Montréal: Student, Labor and Citizen Protests Grow

It started three months ago as a student-initiated protest against university tuition hikes.

By American standards – in fact, even by Canadian standards – the tuition that Québec students pay is very low. But the protest is not about the actual tuition figure, as much as it is about the principle of what education means in Québec society. The province’s notoriously low tuitions were instituted during the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s as a means of ensuring greater accessibility, especially among the francophone population that had long lagged behind the rest of Canada. Borrowing from the pages of America’s “Occupy” movement and the “Arab Spring” halfway around the world, the protests have come to embrace a wide spectrum of causes….and is coming to be known as the "Printemps Érable,” the “Maple Spring.”

And it is a movement that was launched by students – and by all measures, its growing.

Last week, the government negotiated an agreement with student leaders in an effort to end the 13-week walkout that included at $250 increase in tuition. But across Québec, the students who have been asked to approve the agreement are rejecting it in overwhelming numbers. As the possibility of finishing this semester looks less likely each day, students are delivering a message to the governing Liberal Party that they are not going to settle for a poor deal.

“I am surprised to see the impact on the semester is not the major preoccupation of students,” said Léo Bureau-Blouin, President of the Fédération Étudiante Collégiale du Québec (The Québec College Student Federation) “I didn’t realize how far they were willing to go to solve this crisis. Students are ready to make real sacrifices.”

Observers blame Education Minister Line Beauchamp for extending the crisis by not responding more quickly to concerns that were raised about the agreement. Worse, students say that government officials bragged that they had won on the tuition issue, which outraged students who had negotiated in good faith.

As the protests grow, they take on more of the look of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Signs have appeared opposing oil sands drilling, supporting gender equality, opposing the privatization of public services, and opposing the government’s plan to extract resources in the northern Québec wilderness (“Plan Nord”).

And now, political parties and labor unions have joined the students. Concordia political science professor Bruce Hicks described it this way:

“There has been an element involved in the student strike all along that I think grew out of the Occupy movement….the student protest movement has tapped into outrage over the economy and society and government from more moderate individuals, creating a sort of hybrid between an anarchist movement, but also a socially progressive protest vote.” (Precisely the sometimes uneasy but purposeful alliance that has characterized the American movement).

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the spokesperson for CLASSE, the largest and most militant of the three student federations orchestrating the strike, stated from the beginning that students’ fight was with Québec’s “greedy elite,” and that the strike would lead to a “much deeper, much more radical challenge of the direction Québec has been heading in recent years.”

Two major parties - the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire - have endorsed the student protests. Québec unions have donated C$60,000 to the student groups. The Ontario branches of the Canadian Union of Public Employees gave an additional $30,000.
“They can continue to count on our support in the future, we are against the tuition increase,” said Louis Roy, president of La Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN), one of the province’s largest unions.

Roy said his union, along with the Fédération des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Québec (The Worker’s Federation of Québec) and the Centrale des Syndicats du Québec (CSQ), have been working with the students for more than 18 months. The unions and the student federations are part of a group called the Alliance Sociale, which was formed in the fall of 2009 to oppose the Liberal government’s budget.The unions have also provided sound systems for demonstrations and organizational support.

Roy applauded the student’s negotiating skills with the government.

“Their ability to communicate is very good. They are young, but they are not children. They don’t need to be held by the hand.”
They also know how to leverage Montréal’s transit system.

Just as Twitter, Facebook, and text messages have become communication catalysts, the Métro has become the student’s trump card for physical movement. Police complain that protesters are able to shift their actions from one part of the city to another more quickly than police motorcycles or squad cars can move through city streets.

The Police have responded by posting helmeted transit security agents at the Métro station entrances and exits, donning riot gear, brandishing nightstick, and holding police dogs. But tens of thousands of Montréalers who use the line for commuting have grown disgusted – not with the students, but with police lines deployed at each station.

Insp. Alain Larivière, head of the Montréal Police Dept.’s Métro division, claims that Police are merely protecting commuters from protesters.

“The métro may be open, but we can’t just let (passengers) go out while a demonstration’s been declared illegal, while there’s an intervention in progress by the officers or the cavalry…”

Larivière later admitted that all of the demonstrations that have taken place within the Métro have been peaceful. In fact, of the 190 demonstrations staged during the protests, not once has the subway system’s operations being disrupted by the students.


