ia caine

spore nme erase

B.C. Fed march in support of
J. P. Stevens workers, Nov-
ember, 1978.

‘Historic’

victory at
JP Stevens

Workers at the J.P. Stevens
textile company in Southern
U.S. have won a historic victory
with an agreement from the
company to recognize the
Amalgamated Clothing and
Textile Workers Union.

The victory caps a decade |
long struggle to win union
recognition from the textile
company, known throughout
the labor movement for its anti-
union and union busting ac-
tivities.

Throughout the ten year
struggle, ACTWU received
strong soldarity from the labor
movement throughout North
America, including a continent-
wide boycott of J.P. Stevens
textile products.

The agreement with J.P.
Stevens was won by the 3,000
workers at the company’s
Roanoke Rapids, North
Carolina plant, but it includes
provisions to extend the result of
collective bargaining at that
plant to any other J.P. Stevens
plant where ACTWU wins a
cerification vote. a

In an attempt to split an
smash the union in its Roanoke
Rapids plant stronghold, the
textile company had granted
wage increases to workers in
other plants of eight and one-
half percent in 1978 and 1979
and 10 percent this year. The
workers at Roanoke Rapids
were offered the same contract
providing they signed an agree-
ment which would have exclud-
ed ACTWU.

Workers at the North
Carolina plant stuck with ACT-
WU, however, even though it
meant a loss of $40 per week for
two year, for workers earning
only $4.50 per hour.

The agreement includes
recognition of the union at
Roanoke Rapids and in several
other plants in Alabama and
elsewhere.

If government in Canada ac-
cepted the advice of Sandra Christ-
ensen, an assistant professor of
economics at Simon Fraser. Univer-
sity in Burnaby, public employees
who now enjoy the right to strike
would lose that right.

That is the message of her 1980
book entitled Unions And The
Public Interest.

The book was published by the
Fraser Institute of Vancouver, a
privately funded organization
which describes itself as ‘“‘an inde-
pendent Canadian economic and
social research and educational or-
ganization.”

The guideline the institute uses in
its approach to collective bargain-
ing for public employees is contain-
ed in this formulation: ‘““Where
competitive markets have been re-
placed by government control, the
interest of the Institute lies in docu-
menting objectively the nature of
the improvement or deterioration
resulting from government inter-
vention.”

That is the guideline used by
Christensen in her book. There-
fore, neither the Institute nor the
professor can truly lay claim to
documenting the problems of col-
lective bargaining in the public sec-
tor from a neutral viewpoint. Their
starting point is that what is good
for the competitive market system
(including layoffs and unemploy-
ment) is good for all of society.
Thus, they fall in line with those
who say that what is good for the
big monopolies and the multina-
tional corporations which domin-
ate our economy, is also good for

working people.
Inher conclusions, she places the
problem as she sees it: ‘‘. . large

gains by public sector employees
may have undesirable conse-
quences in the private sector, in the
form of unemployment and labor
unrest. These can occur because
private sector employees may resist
accepting wages lower than the
wages paid comparable employees
in the public sector. Hence, private
sector unions may become more
militant in their wage demands, in
an attempt to catch up to the public
sector. Because private sector em-

-ployers do face profit constraints,

they may be unable to grant wage
increases as large as those obtained
by public sector workers, and num-
erous work stoppages may result.””

After creating this hypothetical
danger to the economy of our
country (higher wages for public
employees than those of private
sector employees), the professor
goes on to advance the following
recommendation:

“We would advance that bar-
gaining over pay be eliminated in
the public sector. We would advo-

cate a system of limited collective
bargaining in which overall com-
pensation levels are not negotiable,
although the division between pay
and fringe benefits might be a le-
gitimate topic for bargaining. The
overall level of compensation for
each job type would be determined
in each jurisdiction by an inde-
pendent and continuing wage
board, whose decisions would be
based on strict private sector com-
parability guidelines. Both em-

Jack Phillips

ployer and employee groups would
be welcometo make submissions to
the wage board, but bargaining as
such would not take place. Since
the level of compensation would
not be subject to collective bargain-
ing, naturally, strikes to win in-
creased compensation would be
prohibitied.”’

It is interesting to note how
Christensen expresses her doubts at
another point: ‘‘Public employees
have demonstrated that they are
willing to strike, illegally if neces-
sary, when they are convinced that
they are not being treated fairly.
Even without a strike, employee
discontent can take the form of
more subtle job actions or (inac-
tion) which can be just as disruptive
as a strike. While the substitution
of binding arbitration for the strike
as the means by which bargaining
impasses are resolved in the public
sector is currently a popular idea,
those experienced with it are nega-
tive to the idea.”’

However, after dismissing com-
pulsory arbitration as a method for
resolving labor-management dis-
putes in the public service, the pro-
fessor appears to contradict herself
by proposing a more sophisticated
form of compulsory arbitration: a
wage board that would have the au-
thority to set wages. “The wage
board we propose is very similar to
the Industrial Peace Commission
suggested by Leland Hazard of the
Carnegie Institute of Technology
... In order to free the commis-
sion or board from political influ-
ence, Hazard suggests that its
members, who would be drawn
from labor, industry, the profes-
sions and the universities, be ap-
pointed on a long-term basis such
as Supreme Court judges are.”’

What we have hereis yet another
version of the so-called, impartial
labor court, this time to bemadeup
largely of people trained in eco-
nomics rather than in law.

