Category Archives: federal government

A Race To The Floor For Minimum Wage: Can It Be Stopped?

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just-saying_thumb      By Andrew Chernoff     https://andrewchernoff.wordpress.com/

First it was Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation with his article, “The pay of government workers is way out of line” published July 31, 2013 in The Province, to which I made my feelings known about on August 3, 2013 in my commentary, “Bateman Advocates A Race To The Floor For Minimum Wage…You First, I’ll Give Ya A Push”.

Just like a bad smell you can’t get rid of, or a bad itch you just can’t seem to scratch, another proponent of the drive to lower wages——–using a corrosive and mean-spirited abuse of the privilege of free speech for hateful, venomous and spiteful unsupported comments with the intent to rile, incite anger and get an antagonistic reaction——comes forward.

Ms. Margaret Wente, a so-called journalist for the The Globe and Mail, woke up recently seemingly during that bitchy time of the month (the only way I can explain it), and decided to lambaste, insult and take undignified shots at Canada’s firefighters—all of the “Nations” firefighters—-without exception.

In her article on August 8, 2013,  “A Nation of $100,000 Firefighters”, Wente charges, “municipalities do not love firefighters.”

Further, she claims to speak and know the feelings of our municipalities and regions, proclaiming, “ Across Canada, towns and cities are getting hosed by the skyrocketing costs of their fire departments.”, of which firefighters, she suggests, are the main reason for those increased costs because, municipalities, “simply match the settlements that everybody else got, including police. So the costs spiral ever upward,”

She continues, by adding insult to injury when she claims, “Thanks to arbitration settlements, your firefighters are the best paid (and possibly the most underworked) guys in town.”

Really?? Possibly the most underworked in MY town? Hmmm….she’s been in my town??….I think not!

She claims to have nothing against fire fighters. “I have nothing against firefighters, personally. But times have changed. We can’t go on like this. I could write the same column about the police. You guys are supposed to protect us. But we can’t afford you any more.”

But she does say, “They look good on calendars.”  A sexist comment I dare say. And dare I do.

So nobody is safe. The police make too much. School teachers? Bus drivers? Janitors? Airline pilots? Ambulance drivers? Paramedics? Who is not a target for Ms. Wente?

She obviously has a lustful crush for Stephen Harper and his Canadian Austerity plan. In her desire to drive down wages, she is a true Harperite, spreading propaganda for that race to the floor for minimum wage, to increase that disparity between those that have, and those that don’t—between the 1% and the 99%.

According to Wente, our firefighters have barely anything to do, “Working conditions are pretty sweet too. Thanks to modern safety standards, there are very few fires left to fight. These days, most fire department calls are medical. To prove that they’re still needed, fire departments have been adding defibrillators and Jaws of Life, and frantically expanding their repertoires to respond to even minor non-fire emergencies. Still, there’s an awful lot of what we shall euphemistically call “down time,” which firemen fill by preparing meals, sleeping, watching television, polishing the trucks and rewinding the hoses.”

She claims that the costs and salaries for Canadian firefighters are for smaller cities, “typically the largest item in the budget. It accounts for upward of a quarter of their costs.” And that firefighters and their unions are so insensitive, greedy in the community and regions they live in, that “the costs spiral ever upward, and towns are forced to cut back on libraries and roads.”

This is one woman who has one hell of a bitchy time of the month; so much so, that a grizzly bear would be no match for her spite and hate.

“But the really crass way that the rich have of driving down wages is by subtly and not so subtly feeding people’s envy and greed…making us worry that someone else might be getting ahead, might be doing better than us. We aren’t talking about getting us riled over the wages of bankers, brokers and sports stars; we profile them in the fashion and shopping pages of the papers.”, OperationMaple writes in its reaction to Wente’s column, titled, “Let Us Count The Ways of Driving Down Wages”.

I continue with the following quote from OperationMaple’s article referred to above:

“The Rich and their Media Mavens saved the corrosive power of envy and greed for school teachers, fireman, bus drivers…all the folks that live next door and shop at the same stores we do. Let’s get agitated and angry with Joe down the street and Alice around the corner for having a job with a union, a negotiated wage and benefits and let’s try and pull them down to our situation…part time work and no benefits and lousy pay. Because when their economic situation is as desperate as ours, then everything will be ok.

They get paid too much and work too little and couldn’t we all get by with a volunteer firefighting force? Just because they are the ones who run into burning buildings when the rest of us are running from burning buildings, in Wente’s view, doesn’t justify the wage they get.

It used to be the case that when people got decent wages and benefits through collective action we’d all cheer them on and try to copy their efforts, create our own unions and seek our own collective success. Not anymore. Now we just want to tear down those folks lucky enough to have a union. The drive to lower wages by making all of us envious of our neighbours is succeeding. That’s why the 1% and their media allies, their media employees go after Employment Insurance and Firefighter wages…because it works and it distracts us from the folks that are truly criminally over-paid: bankers and brokers.”

