Marois and the Conseil du Patronat: a match made in hell?

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Welcome to Sunday snippets, my new repository of snark about all the ridiculous nonsense I didn’t get a sufficient opportunity to mock during the week. 

 

Construction and the PQ: a tale of three parties who all hate workers

Today, Quebec’s Parti Quebecois government has recalled the National Assembly to pass back-to-work legislation to end a sector wide strike of construction workers. The strike has idled over 175,000 workers and brought construction to a halt across the province. Last week the PQ had raised the spectre of such a law in an attempt, ostensibly, to motivate both parties to reach a settlement.

Except everyone involved knew perfectly well it would do no such thing. When the government threatens back-to-work legislation, they strip the employer of any motive to negotiate. Why make concessions, when they can simply wait for the government to legislate their employees back to work, with what are normally minimal wage increases and no chance to negotiate non-wage related conditions? Sure enough, after the threat of back to work legislation was announced, the spokesperson for the construction unions told La Presse, the “employer arrived with an offer which was actually worse than the last offer they had made.”

Congratulations Pauline, after losing two weeks of work these workers will be forced back, with a minimal raise and no change to their working conditions, and without having been able to exercise their legally guaranteed right to negotiate collectively. Make no mistake, collective bargaining only works so long as unions retain the right to strike, and consequently the right to threaten to strike. Without the threat of a strike, employees have no leverage.

For those who don’t care about such trifling things as the right to bargain collectively, you should still be pissed off, because the threat of back-to-work legislation actually leads to longer, more acrimonious labour disputes. Employers who have no motive to negotiate don’t reach quick settlements, but instead flaunt their intransigence as they bide their time waiting for a special law. In fact, somewhere north of 95% of all collective agreement negotiations end swiftly and without the need for a strike. This is because the threat of a strike is a strong incentive for both parties to reach an agreement. Employees don’t like strikes any more than employers do.

This is why the system works, interests are balanced and both parties have a built in motive to make compromises and settle quickly. Governments with itchy trigger fingers when it comes to back to work legislation (the federal Conservatives pioneered this idiotic approach to labour disputes, and now the PQ are cheerfully following in their footsteps) upset the apple cart. They shatter the balance of interests which usually leads to a fair deal and put all the cards in the hands of the employer.

This is great if you are the Conseil du Patronat (who called for back-to-work legislation the day before the PQ announced it), or own a large corporation. If you’re anyone else, it’s terrible. So next time you pass a picket line, or are inconvenienced by a work stoppage, don’t blame the workers. Place the blame where it belongs, on the irresponsible government which has taught employers that they should never compromise or give an inch. 

Meanwhile, this idiocy shines a clear light on the convergence of our political system. Our supposedly social-democratic government, supported by the other two major parties, is stripping workers of their right to bargain collectively. Agree or disagree with the law, does anyone believe that it represents the views of over 85% of the Quebec population? No wonder support for the PQ has cratered, they’re trying to be more right-wing than the right-wingers. Meanwhile, the population learns an important lesson: vote, don’t vote, it doesn’t matter. Whoever you vote for, the government will still represent the interests of the Patronat, not the people. 

 

Mainstream media are awesome, part 1,543,968 in an ongoing series

Both the Montreal Gazette and La Presse gleefully covered the results of the 2011 National Household Survey in their pages this week, with the Gazette splashing the following across their front page:

“Montreal gets a C in smarts: Despite four universities and low tuition, Montreal is average when ranked by the number of degrees as a percentage of population. Karen Seidman reports that the latest statistics from the National Household Survey show little correlation between accessibility and the number of graduates.”

Got that folks? All that striking and protesting was just tragically misguided. Because there’s no connection between how much school costs, and how many people attend.

This preposterous canard was a favourite of the Gazette‘s municipal affairs writer Henry Aubin during the student strike. He hammered repeatedly on the point that low tuition did not increase accessibility, based on statistics showing that provinces with higher tuition boasted higher university graduation rates. Sounds convincing, especially when you drop university from the sentence, and refer to graduation rates alone, as Aubin often does. 

Here’s the problem: unlike anywhere else in Canada, Quebec has an exhaustive network of free, public colleges known as CEGEPs. These CEGEPs offer two kinds of programs: two year “pre-university” programs (essentially the equivalent of grade 12 and 13) and three year “professional” programs. These professional programs cover far more professions than trade schools or community colleges, and offer prestigious and exhaustive educations which are usually the only route to certain careers.

For example, to become a nurse in Ontario, one needs to complete a university program. Here in Quebec, one needs to complete a three year CEGEP program in nursing. I have little doubt that a graduate of a three year university program in nursing in Ontario is no better educated than a graduate of a three year CEGEP nursing program in Quebec. But there is one key difference between them: the Ontario nurse is a university graduate, while the Quebec nurse, for the purposes of the misleading statistics being trotted out by our newspapers of record, is a drop-out. 