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On May 1 (International Labor Day): Time to Repeal Taft-Hartley

In a broadcast to the AFL-CIO merger meeting On December 5, 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said,

“You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic--the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men. It would raise to freedom and prosperity hundreds of millions of men and women--and their children--who toil in slavery behind the Curtain.
One principle of this philosophy is: the ultimate values of mankind are spiritual; these values include liberty, human dignity, opportunity and equal rights and justice.

Workers want recognition as human beings and as individuals-before everything else. They want a job that gives them a feeling of satisfaction and self-expression. Good wages, respectable working conditions, reasonable hours, protection of status and security; these constitute the necessary foundations on which you build to reach your higher aims. “

When Eisenhower gave this speech in the 1950s, more than one-third of all American workers were members of a union. Unions were largely credited with bringing about the 40-hour work week, the 8-hour day, the concept of a “weekend,” health coverage, pension reform, and safe working conditions. But today, union membership in the private sector has fallen to 7.2% While some of that is due to changes in industry structure in the US, the single biggest factor that has contributed to the elimination of union protections and bargaining powers is the Taft-Hartley Act.

Passed in 1947 over the veto of President Harry Truman, the Taft-Hartley Act (often known in labor circles as "the slave-labor bill") has been described by Ralph Nader as "one of the great blows to American democracy…that fundamentally infringed on workers' human rights" -- most importantly, their right to unionize.

The includes the following provisions:

- Authorizes states to enact so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws. These laws undermine the ability to build effective unions by creating a free-rider problem—workers can enjoy the benefits of union membership in a workplace without actually joining the union or paying union dues. Right-to-work laws increase employer leverage to resist unions and vastly decrease union membership, thus dramatically diminishing unions' bargaining power. 23 states are currently right-to-work states, with legislation threatening in New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

- Defines "employees" for purposes of the Act as excluding supervisors. This diminishes the pool of workers eligible to be unionized. The exclusion of supervisors from union organizing activity also means they can be used (and coerced) as management's "front line" in anti-organizing efforts; what's more, employers can fire supervisors who try to unionize.

- Defines "employees" for purposes of the Act as excluding independent contractors. It means that institutions such as colleges can hire staff, often using grant funds, as ‘independent contractors,’ thus excluding them from benefits such as health insurance and pension, and denying them union membership and contractual benefits.

- Requires that election hearings on ‘matters of dispute’ be held before a union recognition election, thus delaying the election; these delays enables management to ‘buy time,’ and has been shown to give management an advantage as over time workers feel coerced into avoiding organizing activities.

- Establishes the "right" of management to campaign against a union organizing drive, thereby eliminating the time-honored legal principle of employer neutrality.

- Prohibits secondary and sympathy boycotts—boycotts directed to encourage neutral employers to pressure a defiant employer with which the union has a dispute. Secondary boycotts had been one of organized labor's most potent tools for organizing, negotiating and dispute settlement prior to the passage of Taft-Hartley.

- Enables the federal government to move in and demand an 80-day cooling off period if it deems a strike to be detrimental to the national interest.

The Act sent a clear message to employers: It is OK to bust unions and deny workers their rights to collectively bargain. Today, union membership is at historic 60-year lows, employer violations of labor rights are routine, and illegal firings of union supporters in labor organizing drives are at epidemic levels.

The advent of unions created a balance in bargaining power between ‘producers’ of labor (workers) and purchasers of labor (employers), providing for fairer conditions overall. The attempted destruction of unions through Taft-Hartley and recent political moves against public employee unions represents a scary step backwards in American history.

It’s time for our Presidential candidates to be forced to take a position – and justify their position – on Taft-Hartley.


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"Labor Day" - or "Capital Day?"

[related, updated post at  Republicans, Democrats AWOL on Taft-Hartley]

The following editorial was written by E. J. Dionne, a native of Fall River, a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, a professor at Georgetown University, and an NPR commentator.

In a time when labor is under attack, it is worth a read on this Labor Day weekend....and worth our time, as we prepare to launch a new academic year, to recommit ourselves to support labor's voice and muscle

- Tully

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the tea party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

As for the unions, they are often treated in the media as advocates of arcane work rules, protectors of inefficient public employees and obstacles to the economic growth our bold entrepreneurs would let loose if only they were free from labor regulations.

So it would take a brave man to point out that unions “grew up from the struggle of the workers — workers in general but especially the industrial workers — to protect their just rights vis-a-vis the entrepreneurs and the owners of the means of production,” or to insist that “the experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life.”

