Why I'm glad I immigrated, part N

[jazzfish]

Supreme Court rules Wal-Mart must compensate workers at closed Quebec store: "The store shut down a few months after the 190 workers became the first Wal-Mart employees in North America to be unionized in 2004."

(You may, if you wish, compare and contrast this decision with almost any recent decision by the US Supreme Court.)

Something I've noticed: there are unions in Canada that will actually go on strike. Since I've been here I've noticed: the Post Office, a month after we got here. (Ended badly: the union staged 'rolling strikes' of roughly one spot per day to make a statement while not inconveniencing anyone too much, management responded by locking out *all* postal workers and then blaming it on 'the strike,' and the gov't signed back-to-work legislation.); truckers at the Port of Vancouver, sick of making no money while sitting around waiting for the Port to unload/load. (An agreement was reached; the Port is dragging its feet on implementing its end, and the truckers are making more strike noises.); and BC teachers, currently ongoing.

American individualism is American exceptionalism taken to ridiculous extremes. The idea that helping everyone else get ahead means that everyone else is dragging us down may be the most pernicious I've ever heard. It's certainly up there with "the rich deserve their money" and "work good, pleasure bad."

There's certainly some of that attitude up here, but there's still some leftover pushback against it too. It's nice to see.

Comments

[rbandrews]

I was always under the impression that a strike means something has gone horribly wrong, somewhere: the union and the company should be able to negotiate an agreement before they have to strike.

[shanaqui]

Well, that's an ideal world, isn't it? But the terms one is willing to offer another aren't always acceptable. It's a good sign that unions still feel able to push back, generally. (Could be a bad sign if it's the unions being unacceptable; there's some of that sentiment about the train strikes in Belgium at the moment. But that's more down to the individual union, I think, not corporate/government culture, which is more pernicious.)

(My family were coal miners in Wales until pretty much the last generation before mine. Strong feelings on unions, here.)

[jazzfish]

It's my understanding that there are no North American unions left that are strong enough to make unacceptable demands. (Also, 'unacceptable to whom.' I occasionally make the rookie mistake of reading the comments on some of the news stories about the BC teachers strike, and the number of people appalled that teachers expect to be PAID is truly depressing.)

[jazzfish]

I do tend to think of strikes as being a last resort, because nobody wants that: management doesn't want to lose days of productivity, the workers don't want to lose wages. But management can generally afford to absorb the hit from lost productivity. For workers living paycheck to paycheck it's a lot more serious. So I figure, if it's gotten bad enough that the workers are willing to a) go without wages and b) take the PR hit (these days all strikes are framed as 'those greedy workers'), it must be something pretty serious.

In the case of both the truckers and the BC teachers strike, management has gone all Darth Vader on them: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

[okrablossom]

The idea that helping everyone else get ahead means that everyone else is dragging us down may be the most pernicious I've ever heard.

Thank you for stating this so succinctly. It's helping me to think about this.

[jazzfish]

Most welcome! It's been nagging at me for ages now, and that's the best I've been able to formulate it. (I work in tech, which means I see an awful lot of people who all believe they're above average and that a culture of working-together will just slow them down.)

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

Wow. There are Walmarts with unions there?

The unions in this area get their way by hurting innocent people, not the company/companies they have a beef with, so I'm not really sympathetic. (I've been threatened before and once a grocery store union wouldn't let me into the store to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy, even though I have a chronic condition. It was scary.)

However, on the flip side, I once worked at a company where the manufacturing employees unionized. The company fired them all and, from that day forward, used temps so they wouldn't have to worry about unions. I think that's wrong, too.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

There are Walmarts with unions there?

No, hence the lawsuit. Wal-Mart closed the entire store and fired everyone specifically because they unionised, which is illegal but Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit. It goes right back to Sam Walton and his instructions to workers: when he got sued for illegally paying less than minimum wage and had to pay back all the money he'd stolen from his workers, he handed out the checks and announced that anyone who cashed their check was fired.

[jazzfish]

I am constantly shocked that that particular story is true. It's the kind of thing that you can't put in a novel unless you're Charles Dickens: it's just too cartoonishly evil and tone-deaf.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Oh, and: Assuming the penalty for their crime is something like "pay all the workers their entire wage for the full 10 years since you committed the crime," Wal-Mart owes something on the order of $40,000,000. Forty million.

Wal-Mart makes about $35K in *profit* a minute. So that's about 19 hours of profit. Less than a day's work in penalty, in exchange for being able to spend the last 10 years telling Wal-Mart employees worldwide that if they try to exercise their legal rights and get fair wages or reasonable protections, they're fired *just like those Canadians*?

Even 10 times that much still doesn't sting Wal-Mart like a decade of needing to treat their workers fairly would have. 100 times, maybe, but at that point you're relying on a "arbitrator" to decide that a bunch of minimum wage workers deserve 20 million dollars each.

(Insert standard rant here about how the REAL "tort reform" that's needed is the ability to levy punitive damages that don't necessarily go to the Plaintiff, so that the moral panic about 'but they're getting RICH!' can be removed and appropriate penalties can actually be levied for crimes by rich entities.)

[jazzfish]

Wow. There are Walmarts with unions there?

There are not! My understanding is, this particular store unionized, and the company responded by shutting the entire store down, because they'd rather lose a single store than have to deal with a union anywhere.

I'm sorry that you were threatened and kept from medicine. That's scary and unpleasant, and it shouldn't have happened: to you, to anyone.

But... there's no way for a strike to *not* affect 'innocent people.'

Case in point: the Hollywood writers strike in, what, 2007? 2008? With no scripts there was no production, so lots of non-writers in movie jobs (not just actors, but set construction, makeup, all that sort of backlot stuff) weren't getting paid. I regret that those people were being hurt by a dispute that wasn't about them, and I expect the striking writers did as well. But there was nothing else that the writers could do, and your comment about the manufacturing company is why.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I was screenwriting during one of the writers' strikes, so I totally understand.

Also, my daughter was a union member at Disneyland. In that case, the employees are trying to vote the union out because the union is taking advantage of them, but I don't know if it'll ever happen.

My problem with unions is when they actually break car windows, slash tires and injure innocent people.

[culfinriel.livejournal.com]

I was really pleased to see that the nurses were unionized in BC. Otoh, it didn't help them any when the hospitals decided that they were going to go from 4 weeks a year w/o pay to 6. More specifically, one of the ways they controlled costs, at least in the systems I was working in (which I think are the only two in Vancouver), is closing the hospital operating rooms for 2 weeks in the summer and 2 weeks in the winter. Only emergencies. So anyone who was an operating room nurse got "unpaid vacation". Overall, though, I think it helped the nurses and patients a lot that they were unionized.

[jazzfish]

Yeah, unions won't solve everything... but, like the US Democrats, they'll at least keep it from getting worse so quickly.