No responsible and knowledge-
able leader of any public service un-
ion in Canada, whether at the mu-
nicipal, provincial or federal level,
would agree it is possible to set up
such a wage board'that would be
truly impartial and fully insulated
from the political pressures of the
government of the day and im-
mune to the influence of the big
business establishment. Life being
what it is, such boards would, in
each case, be set up by the very gov-
ernments (or agencies responsible
to them) which the unions have had
to fight, to the point of going on
strike. As to appointments from
the universities, the unions would
be more likely than not to be con-
fronted with types like professor
Sandra Christensen, who in her
book deplores the fact that the ma-
jority of public employees in Can-
ada enjoy the right to strike, which
is not the case, as she points out, in
the United States where she was ed-
ucated, or in Great Britain. Fur-
ther, any labor leaders appointed to
such a board say, by the Trudeau
government, would be conserva-
tive labor leaders who would at best
serve as a screen for the dominant
majority.

The threat to the trade union
movement contained in the Christ-
ensen thesis is illustrated by the fol-
lowing proposals she advances in
connection with the possibility of
strikes in the public service:

@ Public employers should in-
sist on limiting union security
clauses to the Rand Formula,
under which all employees in the
bargaining unit would be required
to pay a ‘‘bargaining fee’’ to the
union, but would not be required to
become union members. In that
case, those non-union members
who did not support the strike
could continue to report for work
without fear of fines or loss em-
ployment arising from union im-
posed sanctions.

@ The effectiveness of. strikes
should be reduced by automating
the employees’ most critical func-
tions or by contracting out at least a
portion of them.

@ Citizens should be given the
right to sue government and the un-
ion for normal services not provid-
ed during a strike.

@ When compensation of pub-
lic employees become ‘‘too expens-
ive,”’ public employment should be
cut by layoffs, attrition, automa-
tion and contracting out to the pri-
vate sector.

She also suggests that there
should be more extensive use of the
lockout by public employers and
more widespread use of scabs to re-
place strikers.

Completely missing from the
book is the fact, for example, that

in British Columbia all the big em-
ployer bargaining agencies, in bo

the private and public sectors, CO-
ordinate their bargaining strategies
through the Employers’ Council of
British Columbia. The Council is
always pressing governments to put
the lid on compensation for public
employees in order to be ina better
position to hold down private sec-
tor wage costs, and because they
know that if the public sector can
be saddled with what amounts to
wage controls, it will be easier tO
apply the same controls to workers
in the private sector. This design
must be seen against a backdrop of
prices and taxes rising faster than
wages, in the overall picture, thus
producing more profits for the
monopoly and multinational cor-
porations.

Another case the professor fail-
ed to cite is Alberta, where the pro- —
vincial government instituted vol-
untary wage guidelines after the
federal government abandoned its
wage control program. The Al-
berta government tries to impose
those guidelines on public employ-
ees and urges private industry to
follow. First set up to keep wage in-
creases to between six and 7.5 per-
cent a year, this year the guidelines
have been moved up toa 7.5 tonine
percent range, with inflation run-
ning at almost 10 percent. Alberta
provincial government employees.
it should be noted, do not enjoy the
right to strike.

Like the other.economists who
have produced studies for the Fra-
ser Institute she is definitely in the
conservative camp. I do not believe
that her book will convince many
trade union members. However, it
was not written for that purpose. It
was designed as part of the big busi-
ness war of ideas to discredit the
trade union movement in the minds
of millions of Canadians and thus
facilitate the passage of more re-
strictive labor legislation. I am
hopeful that the union movement
will use all the resources at its dis-
posal to counteract such mislead-
ing propaganda.

‘Not’ not meant

The word ‘‘not’’ found its way
into the wrong place in Labor
Comment last week, leaving the
opposite impression from that _
which was intended. The sentence
— incorrectly — said “‘It is re-
ported that the AFL-CIO fraternal
delegates . told president
George Meany that the left had
taken control of the CLC, which
was not far from being the case.”’ It
should, of course, have read
«< . .which was far from being the:
case.”

Ontario |
jobs rally
hits plant
closures

Continued from page 1
all the speakers at the rally was
the same: Ontario working peo-
ple will not tolerate the pro-
vince’s deindustrialization and
the thousands of jobs that are
being taken away.

Cliff Plikey, president of the
800,000 member Ontario
Federation of Labor, rejected
‘Ontario labor minister Robert
Elgie’s do-nothing proposals on
plant closures announced in the
legislature Oct. 14.

Pilkey said Elgie’s statement
failed to meet the OFL’s main
demands: public justification of
closures by runaway corpora-
tions; one week leave serverance

pay for every year of service;
complete pension portability;
and, increased notice of a com-
pany’s intention to shut down or
lay off workers to at least six
months.

The OFL president warned
the Tory government that work-
ing people want it to make full
employment its number one
priority. The rally’s purpose,

Pilkey said, was to tell Davisand

the Tories, ‘‘either you change
or we'll change your govern-
ment.””

Bob White, United Auto
Workers Canadian director
called for the Ontario govern-
ment to seizé the assets of cor-

porations that are shutting
down until all the workers’
claims on the runaway com-
panies have been settled to the
workers’ satisfaction.

Referring to the OFL’s se-
cond phase in the ‘‘Ontario can
work”? campaign - which is a
collection of more than two
million protest cards to be sign-
ed and presented to the premier,
White said to the rally ‘“‘Go
home and finish the job. Tell
Bill Davis we need legislation on
plant closures and if you don’t
do it, then step aside and we’ll
put somebody in who will do the
job.”

Ontario Public Services

Employees’ union president
Sean O’Flynn declared “‘it’s
time we had a government that
stopped presiding over the
disintegration of Ontario’s in-
dustrial base.”?

Dick Barry, United Electrical
president said the root cause of
the shutdown epidemic was the
branch plant nature of
Ontario’s economy.

‘Decisions affecting the lives:
of thousands of Canadian
workers,” he said, ‘‘are being
made in U.S. corporate boar-
drooms.

“It’s time we told them
enough is enough,” Barry said.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCT. 24, 1980—Page 12