That’s what Pope John Paul II said (the italics are his) in the 1981 encyclical Laborem exercens. Like Lincoln, John Paul repeatedly asserted “the priority of labor over capital.”

That the language of Lincoln and John Paul is so distant from our experience is a sign of an enormous cultural shift. In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital — resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point — and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.

Consider that what the media call economics reporting is largely finance reporting. Once upon a time, a lively band of labor reporters covered the world of work and the unions. If you stipulate that the decline of unions makes the old labor beat a bit less compelling, there are still tens of millions of workers who do their jobs every day. But when the labor beat withered, it was rarely replaced by a work beat. Workers have vanished.

But we are now inundated with news (and “news”) about the world of capital. CNBC and the other financial media are for investors what ESPN is for sports junkies. We cheer the markets, learn the obscure language of hedge fund managers, and get to know some of the big investors in off-field interviews. Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price.

They have faded away in both high and popular culture, too. Can you point to someone “who makes art out of working-class lives by refusing to prettify them”?

The phrase comes from a 2006 essay by the critic William Deresiewicz who observed that we no longer have few novelists such as John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos who take the lives of working people seriously. Nor do we have television shows along the lines of “The Honeymooners” or even “All in the Family,” which were parodies of an affectionate sort. “First we stopped noticing members of the working class,” Deresiewicz wrote, “and now we’re convinced they don’t exist.”

In his extraordinary book “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” Jefferson Cowie spoke of how little we identify working-class people with their labor. “Workers occasionally reappeared in public discourse as ‘Reagan Democrats’ — later as ‘NASCAR Dads,’” he wrote, “or the victims of another plant shutdown or as irrational protectionist and protesters of free trade, but rarely did they appear as workers.”

With the worker disappearing from our media and our consciousness, isn’t it only a matter of time before Labor Day falls off the calendar? As long as it’s there, it should shame us about our cool indifference to the heroism of those who go to work every day.

Copyright 2011 The Herald News.

Unions Should be Stronger, not Weaker

In Wisconsin, in Massachusetts, in my home state of New Hampshire, and indeed, across the country, a battle over the rights of unionized labor is playing out in state legislatures. In the last half century, as we have moved from a manufacturing economy to a service and information economy, union membership has fallen from 40% of the workforce to barely 10%...and these members are highly concentrated in certain industries - automakers, steelworkers, mining, health care, and public services such as firefighters, police, and teachers.

It has been fashionable in many political circles to blame unions for the nations economic woes: when auto makers sought government bailouts, unions were blamed for the company's poor cash flows, and Tea Party advocates have criticized the success of public employee unions for obtaining pay and benefit packages that they claim are better than most Americans get. When workers show up to protest legislation aimed at eliminating their right to negotiate the terms of their employment contracts, their detractors call them 'union thugs' and 'mobs,' and often throw in cheap shots about the power of 'union leaders.' This name-calling and rhetoric does little to add to objective public debate about the proper role of unions.

Others have more reasonably questioned the status of unions, suggesting that since the days of sweat-shops and dangerous working conditions are over, unions are no longer needed. It is to these 'thinking people' that I would like to respond, drawing on basic economics.

Any one of us knows that when driving about, even in unfamiliar territory, about what to expect to pay for a cup of coffee at a roadside coffee shop or gas station. No one expects to pay a quarter, but no one expects to pay $5.00 either. I recently took a quick survey of 30 students, and asked them to write down what they'd expect to pay in such a situation for a medium-sized coffee. With a single exception, everyone wrote down a number between $1.00 and $2.00, with an absolute majority between $1.25 and $1.75.

This, in spite of the fact there is no law anywhere dictating the price of coffee. It is the result of the natural interplay of the forces of Supply and Demand: thousands of consumers, and thousands of sellers of coffee interacting in the marketplace, with the natural result that a functional price exists. Consumers know that if they stop in a coffee shop and the price is outrageous, they can go elsewhere; and if the price is too low, they may suspect the quality of the product. There is much transparency in a market such as this, as even my students who are not coffee drinkers were aware of the general price level of the product. This is an example of a market that functions well, and it functions well because there are many consumers, with much information, and many suppliers in competition with one another.

But what happens when these perfect market conditions do not exist?

Consider a hypothetical case where hundreds of farmers sell their chickens to any number of processing plants, which in turn package the meat and then sell it to supermarkets. But now consider the results if all the processing plants decided to merge, so that only one chicken processor existed.

