know is phoney.

Over the past few years I have developed a theory of economics that explains some of this oddness. Its's the Ins-and-Outs theory, which says that 50 percent of Canadians belong to the Ins, and the other 50 percent are the Outs. You can easily tell who are the Ins because they have everything; unions that can scream and whine for them, pension plans, early retirement schemes, dental plans, worker's compensation, pro-tected working conditions. Many of the Ins are even protected against the consequences of incompetence. The teaching profession is the best example of this. In the employment market in Canada, school teachers have the lowest turnover rate; sure they get turfed out for molesting the clients, but when was the last time you heard of a teacher being let go because of pedagogic inadequacy? As a teacher, I know that some teachers are in fact being wormed out of the system by devious means, but they, for humanitarian reasons, are always protected from the public eye. On the other hand, this applies only to the very worst of teachers, and the process may take many years.

What kind of people are the Outs? A few are sidewalk musicians, but the bulk are honest workers, night janitors, small business operators, roofers, truck drives, minimum wage earners, the temporarily unemployed; you know what kind of people I am talking about. They rarely make $20 an hour, and the only chance they have of achieving financial security is buying a home, fixing it up and hoping the real estate market will save them.

This picture is highly simplified, but basically sound. What is wrong with this picture is that the Ins get all the media attention. Never do you see a heart warming story of a day care centre finally turning a decent profit after three years of intense effort. No, instead we have to listen to the Nurses Union making a frightful noise, which often is dishonest. For example, this nonsense about nurses having to work overtime really upsets me. Nurses voluntarily work 12-hour shifts three days a week, so they can have four day weekends, although the weekends do float around of course. Do we ever hear of nurses throwing in the towel and the hypodermic needles to join the happy gang at McDonald's?

Brutally put, unions are the enemies of the level playing field. Government creates overly powerful unions and then kowtows to them. If government had any guts they would tame the union monster. Even good old Vanderzalm was scared of the teacher's union, and was unable to control the BCTF.

Anyway, we Canadians should think the unthinkable and do the unimaginable. We should just dump unionism.

(Harbor City (Nanaimo) News, February 6, 1999)