PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE It’s time to organize our country’s youth by Dave Haggard s I was sitting in the office in mid- May I came across a report from Statistics Canada that made me think about the rough road that _ \ Canadians have to go down we \\ approach the year 2000. Stats Canada put out some data which really opened my eyes even wider and made me think about my own kids’ future. In the 1990’s it said there has been greater declines in incomes for Canadians between the ages of 15 and 25. Census data shows that between 1990-95 the average income of young people dropped by 20%. That’s 20% less income for young people to get a start in life with. It’s a 20% handicap that young Canadians have to face. Most of the 15 million other working Canadi- ans saw their incomes drop by 2.5% over the same time period. For aboriginal people, there was 34% less income to take home during those years. All of this has been taking place while the the number of jobs was supposedly increasing, if you listen to the federal and provincial governments in this country. Stats Canada data for the 1996 Census show declining incomes which are getting worse for women and people of colour. There has been an increase in child poverty in Canada today up to the point where a startling 25% of children under the age of six were poor in 1995 as opposed to 20% five years earlier. An unbelievable 1.3 mil- lion children were identified as having to live beneath the poverty line! When you look at the numbers of peo- ple that don’t belong unions, you can seen where most of this poverty comes from. Since 1972, unions have only organized 28 out of every 100 new workers. Today only 31% of workers are protected by unions on a national basis. The percentage of unionization drops to as low as 22% in Alberta, which is often referred to “Alabama North” by the I.W.A.’s Local 1-207 in Edmonton. It gets as high as 37% in Quebec, which is down a lot from the 1950’s and 60’s when over half the workforce in that province was unionized. As for the youth, only 10% between the ages of 15 to 24 are members of unions while 35% of workers over 25 years are organized into unions. Almost 45% of workers between 45-54 enjoy union membership while the youth simply struggle to get by. It’s no mystery to me why the young people of Canada are in such a bind. It’s no surprise to me why they are at the bottom of the economic ladder. We can whine about the Jean Chretiens, the Mike Harris’ and the Ralph Kleins of Canada and their anti-worker policies or we can stand | up and organize the outh in this country. ‘e can continue to point fingers at right-wing governments and right- wing corporations, as I am sure many of us will do, or we can kick start our national organizing program. The I.W.A. and the rest of the labour move- ment have done a good job in bringing the ben- efits of unionization to the baby boom genera- tion and have fought to bring them higher wages and benefits. On aver- age trade union members make 33% higher wages than their non-union counterparts. Those are achievements that we can all be proud of and hold up high. Now it’s time for us to go out there and extend the benefits of unionization to the youth of Canada, thousands of which already work in non-traditional industrial and service indus- tries represented by the I.W.A.. Our youth deserve the best they can get from the trade union movement. They are the ones that will be carrying the load in the future and they are the ones that we need to help to get a better start in life. We have to help them in their struggles to build decent futures for themselves and for the rest of Canada. LANDS AND FOR IFBWW united as they | condemn Greenpeace by Kim Pollock IN thinkers at Greenpeace never had a “1 chance to learn from that wily polit- ical warrior from Saskatchewan. If they had, they would never have abused the trust of European trade unionists the way they did recently. Because, as my wife’s dad also used to say: “What goes around comes around.” And come around it did, when I.W.A. CANADA National President Dave Haggard and Fourth National Vice President Harvey Arcand persuaded members of the Interna- tional Federation of Building and Woodworkers (IFBWW) to vote to “condemn” Greenpeace for its antics( see story page one). The story began last fall, when Greenpeace launched its latest fund-raising campaign, a massive boycott of British Columbia forest products, really an exercise in corporate black- mail. Greenpeace backed that up with a huge fund- raising effort, particularly in Europe, based on alleged bad forest practices in the so-called “Great Bear Rainforest” — the area of British Columbia better known as the Central Coast. No matter that forest workers, First Nations, local governments or citizens of the region reject the campaign. No matter that the province’s New Democra- tic Party government has set up a stakeholder process for the area that will allow those who take part to develop a land use plan for the region. No matter that Greenpeace has