I conclude with the following remarks.

The drive to lower wages may be succeeding in some minds, but it has not succeeded everywhere and with everybody. Are you going to let it happen to you? Will you start fighting back now, and let yourself be heard? Will you stand up? Will you get involved in civil disobedience and fight the good fight?

The drive to lower wages is nothing but a race to the floor of minimum wage. We are expected to give up more, so the rich can get richer? I think not.

The richest 300 people in the world are more wealthy than the poorest 3 billion combined, and every year rich countries take over 10 times more money from poor countries than they give in aid, according to therules.org. Find out more by visiting  http://www.therules.org

Don’t let yourself succumb to the race to the floor of minimum wage.

Austerity chokes the down-and-out, as Harper and Flaherty look the other way

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By Nick Fillmore  August 16, 2013  http://rabble.ca

Austerity chokes the down-and-out, as Harper and Flaherty look the other way

The exceedingly aggressive austerity cuts carried out by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty over the past seven years have come home to roost as millions of Canadians, depressed and without hope, are succumbing to its worst consequences.

Program cuts and tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy have had a huge, disproportionate impact on the poor, working poor, underemployed, and those with health problems including mental illness.

The massive austerity program translates into less income, decreased services, and reduced health care for many of Canada’s most vulnerable people. It appears that more than 3.5-million Canadians — mainly the poor, the unemployed/underemployed and the under-privileged — are struggling.

The attacks on the vulnerable began soon after the Conservatives came to power in 2006. They launched cuts that were a broadside attack on the government’s ability to finance many of its activities, including these much-needed employment and social support programs.

Ignoring the needs of Canadians living in desperate conditions, Harper and Flaherty initiated the extremely aggressive austerity program because of their determination to reduce the deficit and cut the size of the federal government. Their decisions were based on their own neo-liberal economic beliefs, not what Canadians needed or wanted.

There are numerous examples of needless, brutal cuts. Claiming it was concerned that some people don’t have enough incentive to work, Harper-Flaherty toughened up the Employment Insurance rules. They took millions of dollars away from mostly seasonal workers, leaving them vulnerable.

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), the government department that provides the most hands-on support for the poor, is being cut more than any other department. It will lose 5,700 positions — one-quarter of its workforce by 2016. The largest cut in absolute terms is to the Citizen-Centered Services Program, which helps Canadians access government services by phone and online.

Harper also cut funding to the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO) and to a number of Aboriginal women’s health organizations — crucial programs on suicide prevention, women’s health, and diabetes. They also cut the Women’s Health Contribution Program, which funds six women’s health organizations across the country.

The austerity cutting is based on Harper and Flaherty’s near-fanatical determination to cut the deficit and reduce the size of government. The two unwaveringly believe in neo-liberal economics, which enriches corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. We have two people running our country who don’t really believe in government!

Unfortunately, the problems of the less fortunate are not acknowledged in the PMO or Department of Finance. It is much more important that interest rates remain low for the benefit of corporations and the one per cent. A Google search for any Harper or Flaherty comments that express any concern or interest in the problems of the poor comes up empty.

Two moves early on by Harper and Flaherty eliminated the ability of the Conservatives to fund the kind of generous, liberal-minded government Canadians have been used to. First, a two-per-cent cut in the Goods and Service Tax income in Flaherty’s first two budgets cost the government a staggering $10-billion to $12-billion annually in revenues that had been used to help support government services.

In addition, Flaherty has cut $60-billion in corporate taxes since the Conservatives took power in 2006 – needlessly reducing the country’s corporate tax rate to the lowest among G8 countries.

The austerity program and other government cuts have had disastrous consequences for millions of Canadians. There are staggering disparities in life expectancy based on the amount of education a person receives and their amount of education. On average, people living in rich neighbourhoods live an average of 86.3 years, while those living in a poor neighborhood live only 65.5 years — a difference of 21 years.

There is more hunger across the country than ever before. In March, 2012, 882,188 people received food from a food bank in Canada — an increase of 2.4 per cent over 2011 and 31 per cent higher than in 2008, when austerity was being launched.

Children are not spared from the suffering. According to UNICEF’s most recent report, Canada is 21st out of 29 top countries for relative child poverty, and 27th for the percentage that were overweight.

Between the years 2007 and 2011, Statistics Canada reported a 20 per cent rise in people who said their mental health was deteriorating. Mental illness is already the number one cause for disability claims in the workplace. According to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, awards for mental injury at work have dramatically increased in recent years because of pressure placed on workers to produce more during the austerity period.

