Past union victories dramatically improved the ability of workers to afford a good life — but you won’t catch Poilievre talking about that.
Pierre Poilievre seems to pop up with his populist message everywhere these days. But even though he’s out to woo working class voters, one place you definitely won’t find him is on a picket line.
The Conservative leader fumes relentlessly about today’s “affordability” crisis, and he correctly points out that workers are struggling to pay for groceries, rent, mortgages, etc.
Yet he seems confused about what actions workers should take to ease their affordability problems — other than voting for him.
In fact, the proven most effective way for workers to increase their pay and improve their working conditions hasn’t been to vote Conservative but rather to join a union and, when necessary, go on strike.
Still, despite the success of unions in increasing their workers’ pay — unionized workers in Canada have received on average about $5 more per hour than non-unionized workers over the past decade — Poilievre has never seen much merit in unions. Indeed, he’s sided with corporate interests that have persistently acted to suppress unions.
In 2012, when Poilievre was a young parliamentary secretary, he pushed hard for Canada to adopt notorious “right-to-work” laws, which are favoured by corporations because they undermine unions. Barack Obama famously described them as being about “the right to work for less.”
Back then, the bespectacled Poilievre was a far-right political gadfly. His support for “right-to-work” laws — which originated in the U.S. South to weaken unions and their efforts to promote a cross-racial brotherhood of workers — was regarded as too extreme by even the staunchly anti-labour Harper government.
Today, the smoothed-down, done-over Poilievre is less overtly waging class war on behalf of the corporate elite. Instead of focusing on crushing unions, he now presents himself as battling the more neutral-sounding “affordability crisis.”
In fact, today’s “affordability crisis” — caused by recent inflation and high interest rates — is just the latest affordability setback for Canadian workers who have struggled for the last few decades as almost all the economic gains have gone to those at the top, leaving the bottom 90 per cent straining to afford groceries, rent, mortgages, etc.
Today, on both sides of the border, labour senses this may be the moment to begin turning things around — just as a pivotal strike by U.S. autoworkers did in an earlier era of extreme inequality in the 1930s.
Dubbed “the strike heard around the world,” the bitter 1937 strike by autoworkers against General Motors in Detroit was the first major victory for unionization in U.S. history, and it led to 300 per cent wage hikes.
The success of that strike triggered a wave of union activism that ultimately helped create a substantial American middle class — with tens of millions of workers enjoying good wages, job security and pensions that allowed them, really for the first time, to live comfortable lives.
The same dramatic turnaround happened in Canada, again with autoworkers playing a pivotal role.
In 1945, more than 10,000 autoworkers at Ford’s Windsor complex — the largest workplace in the country — waged a gruelling 99-day strike which resulted in workers winning recognition for their union and compulsory dues check-off, which became known as the Rand formula.
That victory inspired other Canadian union actions and helped push Canada in the same direction as the early postwar U.S. towards greater equality and an enlarged and empowered middle class.
But you won’t catch Poilievre — or any of today’s other pseudo-populists — talking about how those union victories dramatically improved the ability of workers to afford a good life.
Indeed, today’s populists seem to know next to nothing about the financial struggles of working people, as Poilievre recently demonstrated.
Speaking at a rally in Sault Ste. Marie in July, the Conservative leader suggested that a local waitress would make $60,000 a year. In fact, the average waitress in Canada earns about $29,000 a year, making him off by about $30,000.
Maybe he doesn’t know that most waitresses aren’t unionized.
Originally published in the Toronto Star September 21, 2023.