Austerity measures unfairly target low income earners
Absent in all the noise accompanying this week’s “consultation” with
labour leaders over the government’s plan to freeze wages, was any
acknowledgement by Finance Minister Dwight Duncan that the real victims
of his austerity campaign will be low income earners in the broader
public sector.
These are the workers who care for the elderly, treat
the mentally ill, operate programs for vulnerable children and young
people, and who find precarious employment on the fringes of our health
care system.
I’m speaking, for example, of the part-time
developmental service worker who might earn an average annual income of
$20,000, or the youth justice employee who will take home an
income in the range of $30,000 – all the while witnessing bankruptcies
and program cuts that have become commonplace in child protection
agencies.
After the dust settles and the math is calculated, these
workers will actually take a pay cut, after inflation, that amounts to
hundreds of dollars each year.
Meanwhile, the corporate titans on Bay Street whose
greed and incompetence contributed in part to the international
financial meltdown in the first place and which, in turn, led
governments everywhere into deficit financing, have been handed a free
“get out jail” card and will bear no personal income loss.
But wait, it gets even better for them. The businesses
they operate have been awarded corporate tax cuts amounting to billions
of dollars annually which the finance minister says he won’t rescind.
That’s tax revenue that will be lost to pay for those bankrupt CAS
agencies and programs for children’s mental health treatment.
Where’s the fairness in all of this? Where’s the
justice?
The fact is, there is no fairness and there is no
justice. Just the cold hand of the finance minister putting the squeeze
on low income public sector workers who can least afford to have their
wages cut in a fragile economic recovery in which they are often the
sole household bread winners.
Lost, too, in the plan to make these workers bear the
brunt of deficit reduction is the fact that, overwhelmingly, women make
up the majority of workers in social service and health care
occupations. So again, we witness the pitiful outcome of a government
directive that unfairly targets women and their families.
In its misguided and unjust austerity scheme, Dwight
Duncan has identified those who stand in the way of its implementation.
At the moment his target is thousands of our members in the broader
public sector, the majority of them women. We cannot abandon them.
OPSEU is currently at the bargaining table, or entering
into more than 150 sets of contract negotiations, virtually all of them
in the broader public sector. Now, more than ever, we must stand
together in a demonstration of solidarity and be prepared to fight back.
The struggle won’t come easily but I believe, in the end, we can arrive
at a fair and just outcome on behalf of our most vulnerable members.
In Solidarity
Patty Rout
First Vice-President / Treasurer
