Marc Roumy, self-described Air Canada Component trustee of CUPE, recently wrote an intriguing letter to the editor of the National Post detailing his union’s information wall against its own members.
Such as the salaries of its officers. CUPE National’s foreign policy. Where the dues go is obscure. Budget? At his local’s meetings, the budget is numbered, handed out and returned afterwards. As Roumy notes: No publicly traded company could get away with such secrecy.
I’m no union enemy. I was a shop steward and membership director for my local.
My union tie probably protected me from an editor who hated my published views. Long-term union decline troubles me.
On the other hand, high on my list of contemptible unionists are Joe Davidson, the Scottish-born leader of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers who screwed up the mail system and then complacently retired to his homeland – British-accented exporters of class warfare from the “Old Country” were the new arrogant imperialists – and fellow 1960s-’70s capitalist-hater Kent Rowley. Tolerance is what radical union organizers demand for themselves; once in power, they have no intention of granting it to their opponents. “Union democracy” is largely an oxymoron.
Among unions once led by Communists or fellow travellers were the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, and the BC Teachers’ Federation (one BCTF president was a genuine card-carrying Communist). Under the alternatives to the capitalist “bourgeois” liberalism they despised – Marxism, a heresy of democracy, and fascism, a heresy of capitalism, being the two great mass murderers of the 20th century – they’d have been crushed like bugs.
I lost count, after the ninth, of the number of times my employment was interrupted by strike, lockout or weeks of slowdown that sabotaged production. After the first strike, I was a neutral, a pacifist refusing to serve.
It was not pretty. The product was newspapers – The Vancouver Sun and The Province. Daily papers are almost uniquely vulnerable: they can neither store their product in anticipation of a stoppage nor play catch-up afterwards. It’s today or never.
To me, the runt of a newspaper family, The Newspaper – capital letters – is sacred. Only ruthless employer exploitation should shut one down. But the papers (and other industries) that richly deserve unions don’t have them.
The slowdowns to up the contract ante were the most effective. Everyone kept working. Everyone was paid. There was simply a series of misfortunes.
Workers “lost” type, dropped galleys of it in puzzling lapses into all-thumbs clumsiness (called “making pie”), had to stop presses when the thread of paper rolls repeatedly broke, or otherwise connived in reducing the run to a trickle.
In fact, the jittery atmosphere invited real mistakes.
Such episodes were led by the more vicious union “progressives.” Other members had to toe the line – or, in the parlance of their English counterparts, be “sent to Coventry,” meaning ostracized forever. So the ranks held.
This is not the place for determining rights and wrongs. But the employer, Southam Inc., which took pride in its paternalism – how many newsroom drunks it offered a fourth, fifth chance to! – eventually gave way in the 1990s to Conrad Black and then the Aspers’ CanWest Global Communications. (Marc Edge’s two brutally fascinating books on this history seem to have been overlooked by the papers’ book pages.)
What the new owners didn’t change, union-crippling technology did for them. Whatever improvements they made, today’s news staff is shrunken and, according to “usually reliable sources,” much unhappier. Spies assure me mine was the golden age.
But that’s another story. •
