by Mark Leier
Labour Day Editorial, National Post
September 6, 1999
It was a bad year for strikes. Thousands of workers took part in illegal strikes, and governments across the country threatened them with fines and jail sentences.
Business complained bitterly about the impact on competition and profits, and leading newspapers across the country agreed. Their editorials insisted that “strike leaders have allowed the intoxication of power to go to their heads” and that “strikes by government officials and the employees of municipal authorities should be prohibited by law.”
A prominent government representative declared bluntly about one strike, “There is absolutely no reason that hardship should be imposed upon the whole community, just because three employers and their employees were unable to agree.”
If this sounds familiar, it shouldn’t. I’m talking about 1919, not 1999. It was the year of the Winnipeg General Strike, and we lost more time to strikes and lockouts that year than any other in Canadian history.
It is worth remembering that year, for it illustrates how much the Canadian labour movement has changed over 80 years, even if our perceptions haven’t.
Many still believe, for example, that the “average” union member is male, blue collar, and relatively uneducated. Today, nearly half the unionized workers in Canada are women. Union members tend have more education than non-union workers, and are more likely to be retail clerks and public employees than truck drivers and stevedores.
Another misperception is that labour unions are more powerful today than they were in 1919. Yet the power of labour is a small thing compared to that of government and business. Unions don’t control the police, make the laws, or put people in jail. Unions don’t hire and fire thousands of workers, cut wages, decide what is produced where, or set prices.
The only power unions have is the same economic power they had in 1919: the right to withdraw their labour to protest unfair conditions. Given the disparity between the net worth of corporate Canada and the labour movement, this is not the devastating weapon some believe it is. The total assets of the Canadian labour movement — buildings, money, everything — are about $5.5-billion. By comparison, Canada’s richest 100 individuals are worth, conservatively, $106-billion, or 19 times more than the entire labour movement.
A recent report on the top 1,000 companies in Canada reveals that the top five have assets of nearly $575-billion — more than 104 times what the labour movement can muster.
This economic power of business translates into political power, for one of the perks of wealth is access to government. As a result, the right to strike has been sharply curtailed over the years. How and when workers can go on strike is tightly defined by the law, while sympathy strikes, mass picketing, and secondary picketing are either illegal or highly restricted. Canadian businesses still use the law, the courts, and even the police to stall organizing drives and break strikes.
Do we strike too much? We’re told Canada loses more time to strikes than other OECD countries. The numbers are misleading, for each country counts strikes differently. If we do strike more, it is because we have to. Other OECD countries have better protection for workers: shorter work weeks, longer holidays, better unemployment insurance, better welfare, better pensions, better job training programs. In Canada, workers have to fight with employers to get what workers in other countries receive under the law.
Even so, strikes in Canada have been declining over the last 50 years. We lost about 0.08% of working time to strikes and lock-outs in 1998. That’s down considerably from 0.17% in 1988, 0.32% in 1978, 0.46 in 1968, and 0.24 in 1958. And it is all far from the record of 1919, when 0.6 % of working time was lost to strikes.
In fact, we lose more time to illness, disability and personal or family responsibilities than to strikes: nearly a month for every day lost to a labour dispute. Making the workplace healthier and safer and curing the common cold would help the economy more than banning strikes.
Thinking about 1919 also reminds us that some things have not changed in 80 years. The basic rules of the economy are still the same. Workers’ incomes are still employers’ expenses, and that is why the two continue to struggle over how the pie is divided.
That is why employers fight labour as hard today as they did in 1919. It is still a struggle in which the employer has the edge. That is why unions are as necessary at the end of this century as they were at its beginning.
Mark Leier is a labour historian at Simon Fraser University. His book Rebel Life: The Life And Times Of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, And Labour Spy, will be published later this year.