In Quebec, our system is designed to stream many people out of the university track at the CEGEP level, and provide them with the education they need to succeed in their chosen field. The merits of that strategy can certainly be debated, but the fact that it artificially depresses university graduation rates cannot be. 

Aubin knows this perfectly well, but chooses to mislead his readers in order to make his point. Seidman, to her credit, at least includes this line, albeit buried at the end of the article: “[CEGEP] can become a disincentive to going on to university. This is perhaps supported by the NHS figures for the census metropolitan areas (CMA) with the largest proportion of trade certificates, which were all in Quebec. Among Canada’s largest CMA’s, Montreal had the highest proportion of trade certificates, at 10.6 per cent.”

It is the crux of the matter, and merits more than a confusing throwaway line, but at least it’s in there. Add the effect of CEGEPs to the fact that one out of two Quebec students is a first generation university student, and the fact that “the single largest determinant to going to university is whether or not your parents have gone”, as Concordia professor Bruce Hicks told Seidman, and the picture is reversed. The truth is Quebec has a higher rate of university participation than we have any business having, given these factors. That’s due to low tuition and a cultural commitment to higher education coming out of the quiet revolution. So next time someone tries to tell you that low tuition has no effect on participation or accessibility, call their bluff. As any idiot could tell you, lower tuition means higher participation. Numbers showing otherwise have been tortured beyond recognition. 

 

“The Conservatives are turning off voters”

Be still my beating heart, Canadians may finally have noticed that our glorious leader is, well, kind of a dick. Nik Nanos, who is quoted above, tells CBC that his survey shows that a whopping 51.5 per cent of Canadians would not consider voting for the Conservatives, compared to 36.4 per cent seven months ago. Now never is a long time in politics, and impending elections tend to focus the mind on the least worst option. As such, some of these folks will no doubt scurry back to Stephen in 2015. That said, this is a cataclysmic drop in a number more damaging than simple support. If a voter tells a pollster they’re voting NDP, you can still win them back. If they tell a pollster that they are never, ever getting back together with you, that’s a different story.

At very least this indicates that the CPC are in very real trouble, for the first time since being elected in 2006. The teflon administration of Stephen Harper seems to have lost its non-stick coating, and the grime is piling up. 

 

You’re all pretty freaking awesome, you know that?

Thanks to the Council of Canadians, who covered my plane ticket, the Quebec delegation to the Tar Sands Healing Walk, who invited me along as an embedded journalist, and most of all thanks to the incredible generosity of fifty seven funders, and 1,832 of you who shared my crowd-funding campaign, which funded a new laptop and other expenses, I’m off to Alberta very early Tuesday morning. 

I’ll be covering the planning meeting for the first ever People’s Social Forum, which is scheduled to take place in 2014, and of course the Tar Sands Healing Walk, which is being referred to as the crown jewel in the Sovereignty Summer, and will be attended by such big names as Naomi Klein, Winona LaDuke, Bill McKibben and Crystal Lameman. 

Because the Conservatives re-scheduled their convention to avoid the flood, and quite possibly the flood of angry party members, because I didn’t take the not insignificant fees charged by Indiegogo and PayPal into account, and because I set a target far lower than what I actually needed (because I never expected to be able to raise $2,000 to be frank), I’m still collecting funds despite having passed my original goal. This is what I’ll be using to live on while in Alberta, and if I raise enough, what I’ll be using to travel to the rescheduled Conservative convention and cover it. The crowd-funder goes for another week, until my return on the 7th, so please toss a couple doubloons in the hat if you can and/or share the shit out of it on your social networks. 

By raising nearly $1,800 in the first 72 hours of the campaign, we’ve set a very exciting precedent for the crowd-funding of journalism. People are sick of the pablum that passes for news, and are prepared to shell out their own cash to support real journalism. That’s reason for hope, and optimism, in the depressing landscape of media these days.

Finally, to all who chipped in or shared this campaign, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I am deeply humbled and honoured by your faith in me. I won’t let you down. 

 

A new, and incredibly sexy, website for Idle No More

Launched with little fanfare, the new website for Idle No More made an immediate splash, reportedly attracting over fourteen hits per second in its first days, with most of those posting and interacting being women. Best part? I get these stats from a Brooklyn-based reporter for The Nation. The impact of Idle No More is clearly expanding beyond our borders. You should really check it out: it’s gorgeous, user-friendly, cutting edge and dripping with web 2.0 neatness. 

 

Not everything I write on this trip will appear on rabble, and I’ll be doing a lot of reporting on twitter which won’t make it into my stories. If you want to follow along, and make sure you don’t miss a thing, please follow me on twitter: @EthanCoxMTL