PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE |

Liberals launch a new attack on the jobless

by Gerry Stoney

he federal Liberals are out to get the | “unemployed. In their February 22 | budget the single largest group of peo- | ple that was targeted, in the name of | deficit reduction, is the jobless.

Jean Chretién’s government is rob- bing a staggering $5.4 billion from the Unem- | ployment Insurance program over the next | three years. Those cuts are designed to make | things tougher for the unemployed.

Now it will be tougher to qualify for UI, | paid benefits will be lower for most workers, | and duration of benefits are being reduced. In short, those who can least afford to suffer are | being punished by the new Liberal govern- ment.

All of this is taking place at a time when of- | ficial unemployment is over 11% and 1.3 mil: | lion Canadians are unemployed.

Workers should remember that it was the | opposition Liberals, who in late 1992, bitterly | criticized Brian Mulroney for cutting the fed- | eral UI program. Liberal House leader Herb | | Gray took the Conservatives to task for “at- | tacking the jobless by taking $2.4 billion out | of the pockets of unemployed Canadians } through cuts to their unemployment insur- | ance benefits.”

Now that the Liberals are in power they are | being even more unforgiving to the jobless. By cutting people off of UI at an earlier date | the federal government is transferring a | greater burden to provincial welfare roles.

Nationwide there are more than 3 million people who are dependent on the Canada As-

| er. In the province ' of Ontario alone | there are over 1.3 _ million dependent on the welfare sys-

ing. The costs of

sistance Plan in one way or anoth-

tem. Those type of statistics are numb-

those numbers, in human terms, is even more serious.

The cut and slash policies of the Lib- eral government are no different than those of the previous govern- | ment. Just as easily and willingly as it

erals wan workers back i conditions of tl 30’s when the u ployed were for work in the camps. The wo had to go there | cause there were other alternati There was no suc thing as UI in the 1930's.

Clearing brush and other silviculture work is a job that must be done by skilled and trained people. Such | work should never be

| signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law un- changed after it said it would renegotiate the

| deal on a number of fronts, the Chretién gov-

ernment is continuing the right-wing policies of Brian Mulroney.

The Liberals are tampering with a system | | that was designed to help workers, not hinder them. UI is an insurance plan and like any in- surance plan, it should pay benefits directly to those who pay into it.

Instead the Liberals are diverting money away from UI’s original purpose and are tum- ing it into a slush fund to serve other purpos- es. They have made some overtones that UI, may be eventually used for guaranteed in- come assistance, job strategy funding, and| substitution for ‘other social security pay- ments.

In late December of last year the Prime} Minister even said that UI recipients may be} made to go to work clearing brush in second growth forests on make work programs. His statements are so unacceptable that they are

in the realm of forced

make work programs.

Prior to announcing their budget, the De- partment of Finance released a study which say Canada’s UI program is a “serious disin- | | centive to upgrade, to work, and to move and

| find worl That. may be the opinion of fat cat political

| bureaucrats who wrote the report from the

comfort of their taxpayer funded offices. But just go try to tell a worker with a family to support and is getting $800-$1,000/mo. that they are lazy and they should be cut back on their UI payments. You'll get a black eye and for good reasons. Workers do not want to be unemployed. At | the same time they have the right to be gain- | fully employed and not work for poverty lev- els wages. When they are unemployed they should be compensated just like in any other insurance pro; | The Liberals must also back down on any | plans to resurrect relief camps. Those are days that we must never return to.

LANDS AND FORES

Reasons for job loss go beyond tech change

by Kim Pollock

} fI've heard it once in the last few months, I’ve heard it a thousand times. “The jobs are going t to be lost anyway.” Some people say it over

| and over, just like a mantra. And like a mantra, its purpose is to lull those who repeat it into a state of bliss, safe from the impact of dull reality.

The people who say it most often are forest preservationists, who say it to escape from the re- | ality of what their proposals would do to forest | workers and their communities. |

When they say it, what they really mean is | “those jobs are going to be lost anyway; therefore it doesn’t matter that our proposal to make (fill in the blank) into a park would eliminate (ten, hun- dreds or thousands of) jobs.”

che unspoken assumptions behind this idea are that:

e forest workers have already lost so many jobs due to technological change that a few more won't be missed;

e when a job is lost in the forest industry it’s | lost forever, it cannot or will not be replaced and | there’s nothing we can do about it;

° since past job loss has resulted mainly from tech. change, future job loss will be due to tech change — park proposals somehow won't hurt | | anything.

