GUEST COLU

Labour should resist
social program review
by Clay Perry

he Liberal Government’s Labour Minister,

Lloyd Axworthy, is conducting what it

calls a “review” of our Social Programs.

Poor and working Canadians, especially

those that rely on Unemployment

Insurance, are the intended losers, so they
should vigorously support Labour's resistance to
the “review”.

J am not a great fan of the general industrial
capitalist system that makes very large-scale
social programs necessary. The Right Wing is
grotesquely wrong in the remedies it recommends,
but in one aspect of its diagnosis it is right: large
scale social programs tend to dehumanize both the
recipients and the societies that provide them.

After all, they were invented not out of humanist
impulses, but in Germany, by Bismarck, and mod-
elled after arrangements made by Krupp for his
armament workers.

Fundamentally the deal between the worker and
his family on the one hand, and the huge employer
(Krupp) or the industrial state (Germany, Canada)
was this: the worker agrees to specialize to the
extent that he or she becomes totally, permanent-
ly, dependent on the system or firm, and in return
the system or firm agrees to insure the worker
against temporary, expectable breakdowns of the
system (UI), and against likely periods when the
worker won’t be able to produce (Old Age
Pensions, Health Care, Workers’ Compensation).

The system is now very powerful; for the time
being it seems to have eliminated what once were
real alternatives, like democracy. Thus did we
become captives.

And now that there is no apparent alternative,
we are faced with an increasingly powerful inter-
national demand to renege on the social arrange-

ments that induced
working populations
to become dependent
on the firm and the
state. Bad faith, pure
and simple.

We could benefit
from a good-faith re-
view of social pro-
grams, dedicated to
making a more human
society. Or, to put it in
another way, dedicat-

ed to making us a

society again.

But that is not what is intended.

The review is generated by, and will serve, those
who pay too little taxes and want to pay even less,
to turn resources from the care of children and the
sick into more private

IfI thought that the review was at least intended
to find ways in which Social Programs could be
better designed for people as they are, or better
yet, for people as they want to be, I would jump in
with both feet.

But the driving motive is to further erode the
remnants of the things that make us a society, that
encourage us to treat at least some people as
though they were people.

They are the few precious things left to us that
prevent us from turning into Los Angeles, where
the affluent and impoverished are held together
only by the force of police fire-power.

If the matter were presented honestly, we in the
Labour movement, and Canadian’s generally,
could deal with it effectively; understand it, and
reject it.

But the clever marketing, the self-deceit, the
stealth, the systematic appeal to one another's
worst natures, may

consumption by those
who already consume
too much.

To paraphrase H. L.
Menken, you can’t
throw an apple core
out of a car window
these days without hit-
ting a prosperous com-

The review is generated by
and will serve those who
pay litile taxes and want to
pay even less

well guarantee for the
“review” a success
that we will bitterly
regret in the future.
The fundamental
problem with our
social programs, of
course, is that they
were designed to

plainer about taxes.

Compare the circumstances of those who today
are demanding “tax relief”, at the cost of those
relying of social programs, with the circumstances
of the Canadians who in the fifties and sixties will-
ingly undertook the extra cost of our health care
programs. You cannot escape the conclusion that
something is amiss.

Canadians of the fifties and sixties, emerging
from a depression and a World War, knew that the
essential costs of maintaining the society included
that of insuring people against the system’s break-
downs, and of accommodating the fact that people
are not after all designed to tend the system’s
machines. Sometimes they get sick, and frequent-
ly, they get old.

And some, thank goodness, aren’t well-designed
for the system even when they are young and
healthy.

accompany generally
full employment. When the fiscal, monetary and
Labour market policies of government ensure con-
sistent structural unemployment of between 10
and 20%, the “insurance” mechanisms are bound
to be stressed, and ultimately to fail. The remedy
to that situation is a return to full employment
policies, not to a review of social programs.

The programs as they stand tend to dehumanize,
but unemployment and sickness and poverty, in
the context of an industrial society that has no
effective defence against these afflictions, are
incomparably more dehumanizing.

Clay Perry is a semi-retired former IWA staff
member who has been the director of a number of
departments over the years. He still advises and
offers his services to the union on occasion.

FERNIE VIALA

1932 - 1994

Former long-time IWA officer and
staff member Fernie Viala has passed
away at the age of 62. On August 5,
Brother Viala passed away in Osoyoos
B.C. after a lengthy and courageous
battle with cancer.

Brother Viala, who served as an
international vice-president of the
International Woodworkers of
America, originated from the Duncan
B.C. Local 1-80 where he was a presi-
dent and served the union in numer-
ous other capacities.

Brother Viala had a distinguished
and colourful career in the union
which began in 1948 when, as a young
man he went to work in various
“gyppo” logging operations on Van-
couver Island. After jobbing around
for a few years he landed a job in the
Mesachie Lake sawmill.

Then in 1952 he hired on at
MacMillan Bloedel’s Chemainus saw-
mill where he eventually became head
of the sub-local union committee.

In 1963 Local 1-80 named Brother
Viala as Recording Secretary and a
year later he was elected as first vice-
president. Throughout his years as a
business agent he was utilized as an

- organizer, did numerous rate revi-
sions, and had one of the IWA’s best
records on handling arbitration cases.

In December of 1972 he became
president of the local and a member
of the IWA’s provincial negotiating
committee and a member of the exec-
utive board for IWA Western Regional
Council No. 1.

In 1976 he made a major move with-
in the organization when he was

appointed to the position of Inter-
national Second Vice-President. Viala
was appointed to that distinguished
position by Keith Johnson, who was
then President of the International
Woodworkers of America which had
over 115,000 members in Canada and
the U.S. at the time.

As second vice-president of the
international union, with its headquar-
ters in Portland Oregon, he was
charged with coordinating organizing
efforts in the United States and
Canada. Brother Viala launched his
efforts to bring up wages in the U.S. to
the level of their Canadian brothers
and sisters.

In 1976 base rate for union wood-
workers in B.C. was $6.14/hr. In the
U.S. south companies such as
MacMillan Bloedel were paying their
workers less that half of those wages.

Brother Viala viewed the wage dis-
parity as a threat to all woodworkers.
Although he traveled throughout all
five regions in the IWA, much of his
time was spent in the U.S. south
where he concentrated on organizing
under very difficult conditions that
include “open-shop” labour laws.

Under Brother Viala’s leadership
the international union set up a fund
known as the Southern Cooperative
Organizing Program in which local
unions from all over North America
contributed into a fund to organize in
the U.S. south. As a result of the fund,
thousands of woodworkers had their
wages and working conditions

brought up.

Continued on page eleven

¢ Long-time union officer and activist Fernie Viala passed away on August 5,
1994 after a lengthy and courageous battle with cancer.

LUMBERWORKER/AUGUST, 1994/3