Unions Have Made A Better Life For All Canadians

By David Murray on March 24, 2014

By David Murray. I was at the local gym in Pitt Meadows today working out. I overheard a conversation from a young man who was talking to a young lady. He was telling her that he was doing all the work and the older guys, twice his age were doing nothing. He was saying that he hated working for a union.
I guess it would be hard to blame him in some ways. After all he was all of 22 years old! His generation has not seen much positive press about belonging to a union. When the B.C. Liberals took over the government in 2001 approximately 44% of all workers belonged to a union. Today sad to say it is only 26%. 2001-to 2014 , that is a couple of generations for a young worker.
I went up to him and started talking to him. I was interested in why he had such a bad opinion about unions.
He went on to tell me that at his job , there are two-tiers. Workers with benefits and young workers with little or no benefits (medical-sick leave-etc). Most of his generation are not getting 40 hours a week. A lot of them are working part-time and have to get a job somewhere else. This makes it hard to participate in a lot of the union activities, meetings etc. (Companies are making it harder all the time for younger workers-With all the new labour language it is getting harder and harder to get union benefits)
After I let him have his say, I agreed that things certainly were not perfect in the union movement. That being said I started to ask him some questions? Did he know that people used to work 10 hours a day and six days a week , with NO overtime. Sunday was the only day they got off. There was no medical plans what-so-ever. No seniority, when you got old and couldn’t do the job any longer you were let go for a younger worker.
There was no work safe policies that all workers enjoy today. Women had it even harder, very low pay, no sexual harassment policy. And of course no child labour laws, kids were in factories working at age 8 and 9.
He didn’t realize that the union movement did so much for workers in the early part of the century.
Why would he? Now a lot of companies when you are being hired as part of your training show you a video on why you do not need to belong to a union.
Plus so many companies have reduced their amount of workers so that low paying contractors can come in and do as much as cheaply as possible. We have a “Free Trade Agreement” with China. This is making it hard to compete for workers. Outsourcing of jobs in our country has reached epidemic proportions.
This has not been the fault of Unions and Canadian workers.
It has been caused by corporate greed! Canadians companies currently are holding billions of dollars in surplus money and not reinvesting it in our country to create jobs or stimulate and grow the economy. It is shameful.
The young man after talking to him for five minutes, thanked me for telling him about the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who toiled and suffered under adverse conditions so we all could enjoy a better life.

 

 

Mike Farnworth first to cast hat in ring for NDP leadership

 

 

By Michael Smyth, The Province March 3, 2014

 

 

 

NDP leadership candidate, Mike Farnsworth, speaks during a debate themed on "youth" issues at SJ Willis school in Victoria on March 31, 2011.

Photograph by: Lyle Stafford , Times Colonist

Christy Clark may have won an election few expected her to win, but Mike Farnworth says he knows a thing or two about winning himself.
Now he’s out to prove it.
“I’m running for leadership of the New Democratic Party,” the veteran NDP MLA told me.
“I don’t believe for a minute Christy Clark is unbeatable. I’m running to be premier — and I intend to win.”
With those words, Farnworth, 54, becomes the first official entrant in the race to replace Adrian Dix as NDP boss and leader of the Opposition in the legislature.
Farnworth, first elected as MLA from Port Coquitlam in 1991, didn’t expect to get another shot at the job after finishing second to Dix in the 2011 NDP leadership contest.
“Like everyone else, I thought we were going to win last May,” he said. “But we didn’t seal the deal.”
Despite a 20-point NDP lead in the polls at the campaign’s start, Clark’s Liberals cruised to an upset victory, forcing Dix’s resignation announcement in September.
How did the NDP blow it? Farnworth points to Dix’s mid-campaign policy flip-flop on the proposed Kinder Morgan oil pipeline.
Dix maintained for more than a year that he was neutral on the Alberta-to-Burnaby pipeline, pending the outcome of environmental hearings. Then, out of nowhere, he announced on Earth Day that he was opposed to the $5.4-billion project.
“That was not good,” Farnworth said.
“One day I’m on the doorstep saying one thing to voters, and the next day I have a different message. And it was like, ‘Where did that come from?’”
Farnworth said the so-called “Kinder surprise” threw a scare into voters over the NDP’s ability to manage and grow the economy.
“I think many voters said, ‘Wait a second. Resource development is important and these are our jobs,’” he said.
“It allowed the Liberals to characterize us as a party without an economic vision.”
He said that’s why he wants to be an NDP leader who supports jobs and economic growth.
“We can’t be perceived as the party of ‘no’. Otherwise, the people of this province, especially in the Interior, will just say ‘no’ to us again.”
He said he personally still supports the NDP’s original position on Kinder Morgan — neutral, pending the outcome of environmental hearings — putting him offside with the party’s current stand against the project.
Farnworth also criticized the NDP’s “positive” election campaign, saying the party should have fought back harder against the Liberals’ negative attack ads.
“I admire what Adrian did in terms of having a positive vision for the NDP,” he said.
“But we didn’t fight hard enough to hold the Liberals accountable for their record on things like the HST.”
Does that mean he would run negative ads next time?
“You know that’s what the Liberals are going to do and you have to fight fire with fire,” he said. “If I’m leader, we will never fight an election campaign with one hand tied behind our backs.”
By the time that next election rolls around in 2017, the Liberals will have been in power for 16 years.
Farnworth said the party can break the dynasty by beating the Liberals in Lower Mainland suburbs, where the New Democrats were badly beaten in May.