Locked out. No job. Income gone. That is the reality for 13,700 Telus workers, and 5,500 CBC employees.

The British Columbia Federation of Labour marked Labour Day 2005 with a support rally, held in a park across from the Telus building in Burnaby. A crowd of over 2,000 turned out to applaud locked-out Telus and CBC workers, and striking Trail Steelworkers.

Canadian Labour Congress President Ken Georgetti was the headline speaker: “workers have had enough of being told to take less by people who have too much,” he told the crowd.

The many Telus employees present were well aware that the same company CEO who wants them to negotiate away their pension is guaranteed $700,000 a year for life when he quits. While the CEO earns over $6 million a year, Telus employees have not had a raise in five years.

CBC Marketplace host Erica Johnson was the event M.C., Valdy provided the music, the sky was a B.C. blue, and people were angry.

Jim Sinclair B.C. Fed president talked about the CBC plan to create more temporary work. “Does that mean parents can also have temporary children,” he asked, “and that you can sit down with your bank manager, and negotiate a temporary mortgage?”

The French language CBC, Radio-Canada, went out on the picket line in the 1960s, and the labour action transformed Quebec society. René Lévesque became a militant Quebec nationalist as a result of his experience on the line.

This CBC lockout, the fifth since Robert Rabinovitch became president, has the potential to shine some journalistic light on the way the economy works, and if people were actually to know what was going on, it would transform Canada as well.

The economic news is usually reported as if there were no blame, no crime, no right and wrong. But economic news is no different from the rest of the news: justice issues arise daily. If the truth were to be told, economic news is mostly about the abuse of power by self-described management, and the support corporations receive from government.

When a man walks into a public place and shoots someone, the event is reported as a murder. Yes, the word carries the connotation of blame; after all, a crime has been committed. When CBC management locks out its employees, it is in contravention of its parliamentary mandate to broadcast to Canadians. Managers have no right to shut down a public service. The CBC president is as much in the wrong as the man who shot his gun. It is time the news was reported that way.

The government would not allow the Canadian Armed Forces to lock out its soldiers, sailors and air force: it would endanger national security. Why should it allow CBC so-called management to lock out its journalists, producers, technicians and administrative support, when that imperils our ability as a society to know what is going on?

The sense of outrage and injustice expressed at Labour Day rallies across Canada is founded on the unjust nature of the workplace, and the complicity of government with corporations. Trail Steelworker local president Rick Georgetti outlined how his employer Teck Cominco was allowed to dam rivers to create jobs, and run a smelter. Now it is using public water resources to export electricity. The profits from privatized electricity allow them to provoke a strike in the hopes Teck can then gut the union pension plan, and weaken the union.

Trail has been out for seven weeks, hurting businesses as well as workers, while the Liberal government, a recipient of Teck election campaign funds, sits tight, ignoring the misuse of public water resources, and the unwillingness of the company to bargain in good faith.

While workers are being locked out, some corporate leaders are being locked up for their criminal activity, usually described as stealing from shareholders, or betraying investor confidence.But, it is still considered good business for corporate leaders to steal from their employees, and undermine the confidence of the work force by removing economic security provisions from collective agreements, and denying pension benefits. This is an abuse of economic and social rights under the international covenant of the United Nations, as wrong, and as criminal, as accountants fiddling the books.

Governments will go along with this criminal activity until the public will stand for it no longer. So, the lesson to be drawn is that to change the way governments act, you have to change public opinion. The surest way to make that happen is to inform the public about what is going on.

The goal is for the public to know as much as the locked-out Telus and CBC workers about what life is like in today’s workplace, and why they are walking the line. Stay tuned.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...