refused to take part in that process, No matter that 18 percent of the planning region is currently “off limits” to logging as either protected areas or | study areas or that 12 percent will ultimately be protected as parks. None of this matters to Greenpeace, which states that its goal is to eliminate all harvest- ing of “old growth” in the area, a proposal that would completely shut down logging in the region and which, if extended to all of British ever overplay your hand,” my late father-in-law used to say. “And don’t bite your friends on the ass.” It’s obvious now that the deep-green Columbia would eliminate more than 80,000 jobs and effectively shut down the province's for- est industry. Nor does it matter that the campaign was launched without a moment’s consultation with I.W.A. CANADA, the province’s largest union representing for- est workers. No, none of this mat- ters to Greenpeace. That’s because the Ams- terdam-based eco-extre- mist group raises the bulk of its funds in Europe, where there is nowhere near the level of knowl- edge about B.C. and Canada that would be needed to refute Greenpeace’s package of lies, half-truths and baseless claims. Many of the middle-class, young urbanites that make up Greenpeace’s tar- get audience simply see of markets for European producers! Which reminds me of another thing my father- in-law used to say: “God help you when the opposition can beat you up and feel great at the same time.” : But that’s where Greenpeace overplayed its hand. Back in early April they met with IFBWW representatives to discuss, among other issues, LW.A. CANADA’s request for help against the Greenpeace campaign in B.C. Greenpeace came out of that meeting trumpeting the support they had from Dutch and Belgian unions. But it wasn’t true. Investigations by I.W.A. CANADA and the Canadian Labour Congress brought nothing but puzzled and shocked response from those unions. “No such declara- tion has been made by our confederation as such,” Mia Devits, general secretary of the Bel- gian Workers Federation assured Haggard. The Dutch FNV “is in no way involved in any campaign of Greenpeace against the timber industry in British Greenpeace’s misleading images of bears and wilderness and think down all the “big trees,” leaving poor, homeless bears in our wake. How awful, they think; what can I do to help, they ask. That’s where Green- peace comes in. The pitch is always the same: there is a crisis, but you can be Greenpeace has told lies to we're over here tearing Split the international trade union movement and it has backfired on them as the IFBWW has condemned their actions in B.C. Columbia,” added president Lodewijk de Waal. But it tells you how far Greenpeace will stoop: split the inter- national workers movement? No prob- lem. Lie and dissem- ble? If it helps the cause, you bet. It really makes you wonder how much of anything saved if you send your dollars today. Think of Greenpeace as green tele-evangelists, with a German banker instead of a Louisiana preacher in the pulpit. In recent years, Greenpeace has experienced some declines in revenue, particularly in the U.S. Still, the green avengers raise over $30 million world-wide every year. One of Greenpeace’s largest sources of funds, in fact, has been the European labour move- ment. Justifiably concerned about clean air and water, those organizations have handsomely supported Greenpeace’s high-profile, in-your- face campaigns. And let’s face it, it’s much eas- ier to feel good about a campaign that purports to deal with an alleged environmental crisis when doing so involves absolutely no threat to your own job, your own community or your own nation’s economic base. On the contrary, with Greenpeace’s anti-log- ging campaigns restricted to Canada, Euro- peans can actually feel noble about “saving the environment” and at the same time advance their own economic interests! Because, after all, if we in Canada sell less of our lumber or wood products or pulp and paper, that opens all kinds Greenpeace says is really true, doesn’t it? 3 Well, that’s apparently how our friends at the IFBWW were feeling in the last week of May, when they voted to “condemn the actions taken by Greenpeace in British Columbia.” As Hag- gard and Arcand told representatives of the 12.9 million member federation, British Colum- bia’s NDP government has taken major steps to improve forest practices in B.C.; our members have been put out of work and their jobs made more dangerous by Greenpeace’s illegal road blockades and other stunts. Meanwhile, they noted, the strategies Greenpeace has urged involve more dangerous “selective logging,” cap- ital intensive helicopter logging that will elimi- nate more jobs and cause less environmentally- friendly high-grading. As Alvin Hewitt would say, “anyone with one eye and an asshole” could tell that’s bad policy. Especially if those same folks just overplayed their hand and bit you on the hind-end. Kim Pollock is the Director of Environment and Public Policy for I.W.A. CANADA, a SS SS 4/LUMBERWORKER/JUNE, 1998 3 . . :