It’s also likely been an increase in suicides in Canada due to the distress suffered by individuals as a result of the austerity program. Two international researchers, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, have documented substantial increases in suicide in several European countries and the United States as a result of austerity cuts. Suicides in Canada increased from 3,512 in 2005 to 3,890 in 2009, which takes in the early part of the austerity period. However, Statistics Canada is three years behind in posting its deaths statistics, so no information is available covering a large period of austerity. But, assuming that Canada is experiencing roughly the same fallout as are Europe and the U.S., it is safe to predict a sizeable increase in suicides here.

Throughout the Conservatives’ seven years in office, independent economists argued that the austerity program was not achieving its stated goal of preparing the country for an economic recovery, but Flaherty refused to budge.

Then in April, the world was shocked when the austerity experiment, which was had destroyed the lives of millions in Europe, was totally discredited. Thomas Herndon, a young University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student in economics, discovered that an influential paper endorsing austerity practices as a way of rebuilding beleaguered economies was incorrect because of spreadsheet coding errors and selective data.

Amazingly, Flaherty continued with the austerity experiment. “What I worry about is those that suggest that austerity should be abandoned,” he noted. “I think that’s the road to ruin quite frankly.”

So more cuts that will affect the poor the most are on the way. Harper and Flaherty will chop another $11.8 billion from government spending by 2014-15; job losses in both the public and private sectors will be 90,000 by 2014-15; and there will be 1.4 million unemployed workers in the country in 2015.

If Harper and Flaherty really wanted to balance the budget and look after people at the margins, they could work harder to collect the $29 billion the government is owned by the rich and corporations in unpaid taxes.

They also could try harder to find the $3.1-billion that was given to the anti-terrorism program but now cannot be accounted for.

The Council of Canadians says if Harper and Flaherty really wanted to both gradually reduce the deficit and look after the needs of the poor, they could continue to stimulate job growth through needed infrastructure projects (water, transit, green energy, roads, etc.), and reverse corporate tax cuts. Not by suffocating those at the very bottom of the pyramid.

Nick Fillmore is a freelance journalist who worked in many areas with the CBC over nearly 30 years. He is a former member of THIS magazine’s editorial board and was publisher of The 4th Estate, an independent weekly in Nova Scotia, during the 1970s. Fillmore was also a founder of the Canadian Association of Journalists. To see other articles, visit his blog.

Opinion: Politicians must step up and make rail safety a top priority

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By   William Brehl  | August 5, 2013  http://rabble.ca

 

Photo: flickr / mcwetboy

 

Transport Canada’s emergency safety directive issued following the Lac-Mégantic rail tragedy is welcome but more can be done.

For almost a decade we’ve been campaigning for better rail safety in Canada and the Harper government, to its credit (and that’s not easy for a union person like me to say), has returned some of the independent policing powers to Transport Canada after too much deregulation was granted by previous governments.

Still, the calamity of Lac-Mégantic occurred.

Obviously, more must be done to ensure safety, especially when tens of millions of Canadians live near main rail lines.

Transport Canada’s emergency directive is meant as a temporary fix while Ottawa drafts and passes into law new safety regulations.

The Transport Canada directive calls for limitations on leaving trains unattended and locomotives unlocked, minimum two-person crews when transporting dangerous materials, and clear direction on applying handbrakes to unattended locomotives with one or more cars attached.

As I said, it is a good start, but as someone who spent 20 years working on the track and the last 15 years representing 4,000 men and women who repair and maintain the track, there are three things that the temporary directive overlooked that I believe must be included in legislation.

Away from rail yards, no train should be left unattended for one minute, let alone one hour or more. Although the exact causes of Lac-Mégantic are still under investigation, the tragedy has already taught us this: Deadly and surprising things can happen when a locomotive is running and no one is around. Ending the practice of unattended locomotives will require better staff scheduling by managers.

Safety plans must be more transparent. Currently, federally regulated railways must file Safety Management Systems, or SMS, with Transport Canada. The SMS is intended to be a formal plan to build a culture of safety across the organization. SMS are not intended to be self-regulation, but in the everyday world, they are because a railway’s compliance is restricted to its own filings and infrequent surprise inspections from Transport Canada.

More Transport Canada safety inspectors are needed. Something is amiss when for every one Transport Canada rail inspector there are eight or nine air inspectors. Granted, when there is an air accident, it is usually a catastrophe with loss of life, but, as we’ve so tragically learned, calamity lurks on rail lines, too. The gap between the number of rail and air inspectors must be tightened.

Over the last 15 years or so, train derailments and accidents have been on the rise in Canada. In fact, there have been more than 10,000 of these incidents since 1999, according to transportation safety board statistics. Most are minor; some are major that force residential evacuations and some are catastrophic like Lac-Mégantic.

We cannot turn back the clock and bring back those innocent people in Lac-Mégantic. But we can look forward and create an environment of safety first.

