It can be instructive to spend some time each week reading items from Canada’s business class media and the nation’s right-wing think tanks, so generously funded by big business. I try to do so regularly, both because such study, no matter how annoying it can sometimes be, provides valuable insights into the mind set of those who own and rule the Canadian economy and because grappling with their propaganda and sorting out any actual facts it may contain helps stave off the kind of over-earnest certainty we can all fall into if we remain prisoners of our own preferred information silos. I rely on the old adage that a stopped clock is right twice a day and try to recognize the fragments of fact amongst the ideological swill.
So, I of course recommend that readers turn first to rabble and other progressive media for analysis and reporting that has a pro-working class, pro-woman, anti-racist and anti-sexist perspective. But supplement such readings with dips into the murky waters of the business class media, both to keep up with what our economic masters have on their minds (and want us to have on ours) and because a careful, critical read of such material will sometimes reveal new information we’d miss if we only listen to each other.
For example, during the week this essay was written, the National Post issued an anguished plea to its readers “Don’t Blame Capitalism,” clear evidence that the Post’s editorial board is uneasy about the relatively mild mannered references on the part of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh recently to industry price gouging. The editorial implicitly invokes one of the central tenets of business class ideology- that when rich people get richer, that is good for the economy, but when workers manage to win a modest raise, that is very, very bad for the economy, and to be opposed at all costs.
A bit earlier this year, the staunchly pro-business Bloomberg.com was urging its readers to be afraid, be very afraid of the militance of Canada’s largest private sector union, Unifor, and the danger that wage improvements won in collective bargaining would create spiking inflation. Again, in this typical rant from the right, the implicit assumption is that when profits go up, it is a good thing , but when wages go up, it is a disaster.
And, over at the Fraser Institute, adjunct scholar Matthew Lau weighed with an unintentionally revealing essay in the March 16 Ottawa Sun this year on why, in his view, a recent slight reduction in the percentage of private sector workers represented by unions is a very good thing indeed.
Mr.Lau, perhaps drawing on that great economic thinker the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who boasted that she practiced believing six impossible things before breakfast, delivered this gem in an article earlier this year:
“The decline of unionization is worth celebrating because the effect of unions—contrary to stories emanating from union headquarters, union-friendly politicians and the broadsheets of some journalists—is to restrict worker choice, prevent job formation, reduce business investment, disrupt markets, discourage work effort and cut economic productivity.”
The observant reader will note once again the presence of that foundational right-wing assumption, that profits count as improvements to the economy, but worker gains do not, in this luminously mean-spirited and implausible pseudo-analysis, which is both factually inaccurate and tonally obnoxious.
The poet Maya Angelou rightly tells us “ If someone tells you who they are, believe them,” but she nowhere suggests that if someone tells you who you are or how you should understand the world, you should be equally credulous. While very unreliable guides to our self-understanding, the ideas and arguments that business-friendly media and think tanks promote do provide a sense of what matters to the wealthy, and what alarms them. That information can be useful as we think together about analysis and tactics.
Clearly, as seen in the examples of “boss talk” cited earlier, the increased militance of some workers over the plague years is alarming to our economic masters, and the prospect of a labour movement informed and guided by that militance growing stronger is even more worrisome.
If the bosses are worried, workers should be interested. We should support the current levels of militant talk and action by our existing unions and work hard to prevent any failure of will or temptations toward class collaboration among our union leaders. And we should launch and support as many organizing campaigns as possible among unorganized workers, especially the most marginalized. We should campaign against the ways that “temporary foreign workers” are made more vulnerable by the regulations surrounding their arrival and work in Canada, and we should reach out to those workers to help them organize and bargain collectively.
Canada needs more unionization, not less, despite the ill wishes over at the Fraser Institute and its many unpleasant siblings. But don’t just take my word for it. Even Stats Canada recognizes many of the benefits of unionization, saying in a recent report that:
“Unions may influence wage setting directly (Cahuc, Carcillo and Zylberberg 2014) and indirectly by increasing the outside options of non-unionized workers (Beaudry, Green and Sand 2012). They may also affect the hiring practices of non-unionized firms (Taschereau-Dumouchel 2020). Unionized jobs tend to have higher-than-average coverage by registered pension plans …” .
Sadly, Canadian unions are not yet the hotbeds of ferocious class consciousness and militancy so often portrayed in the business-friendly media. They are, though, important ways that workers can defend ourselves, but our unions are themselves subject to pressures to collapse and collaborate with the other side. Currently, there is more tough talk and strong tactics coming from our unions leadership than there has been for decades. Rank and file members and interested union retirees like me need to encourage boldness in our leadership. Knowing something about what alarms or comforts the ruling class can help us craft strong tactics and strategies. So, let’s keep reading the opposition’s press, and keep talking with each other about what we learn.
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