In Ontario, Canada, there will be an election in three days. Ontario is the most populous province in Canada. Currently, the Liberals are in power, but even their leader admits that they will lose the election. The race is now between the Progressive Conservatives (an oxymoron, of course), headed by the populist Doug Ford, and the NDP (supported by many unions), headed by Andrea Horwath.
I will vote for the NDP, but I hardly believe that this party represents my interests. Such a party has no intention of opposing the power of employers as a class.
The fact is the NDP party and unions cannot address issues that I and many others face in our lives–in this case, the power of management to dictate to us at work. They remain silent over such issues, or they paper over such issues by high-sounding rhetoric that hides the reality.
Consider the rhetoric of John Cartwright, president of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, in his open letter of January 30, 2018, wrote the following: “We need to fight for labour law reform including broader based bargaining so that precarious workers can have a vehicle in which to achieve dignity and economic justice.”
What does Mr. Cartwright mean by economic justice? Collective agreements? Since he does not explain what he means (a characteristic of rhetoric), we will assume that he means collective agreements between employers and unions.
Other social-reformist leftists express a different kind of rhetoric that centers around the non-unionized workforce. For example, the fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage here, along with needed reforms of employment standards, was paired with the concept of “fairness.” David Bush, a contributor to the rankandfile website, explicitly considered such reforms to be fair.
Collective agreements, however, are probably better than the provisions of employment standards for workers in that they limit the power of management even more. Nonetheless, collective agreements are decidedly unfair in that they do not question the power of management to use workers as things for the benefit of the employer.
The NDP, Canadian unions, the social-reformist left in general and even the so-called radical left seem incapable of criticizing the adequacy of such collective agreements.
This blog will at least partly compensate for this silence.
The following management rights clause is more detailed than many. It illustrates the power of employers in relation to employees and how employees are, ultimately, things to be used (in this instance, for obtaining as much money as possible). It also illustrates the lack of democracy in the workplace.
Even if the management rights clause were not detailed, arbitrators have indicated that there is an implied management rights clause in collective agreements. Consequently, workers are expected to follow management’s orders or suffer the consequence of possible discipline and, ultimately, dismissal–economic blackmail.
This is what working for an employer involves–economic blackmail. The implicit situation is: if the worker does not like the working conditions and does not like being treated as a thing–there is the door. The worker is “free” to leave at any time. Of course, workers in general (as a class) lack the conditions for their own economic independence. Consequently, their freedom is an empty freedom. If they try to exert their freedom, how are they to live? If they are parents, how are they to feed, clothe and provide for the children? Such freedom is empty, and yet this empty freedom is nowhere addressed by the social-reformist left. At best, they look towards a renovated welfare state and not to democratic control over the economy.
From
COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT
Between
COLD LOGIC CORPORATION
And
UNITED FOOD AND COMMERCIAL WORKERS UNION, LOCAL NO. 247
Chartered by the United Food and Commercial
Workers International Union, CLC
TERM OF AGREEMENT
October 17, 2010 to January 31, 2021
pages 3-4:
ARTICLE 4 – MANAGEMENTS RIGHTS
4.01 Except as specifically limited by the express provisions of this Agreement, the Company retains exclusive right to exercise all management rights or functions.
These shall include:a) The right to formulate, enforce, revise and administer rules, policies and procedures covering the operations including but not limited to attendance, discipline and safety.
b) The right to discipline or discharge for just cause.
c) The right to select the products to be handled, choose customers, determine the methods and scheduling of shipping, receiving and warehousing, determine the type of equipment or vehicle used and the sequence of operating processes within the facility, determine the size and character of inventory and to introduce different shipping, receiving and warehousing methods. Without restricting the generality of the foregoing, the Union agrees that the Company has the right to study or introduce new or improved production methods or facilities
d) The right to establish work schedules, to determine the number of employees necessary to operate any department, or classification of the Company, to determine management organization for each department, to hire, layoff, suspend, promote, transfer and demote, to assign work on a temporary and permanent basis, to establish or revise reasonable performance and quality standards.
4.02 It is agreed that listing of the foregoing management rights shall not be deemed to exclude other rights of management not specifically listed.
You will unlikely be able to find anything by the social-reformist left that addresses the issue of why management has such dictatorial power over workers on a daily basis.
Why the silence?
Perhaps, as Jack Nicholson said in the movie A Few Good Men–“You can’t handle the truth!”
The NDP and its social-reformist followers cannot handle the truth. Why otherwise the silence?
The Abolitionary 