When you unpack them like this, of course, | these arguments look pretty silly. Let’s take them | one at a time:

e so many jobs have been lost to tech change | that a few lost to removals won't be missed, or “if MacBlo steals my right leg and Vicki Husband | steals my left, I won't miss my left.”

This one just doesn’t make sense. Granted, lots of jobs were lost to tech change in the 1980s: Sta- | tistics Canada’s numbers show about 16,000 lost | jobs in B.C. between 1981 and 1991.

But this past trend doesn’t tell us anything about what the future might bring. In the United States’ Pacific Northwest, for instance, there was also

| ment takes place in in- | tensive silviculture,

brought timber sales on ; federal lands in Wash- ington, Oregon and | Northern California to a | virtual standstill.

Since 1990, a series of | legal actions by preser- | vationist groups and re- | sulting U.S. court | decisions has reduced harvests on federal

} Wake i preferred “Option Nine” will likely reach 30,000. | Let’s be clear: that’s all due to land removals.

e When a job is lost in the forest industry, it’s

| lost forever, it cannot be replaced and there’s |

nothing we can do. The argument that the jobs will be lost anyway doesn’t make sense

lands and under the} Clinton administration's |

ture of all but the least efficient operations.

Tech change always happens as a result of spe- cific economic conditions. In the early 1980s, for instance:

e the federal Liberals followed the Reagan ad- ministration’s high-interest-rate policy, helping to drive down housing starts and demand for lumber and plywood;

e a high Canadian dollar also eroded profit mar- gins and hindered our access to export markets;

e largely as a result of higher interest rates, there was a very sudden and severe recession.

Tech change allowed some mills to remain com- | petitive - at a price. That price was jobs. Because | of the economics of the day, the choice was often | between tech change and some jobs or no tech | change and no jobs. Some companies survived by

means of tech change; some through downsizing;

| some failed. These were grim times for the econo-

' my, grim times for the industry, grim times for the union.

| without this assump-

tion.

Well, it doesn’t make much sense with it, ei- ther! It only makes

if the fc st in- Ginna mee Ghai mak 1 the and if no future invest- sustainable

| forest rehabilitation,

We can offset the effects of changing technology and

defined land base

So it becomes hard to pick apart the job loss that occurred in the 1980s and say, “this part was due to new technology and this part due to the state of the markets and down- sizing.”

The point, though, is that we're talking about

industry on a clearly-

new harvesting meth- ods or through ad- | vanced utilization, that is, more efficient use of

| what we harvest.

But the price of lumber is currently at $420 U.S. | per 1000 board feet, up from $220 as recently as October, 1992, — a direct result of all the removals | in the Pacific Northwest.

A higher price for wood makes possible more investment in intensive silviculture and advanced | utilization. The only things that would likely stop these kinds of investments would be removals o1 such a scale that the benefits of higher prices aré undermined by a reduced land-base.

© Past job loss was largely due to tech change, | so future job loss will also come from tech change, | not removals.

Tech change is not a constant trend, but rather | goes in cycles or waves. New innovations appear | and are built into the newest, most advanced mills. |

| Others implement the new developments or else |

a specific moment in | history; times change | and we're facing different threats. | _ Now the Pacific Northwest experience shows that forest removals can also destroy tens of thou- | sands of jobs. Past job loss may well have been | largely the result of tech change; future job loss is | more likely to come from a combination of re- | movals, cut reduction and netdowns due to new | regulations. | We're already losing jobs due to reduction in an- ual allowable cut, biodiversity regulations, fish- ‘orestry guidelines and the like. Again, no one can ay these are the work of technology.

We can offset the effects of changing technology and to some extent, we can offset regulations that | aim at making our ‘industry more sustainable. We can do this through investments in intensive silvi- culture and advanced utilization.

Kim Pollock is the Director of IWA-CANADA’s

large-scale job loss due to tech change during the / lose out to their more efficient competitors. Over | Environment and Land-Use Department. Eighties. Then came the court injunctions that | time, the new innovation becomes a standard fea-

A 4/LUMBERWORKER/APRIL, 1994