Right To Work For Less Coming to Ontario

My operating assumption is that Tim Hudak's "Progressive" Conservative party of Ontario will win the next Ontario election and form the next government.  I hope I'm wrong, but it's certainly the safe bet after events drove McGuinty out of power and Horwath's NDP haven't managed yet to convince voters they're a plausible non-crazy alternative to the PCs.

One depressing certainty of a Hudak administration would be a war on organized labour.  If Republian Governor Snyder can take on Michigan, Hudak can certainly bring some variant of "right to work for less" to Ontario.  Indeed, he has already (months ago) indicated he wants to:

“In many cases union leaders have become so powerful that many employees in effect have two bosses — their actual employer and the people who run their union.”

To correct that, he would like union membership to no longer be mandatory and would outlaw the “forced paycheque contributions” unionized workers make to political causes.

The arguments will be the same anti-union stuff from the US, but also a dollop of one particular anti-union argument that I really want to see die, it's the one that goes like this:

Unions were important back in the days of the robber barons and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, but now we have all these fancy labour laws that protect workers, and unions have served their purpose.

I really did see someone say something almost exactly like that, including the Triangle Shirtwaist reference. 

The first thing to say here is that we never stopped having Triangle Shirtwaist fires, we just simply outsourced them to Bangladesh, and other unregulated labour countries where such events are depressingly common.

Naturally these facilities are almost never directly managed by brand name Western companies, but they all make clothing for them, and I guarantee those companies' representatives have visited.  We're talking about places built without fire stairs, smoke alarms, sprinklers and where "fire drill" is a meaningless phrase.  I realize companies probably don't send health and safety experts to assess these places, but it doesn't take a Fire Marshall to realize the damn building has no fire safety measures whatsoever.  They don't care. 

They never did.  The only thing that ever makes them treat workers like humans and take the necessary steps to protect their health and safety are laws.  These laws were almost to a one, brought about by unions.

What happens when organized labour is beaten?  These laws are repealed.  No right wing leader ever campaigns on repealing the building fire code, but they'll talk in general terms about "burdensome regulations" and invent convoluted arbitrary schemes to gut workplace regulations.  Like Hudak has already done.

I'm not in a union and I never was, but I know it is not white collar people like me who make sure my office has a first aid kid, fire extinguishers and we hold an annual fire escape drill.  These are all "burdensome" regulations on my employer and every other.  They also save lives.  The Westray Mine disaster was really not that long ago.  It can and will happen again the weaker these laws are made (along with a host of other labour abuse ills, long forgotten which reemerge the moment the laws prohibiting them are repealed).

It's cliche, but Hudak is shaping up to make Harris look like a moderate.  Past conservative ideologues always seem like moderates but it might actually be true here.

Labour Organizing As Warfare

Matt Stoller tweeted a link to this excellent piece on recent changes to the US labour organizing strategic landscape.  In one of the most remarkably under-reported stories I've ever seen, Walmart workers across 12 cities in 9 states staged a series of wild-cat strikes in early October and unlike almost every other attempt by workers to organize against Walmart, came out ahead.  In the past at Open Left, I noted a couple Canadian Walmart stores that unionized, and Walmart's answer invarably was to suddenly declare the store "unprofitable" and close it down (only to open a new store shortly after in the same geographic area). 

At the current moment, the total impact of these actions has been small, involving a relative handful of workers, which perhaps justifies why this isn't getting more media attention, but the fact that such small labour actions suceeded should make anyone interested in labour power pay attention, because it looks like some labour groups have figured out a new way to fight back in the globalization era.  From the first link:

The Elwood facility, owned by the company RoadLink, processes a staggering 70 percent of Walmart’s domestic goods, and the strike there has radically altered the balance of power in the workplace. Mike Compton, a former striker who is now back at work in the warehouse told me about the new climate of the warehouse. “Managers are being overly nice,” he said.

This is where the post title comes from.  This is an application of war doctrine to the labour rights question.  There's a famous quote (attributed to several famous military leaders) that goes "amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics."  Sun Tzu's line about armies marching on their stomachs also comes to mind.  Walmart has spent decades developing a lean, mean, "just-in-time" supply chain which means they deliberately keep as little stock in each store and warehouse as possible.  This makes them highly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.  That the US rail system has particular nodes where high volumes of goods go through only makes Walmart more vulnerable to well organized pinpoint labour strikes (and the word strike here can be understood both as a labour disruption, and a military tactical attack).

