Summer calm before the storm
Union work seldom stops, but summertime is one of those
seasons when many members find good reason to gear down a notch or two.
The prospect of warm summer days and time spent on vacation and away
from work with family or friends is too tempting to resist.
Regrettably, summer breezes aren’t enough to clear the
air of some very serious challenges we face. More than ever it seems
public sector workers and the services they provide are in the cross
hairs of governments everywhere who are scrambling to balance budgets to
make up for stimulus spending brought about by the financial meltdown of
2008 – a fiscal crisis which was not, of course, caused by working
people.
But governments are intent on making working families
pay a steep price for the greed and incompetence demonstrated by the
international financial services industry which triggered the Great
Recession
We should be very concerned by the key decision reached
by G20 leaders in Toronto to cut in half government operating deficits
by 2013. We’ve seen this movie too many times before. When governments
preach fiscal sobriety what they’re really saying is that the public
services that common people rely upon should be the first snatched away
from them.
One can almost imagine Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty
licking their chops as they draw up a hit list of public services they
and their cronies on Bay Street deem too generous for the working folks
who paid for them out of their own tax dollars.
The situation isn’t all that much different here in
Ontario where the spring budget signaled Dalton McGuinty and Dwight
Duncan’s intention to make working people pay for bringing about a
balanced budget. Public and broader public wage freezes – which really
amount to pay cuts, after inflation – service cutbacks and privatization
of valuable Crown assets are all part of the Liberal party’s menu of
so-called fiscal prudence that disproportionately harm working people
and their families.
Instead, the premier and his finance minister are busy
implementing corporate tax cuts for the private sector, a misguided
policy of tax relief that history has shown seldom creates jobs but
instead drains the public purse of revenues needed to pay for education,
health care and other public services.
The same can be said of their audacious scheme to create
a so-called SuperCorp of Crown assets – the LCBO, Hydro One, Ontario
Power Generation and the Lottery and Gaming Commission – and sell off 20
per cent of this new entity to the private sector, much like Mulroney
did with Petro-Canada 20 years ago.
Today, PetroCan is an enormously profitable player in
the domestic energy sector, but none of it remains in public hands.
Expect the same scenario to reveal itself if McGuinty and Duncan are
allowed to get away with SuperCorp.
Where does all of this leave organized labour? It means
more than ever we must redouble our efforts to fight back against
policies that are so clearly against the interest of working families.
This means mobilizing to fight back whenever government
leaders and their acolytes in the private sector and business media
attack us for being overpaid, under-worked and soft. As if.
I say, tell that to the developmental service worker who
struggles to provide care for vulnerable children. Tell that to our
public safety workers who toil in precarious correction facilities, or
to those who fight forest fires or who inspect dangerous work sites.
We know that Public Services build the Public Good. It’s
a message I urge you to share with family and friends this summer.
In the meantime I sincerely wish all OPSEU members a
safe, healthy and restful holiday season.
In Solidarity
Patty Rout
First Vice-President / Treasurer