If there was only a single Processor, they would constitute a Monopoly insofar as they would be the sole seller of packaged chickens to supermarkets. As most consumers know, when you desire a product that is sold by only one firm, that firm can demand a price far higher than they would be able to if they had to compete with other producers. Consumers paying electric bills to Monopolistic providers know this all too well. However, in our example, we shouldn't presume that the higher prices paid by the supermarkets means that the chicken farmers will get a higher price for their chickens.

In fact, the truth is just the opposite.

The relationship between the Processor and the farmers is called a Monopsony - not a word that is as popular in the public mind as Monopoly. A Monopsony - rather than being the sole provider of a product - is the sole Purchaser of a product. In other words, with only one Processor, the chicken farmers can only sell their product to one buyer. If that buyer should say, "We're paying .25 per chicken - take it or leave it," the farmers have no place to turn. In such a case, the price the farmers receive will be less than under normal market conditions where there are a variety of both producers and consumers.

As a result, our Monopoly/Monopsony Processor is able to depress the price it pays the farmers, and increase the price it charges to supermarkets, and ultimately, the consumer. This is due to unequal bargaining power (or concentrated "Market Structure") of the Processor...and it would simply be erroneous to blame the farmers or the high prices the consumer was ultimately paying.

There are two solutions to this imbalance of market power: the Processor's power can be reduced or divided; or the farmers power can be increased. In the former, the state would use anti-trust laws to 'break up' the Processor into several smaller companies, thus restoring balance in the negotiating of prices; or, the farmers could band together and speak with one voice to negotiate a price for their product with the Processor (This is precisely what cranberry growers have done, by creating the farmer's cooperative known as Ocean Spray).

Now, let's apply these principles to Labor Markets.

Individual Workers, rather than raising and selling chickens, sell their labor to Employers (which could be private employers, or to governing structures). Those employers then sell the final products (whether goods or services) to consumers. In the case of public employment, the consumers are taxpayers, who have little say: they 'purchase' these services with their tax dollars, and face legal repercussions if they refuse. Understandably, from time to time these consumers may complain about either the price or the service...but just as chicken farmers are not the natural enemy of the consumer, neither are public employees the enemy of the taxpayer.

In fact, just as the Processor in the above example wields market power to increase prices to consumers while simultaneously depressing the prices the farmer gets, so too do the structures of government (and many private corporations) increase the price (or tax) they charge to consumers, while wielding the ability to depress the price (or wages) it offers to its employees. Unlike private industry where employment contracts are enforceable in a court of law, government can - and does - change the terms of its employees compensation through a mere act of the legislature. The terms of employment that labor counted on can be changed with a legislative vote and a pen stroke, with few legal rights of recourse. The unilateral power of governing structures to dictate the terms of employment means that, left unorganized labor is in no better condition than the farmers in the above example.

Unlike the example of the Monopoly/Monopsony Processor, however, there are fewer solutions available to public employees to 'even the playing field.' Anti-trust laws can not be applied to government structures, and government can not be 'broken up.' No one seriously suggests that there should be multiple State Troopers, or competing Registries of Deeds, or three different fire departments competing to provide service in one city. No one seriously believes that there should be multiple public school systems in the same town, with the resultant duplication of administration and buildings.

The only solution, then, to create equivalent market power, is to permit those at the bottom of the chain - the laborers - to organize and speak with a single voice. And that is what unionism is all about. It is the only option available to create equivalency of bargaining power between those seeking to sell their labor and the governing structures hiring them, and to counteract the arbitrary and raw power those institutions can exercise if unchecked.

And for those who claim that public employees, or any other employees, 'make too much,' or have 'extravagant' benefits as a result of union agreements - perhaps they should turn that question around:

What has happened to the average Americans pays and benefits as a result of the decrease of unions in this country over the last half-century?

By most measurements, Americans are now losing purchasing power. Their health benefits are less than at any time in the last 50 years. Their vacation, sick, and personal time lags behind every major industrialized nation in the world.

Those who complain about the effects of unions remind me of the 1971 song recorded by "Ten Years After" titled, "I'd Love to Change the World." One of the more memorable lyrics in that song went,

"Tax the rich, Feed the Poor,
'Till there are no Rich no more..."

I have always believed that the writer, Alvin Lee, got that all wrong. Rather, it should be:

"Tax the rich, Feed the Poor,
'Till there are no Poor no more..."

Our goal as a nation should not be to make everyone equally miserable by impoverishing everyone...but to ensure that all our citizens share in the wealth our society creates.