This is turning the system of neoliberal globalization against itself.  Rather than relying on trying to reach critical mass of front line clerks sufficient to make Walmart unable to get by on scabs and store closures, find the vulnerable points in the system and organize just enough workers there to have an impact.

This logic can be extended to other organizations too.  Walmart's supply chain model has been highly influential on other retailers and even other industries.  I suspect the more globalized a company is, the more vulnerable they are to this. 

In another strain of finding a vulnerable point to strike, there is talk of a "Black Friday" strike.  This would hit Walmart on the biggest shopping day of the year (so named, I hear, because it is the day that many retailers actually become net profitable for the year, going from "red" ink to "black" in their books).  This strikes me as more likely to leave room for Walmart to simply fire any front line workers who walk off, but perhaps they'll settle very quickly rather than lose out on the single biggest shopping day, even if at only a handful of stores.  It's got a shot because a disruption to Black Friday profits has the possibility of hitting the Q4 results measurably.  It also will generate a lot of media attention in a way that some workers striking in a warehouse does not.  The media would love to air footage of people lined up for gate-crasher deals at some Walmart store and the store not opening because the workers had struck.  If Walmart is foolish enough to have the managers try and open the store themselves, we'll likely get footage of chaos, and if anyone is hurt (which already happens almost every year), all the more blowback against Walmart.

It might not work, but it has been several decades of slow decline for organized labour and it's encouraging to finally see some tactics employed that don't rely on past tactics which have now been rendered next-to-impossible via the legally slanted playing field. 

But do read this piece from up top.

Deregulation Kills Workers

The CBC has done a good job tracking the story of a gas station employee killed as he tried to stop a customer who was driving away with over $100 in gas without paying.  I'm glad I wasn't the only one who saw the original story on the weekend and immediately guessed that the cause was that his employer was docking his pay for theft losses.  Now, the employer (a Shell franchisee) in this case denies it, but the deceased man's family (who insist he was penalized) are much more likely in my opinion to be telling the truth. 

The man, likely earning at most minimum wage plus a dollar or two, in the face of seeing several days worth of wages driving off was prompted to put his own life at extreme risk facing off against someone in a vehicle. 

This is just a good case in point to remind ourselves at least anecdotally how regulation (with adequate enforcement) saves lives.  Ontario actually has a law that prohibits employers from holding their employees financially accountable for any assets the employee doesn't have sole control over, but it's obvious that there is widespread under the radar disobedience of this law by the station owners.  Now, this is what happens even with the law prohibiting it.  Imagine what would happen if this law were repealed?  The numerous anecdotal reports of gas station employees facing such penalties (and to which I can add my brother, who worked for a real cheapskate station owner many years ago) show that the incentives are in favour of owners outsourcing this risk to their staff, and the power disparity between owner and employee is such that they will almost certainly get away with it. 
 
The usual conservative/libertarian answer to this is "if you don't like it, find another job" - but even for individuals able to do that, the industry practice wouldn't change and many more clerks will get hurt or killed over gasoline thefts.  No, if you actually want to prevent these tragedies, regulation is the answer.  We're often told that business owners deserve every penny they can squeeze out of their businesses because they take all the risks in opening them, I'm not convinced of this, but I do know they should not be allowed to delegate downside risk to staff with no comparable upside opportunity. 

There will still be cases where regulations are ineffective or do more harm than good for whatever reason, but such cases do not negate the basic rationale for regulations:  Employers almost always have more power than employees and if left to their own devices, many will exploit that power imbalance in unfair and socially harmful ways.

A Liberal MPP has proposed a bill to make pre-payment at Ontario gas stations mandatory and the Ontario Federation of Labour has moved quickly to set up a hotline where people can report gas station owners who violate this law. 

What follows Wisconsin?

I hope people leading the US labour movement, progressive leaders, MoveOn and whoever else are giving some thought to what comes next here, win or lose.  It seems likely winning would entail more momentum than losing, but this looks like a great candidate for a situation where losing could still mean "losing well" - it would depend how it went down, but Walker has spent a tremendous amont of political capital here, and labour has been fired up in a way they probably haven't been since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. 

Anyway, where from here?  Seek a federal law protecting collective bargaining?  A constitutional amendement?  A series of state level ballot initiatives?  A drive to unionize Koch industries?
 
A win in Wisconsin would be great, but isn't enough, as the current fight is defensive in nature.  It's worth trying to make back some lost ground.  Obviously the national Democrats aren't going to lead on this.  Don't let this moment pass.