Ideology drives workers' rights critic

(May 3, 2006) -- 'While extreme ideologues can generally be relied upon to defy reality in support of their radical agenda, Ms. Martinuk's article was especially surprising in its shallowness and misrepresentation of the facts.'

As columnist Susan Martinuk made clear in a recent commentary about the Workers' Bill of Rights developed by National Union of Public and General Employees and United Food and Commercial Workers, her agenda is to destroy or further limit the rights of workers and the unions they choose to represent them.

While extreme ideologues can generally be relied upon to defy reality in support of their radical agenda, Ms. Martinuk's article was especially surprising in its shallowness and misrepresentation of the facts.

Our Workers' Bill of Rights simply states that all "workers have the right to form unions and bargain collectively as the means of determining their wages, working conditions and terms of employment."

The statement "labour rights are human rights" is not an old-fashioned catchphrase as she implies. It is actually a fundamental consensus entrenched in Canadian and international law.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many Conventions of the International Labour Organization (a tripartite agency of the United Nations) all guarantee in principle that the freedom of workers to join together in unions and bargain collectively is a fundamental human right.

All governments are responsible

As a consequence, all governments have a responsibility to uphold and promote, and all individuals and employers have a responsibility to respect, workers' fundamental human rights as contained in our Charter and UN conventions Canada has signed and proclaimed.

But her foolishness doesn't end there. She says that when it comes to unionization campaigns "bullying is standard union behaviour," a statement so far removed from reality as to be laughable.

Employer coercion is almost always the problem, not union coercion.

As an example of her claim, Ms. Martinuk cites seven bank workers in Lively, Ont., who voted against joining a union but did not succeed in preventing the unionization of their workplace.

The seven workers had an opportunity to vote for or against unionization and, as with any democratic organization, the majority (who supported unionization) prevailed. The seven workers still have the democratic right to participate in the union and make their voices heard.

How exactly is any of that coercive or anti-democratic?

Harper and the NCC

Of course, Ms. Martinuk fails to mention the fact that the National Citizens Coalition is financing the campaign to raise the profile of these seven workers. The NCC has a history of running disinformation campaigns against unions and is a well-known shill for corporate Canada. The last president of the NCC happens to have been Stephen Harper.

An obvious question is: What is the relationship between these seven workers, the bank, the NCC and Mr. Harper's refusal to sign our Workers' Bill of Rights?

Her example, however, does raise an interesting point. Various independent national surveys confirm that hundreds of thousands of workers want unions but are afraid they will be fired or penalized in some other way for declaring their Charter-protected interest in joining a union.

For example, in 2003 among non-union workers in a national study, a third said they would vote for a union. But 43% would vote for a union if they knew their employer could take no reprisals against them. The employer fear factor of 10 percentage points generalized across all nonunion workers in the country represents around half a million employees.

Of course, pro-union workers and union organizers attempt to make their case persuasively. But the big problem is that when workers seek to exercise their basic human right to join a union, they nearly always run into a storm of employer threats, intimidation and coercion.

Coercion and democracy

When the person who signs your paycheque calls you into their office and tells you they're against the union, that's definitely coercion. Some employers use the ultimate threat of closing up shop entirely. Did Ms. Martinuk miss the hundreds of news reports when Wal-Mart closed a store in Quebec last year after its employees decided to join a union?

When workers go to the ballot box to choose whether to bargain and speak through a union, they usually face nerve-wracking employer pressure tactics. If these same abusive and illegal tactics were used to deter Canadians from exercising their democratic right to vote for their Member of Parliament, we would be awash in royal commissions and international observers.

While opponents of progressive labour rights present themselves as defenders of democracy and workers, their true motivations are more aligned with an extreme ideological objective to eradicate labour unions, collective rights and many public institutions.

The consequences of this agenda go way beyond the loss of wages, benefits and respect on the job, serious though these are. They also include the silencing of workers' voices in the political process and the weakening of the counterweight against unbridled corporate power that is so essential to the preservation of our democracy and civil society.

If Ms. Martinuk is genuinely concerned about ensuring a high standard of living for Canadian workers and protecting the foundations of Canadian democracy and civil society, she should be joining us in calling on Prime Minister Harper to sign our Workers' Bill of Rights.