Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Getting Dissed By Canada's Most Hated Union Leader Polishes Dion's Centrist Credentials

I am entirely in agreement with Greg Staples, this is excellent news for Dion. Because while I think Dion's trolling the left side of the political spectrum for support is a good idea, he should be concentrating on Green over Labor votes. As a political rule of thumb, when it comes to a contest between this:












and this:













...cute and fuzzy wins every time. Dion has picked the right one to stiff in order to demonstrate that he still inhabits the political center.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, if they would promise my taxes wouldn't go up and price of products wouldn't go up every time they went on "gimme strike" then perhaps anti-scab, but until such time let's leave it alone.

Buzz is not PM, does he know that?

Anonymous said...

Screw the unions. If you don't like the pay or the benefits, work elsewhere. It's that same old entitlement infection the liberals have. This is MY job, not the company's.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 2:43

Easy for you to say...the only reason we have holidays, sick days, overtime, pay differential etc etc is because of unions. God knows the 'company' did not come up with the idea on their own.

If you're so excited about a union free country, why don't you have a look overseas where there are no unions. Factories in China are finally having to offer incentives to their workers because of the labour demand...keeping in mind that sometimes these incentives are working 10 hours instead of 12. Sure there are no unions and the market is dictating the labour environment, but it's so painfully slow in reacting that it's absurd.

It sounds like you really take the hard work that has been done over the past several decades for granted, which is pretty typical for the average self-centered Canadian. Maybe you'd like to give up your holidays and overtime to prove how hardcore you are??

Anonymous said...

paul, I meant to say screw the unions for their current intractibleness (intraction?) w.r.t. 'losing' any sort of current wage or benefit. I wasn't talking about past beneficial aspects of unions; I'm not an ideologue. But when union demands actually shut down a company and put people out of work, how do you justify this? When the competitive product to yours is 25%less, and your profit margin is 6%, what do you do? Keep the Cadillac wages and benefits up until you're out of a job? Or accept that we're now all a one-world global marketplace and wages in Korea HAVE to have a bargaining impact on wages in Windsor. Otherwise it's bye-bye to the industrial might of Ontario for good.

ottlib said...

A yes, the race to the bottom.

The folks in South Korea and China will work for one quarter of what Canadians will so Canadians have to accept more "competitive" wages just to keep up.

Of course prices will not follow the wages so the result is a lower standard of living for everybody.

But hey, at least the GST has been cut by 1%.

Anonymous, with regard to the auto industry the reason why the big three is taking a bath in the market is bad management. They are not as nimble as their competitors nor as innovative and the results are showing.

As for the rest of the economy private sector unionization has been steadily decreasing over the last three decades. So if there is a problem with Canada's economic competitiveness you are going to have to look somewhere else.

Personally, I would look to our business class, which is third class at best and has been holding the country's economy back for decades.

Anonymous said...

Buzzboy's a Liberal, backed Martin in the last campaign, everyone knows that. Don't see how this will help Dion.

Anonymous said...

Well that's what you global one-worlders wanted, isn't it? I guess you could try to start up a clothiers union in Bangaladesh or Singapore to bring their wages and benefits up to N/A standards, good luck with that.

Anonymous said...

We don't even need to export those expensive industrial jobs, they can move to Saskatchewan or Manitoba, or another have-not province. Ontario has been rich for long enough, it's time they started thinking of the rest of Canada. Why should Manitoba and Saskatchewan pay for all the eastern industrial pollution for the last 100 years under Kyoto?