Comment 29421

By Action Jackson (anonymous) | Posted March 09, 2009 at 12:36:37

I'd love to see a new unionization drive in Ontario. All the growth areas of employment "service jobs" are almost all non unionized with crappy wages no benefits and no job security.

Everyone blames the unions for making labour too expensive but the fact is the unions are why we have a middle class at all, suddenly people (making more money) could afford to buy stuff and the companies sales could grow beyond the rich.

That was what Henry Ford did but most companies didn't go along with him, it was the unions that had to drag the companies into the mid 20th century.

Think about it, as more of our jobs have gone into "service" roles that's exactly the same time that our incomes stopped growing and started falling - without organized labour to keep pressure on wages and benefits we went backwards on them so you've got more people juggling two part time jobs to try and make ends meet.

All the things they're saying about why we "can't afford" to unionize the service sector is all the same things they said about how we "couldn't afford" to unionize manufacturing 50, 100 years ago. It was BS then and it's BS now.

If the NDP wants to make real gains they should focus on this. The best thing about service jobs is you can't offshore them (and with Peak Oil you won't be able to offshore manufacturing for much longer either). That would be good for workers and good for the economy (because people will have more money to spend).

In other words, they should get back to basics, a la what Horwath is talking about. She's just what the party needs right now, a young, energetic "back to the future" leader who can get the party back to its roots doing the things that made it successful in the first place.

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