OPSEU Notes on the Ontario Economy: October 2008

OPSEU notes on the Ontario economy – October 2008

The economy

Cutting or delaying spending in the public sector will make the economic picture worse, not better. Right now manufacturing is down, commodity prices are down, and the financial sector is facing a lot of uncertainty. We need good-paying jobs in the public sector now more than ever. If your economy is not firing on all cylinders, you don’t take the sparkplug out of the one that is.

Most people understand that when working people do well, business does well. For the last 30 years business has been trying to tell us that it works the other way, but looking at what’s happened in the U.S. it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t. We need good-paying jobs in the public sector to support good-paying jobs in the private sector.
Right now the private sector depends more than ever on having public sector jobs in our communities. Any money we make, we spend locally.
Every dollar spent in the public sector not only provides a service that people need, but also provides income that supports local families and local economies. In families where a private-sector job has been lost, the public sector job may be the only income for that family.
We don’t support any reduction or delay in current or planned government spending.
·We are very concerned that the government’s response to our economic troubles is too weak.

Going into deficit

Now is exactly the right time to have a deficit. The Premier talks a lot about what families do in tough times, and one of the things they do is borrow money. If your furnace conks out in the winter you have to replace it even if you don’t have the money saved up.

On Monday, the chair of the Federal Reserve in the U.S. was calling for a major economic stimulus package to get the country back on track. All that money would be borrowed, but Ben Bernanke still says it must be done. We have nowhere near the problems the U.S. has.

Wages

Holding back wages in the public sector will not help anyone who loses their job in the private sector. In fact it will have the opposite effect, so that if we have a recession it will be longer. The real question is, “What can we do to get people working again?”

We need a comprehensive, long-term good jobs policy that uses public investment not only to create jobs but to strengthen the public infrastructure all jobs depend on.
Any jobs policy must recognize the importance not just of jobs, but of good jobs. Compared to 30 years ago, the average working person in Ontario is more productive than ever and is working more hours at jobs that demand more skills, yet our wages haven’t moved up. This is the problem in both the private and the public sectors. This is the problem we need to fix.
Over the last 30 years, the wealthiest fifth of the population has seen its income rise while everyone else has fallen behind or stayed in place. It’s time business leaders and people who got rich during the boom started showing some leadership on our fiscal situation.