Rail safety is something that must be maintained year in and year out, day in and day out. Wear and tear continually work its way on track and equipment. Short cuts to safety procedures must be avoided. Complacency as time passes since Lac-Mégantic must not occur.

Cynics might suggest that our decade-long safety campaign has to do with maintaining union jobs. But rail safety is not about jobs. It is about lives.

Millions of Canadians live close to rail lines and hundreds of millions of tonnes of dangerous commodities are shipped by rail through crowded urban areas every year. Our economy depends on rail traffic and our lives depend on it moving safely.

It is now time for every Member of Parliament, everywhere in Canada, regardless of party affiliation, to step up and do what is necessary to ensure that safety is given top priority. MPs need to look to their own constituencies, be aware of the possible dangers, and earn the trust their constituents have placed in them.

This fall when the House of Commons transport committee begins hearings it will be an important step toward ensuring no more tragedies like Lac-Mégantic happen again.

William Brehl is president of Teamsters Canada Rail Conference’s Maintenance of Way Employees Division, based in Ottawa, and a member of Transport Canada’s Advisory Council on Railway Safety.

Photo: flickr / mcwetboy

Corporate elite grumbles over possible CETA failure

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By Stuart Trew   | August 5, 2013   http://rabble.ca

Corporate elite grumbles over possible CETA failure

John Manley, the former Liberal deputy prime minister and current mouthpiece of Canada’s corporate elite, wants Prime Minister Harper to send a “high-level” political mission to Europe to save the stalled Canada-European Union free trade negotiations. Manley made these comments in an interview with The Canadian Press last week, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that argued “quitting [the CETA] is not an option.”

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched the talks on Canada’s behalf, and he is the only person with the authority to make the hard choices that inevitably arise in negotiations this complex,” he wrote on July 25. “On the EU side, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso must summon the political courage to carry his 28 member states over the finish line. No new issues or backsliding can be tolerated. The only acceptable direction is forward.”

It is typical Manley — not a second thought for democracy, just big, strong leaders making tough decisions that will help us all in the end because they help Big Business.

Manley also doesn’t explain what would make this urgent political delegation different from the past two or three attempts to seal a deal, including Harper’s multi-country trip to Europe before the G20 summit this June.

But cut the guy some slack. The CCCE has not been paying as much attention to the CETA negotiations as past trade efforts or Canada’s current Asian trade and investment talks like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and bilateral negotiations with Japan. At least that’s how it seemed until now.

Is corporate Canada getting nervous? Maybe. And it’s probably not because of the actual payoff from a deal with Europe, which is flimsy. (See Public Citizen’s recent assessment of the value to the average American — a chocolate bar a month, starting in 2029 — of a proposed U.S.-EU trade deal.) This is about free trade machismo.

“Canada needs to demonstrate that it can reach an agreement with Europe if it is to have much hope of making headway in trade negotiations with emerging markets in Asia,” wrote Manley in the Globe and Mail. “The government’s trade policy is dependent on this,” he later told CP. “If we don’t do Europe, there’s not a lot to show for our trade policy.”

The CP article explains that that the problems facing the Canada-EU talks include “counter-balancing Europe’s need to win greater access for cheese producers, with Canada’s demand that Europeans open the gate to Canadian beef and pork exports.” As well, “Canada is being asked to accept stricter European standards on patent protection for pharmaceutical drugs, which provinces have resisted because it could push up drug prices by as much $2 billion annually.”

The article also quotes trade lawyer Laurence Herman suggesting the government and business sector have not done enough to sell the benefits of CETA to the masses, “particularly as the critics — such as the Council of Canadians and other civil society groups — have been successful in underscoring the concessions Ottawa and the provinces must make.”

So when might a Manley-endorsed high-level meeting be possible? Not until after the European vacation month of August, according to iPolitics.ca.

“One challenge that we face is that in the summer — August, usually — the Commission…this is their period where they usually close down, so it is more challenging right now to engage with them,” Frédéric Seppey, Canada’s chief agriculture negotiator, told iPolitics at the U.S. Grains Council Annual Board of Delegates last week. “But we’re hopeful that in September it can resume and conclude in a timely fashion.”

Take action

Two billion bucks in extra drug costs is not chump change. The drug patent demands of the European Union are unacceptable. They render any modest economic benefits almost meaningless to Canada. The new limits CETA would put on provincial and municipal public spending, on the creation new public services, on telecommunications policy, on financial services regulation — all of this already in Canada’s offers to the EU, which have leaked — are also already too much to pay for small potential market access gains in Europe for Canadian agricultural products.

Manley says quitting CETA is not an option. We think it’s the best one. Whichever you believe, we can’t let Corporate Canada’s rush for an EU deal get in the way of democracy and our right to have a say in the CETA negotiations before anything is signed. You can tell the PM and opposition parties how you feel by using our action alert, WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH EUROPE? As always, let us know what you hear back from the government and opposition parties.