Swift is the head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, so you would think she would be working on private sector issues.
However, for weeks leading up to the budget, several articles a week have come out with her and C.D. Howe Institute aggressively attacking public servants’ benefits - pensions in particular.
Upon hearing of the wage freeze for public servants, Swift said it’s a good start, but there’s a lot more to do. She will be meeting with Day of Treasury Board to discuss putting the hatchet to public servants’ benefits and pensions.
Why is this any of her business? Both Swift and C.D. Howe point to the gap between public and private sector pensions, chanting on about how unfair this is.
Yes, there is a large gap between benefits of private industry workers - except in the upper echelons, that is, where Swift and the C.D. Howe bunch probably nestle in comfort, but the answer isn’t to take away from those who fought for years to get a decent wage and pension, the solution, the fair and necessary solution, is to improve the lot of private sector workers.
And that is why Swift wants to take away what was given through fair bargaining, in good faith, over the years. Pension is in great need of reform in the private sector. Many workers have no protection should the company they work for claim bankruptcy. While tax dollars bail out corporations and CEOs continue to get high wages, keep their pensions, and get ridiculous bonuses, the workers are often left with nothing despite having paid into pensions for years.
With a rapidly aging population, the pension crisis is demanding action in the private sector. Servants of the money god, like Swift, are looking for a way out of giving workers what they deserve and have earned, so they go with the finger pointing thing. It’s what Thomas Walkom recently described in the Toronto Star as reverse class resentment.
It is an excellent article and should be read in its entirety. He goes through the history of unions, why they arose, the impact they had, and describes how things have reversed.
Today, class resentments have been turned on their head. The focus of anger is not the silk-hatted capitalist but his unionized workers, with their job protection guarantees, their pension plans and their good wages.
Increasingly, in the world of media and popular culture, it is not the rich who are blamed for their excesses but the poor - the undeserving welfare recipient, the shiftless single mother, the employment insurance cheat. Resentment has become a potent tool of the right.
...For the Harper Conservatives, all of this is useful. First, it removes the focus from the country's real pension problems: Most Canadians don't have workplace pensions; those who do have found their plans savaged by this recession.
Walkom closes by telling us of the dangers this approach poses:
...The left's resentments were predicated on the notion that if some are privileged, all should be. For all of its problems (and resentment is a difficult force to control), it was at least optimistic. At its best, it encouraged people, through their governments, to improve the lot of those who were hurting.
The new resentment is based on the presumption that if I don't have something, neither should you. Its aim is not to improve anyone's lot but to cut down to a common level of misery those uppity enough to think they deserve better.
Harper’s government: mean, resentful, creators of misery.
Monday Afternoon Links
9 hours ago
2 comments:
This sadly comes as no surprise that those with wealth and power wish to hoard that wealth. The key to is to keep workers happy with promisses and find a way to reneg on them at a later date. The problem is not the public services wages or pensions, rather the problem is that all wages and pensions, especially fair ones, remove large sums of wealth from gready hands of these few individuals. It is their affair because their sense of entitlement to all the wealth in the world makes them see any of it distrubuted fairly amoung workers as money that is rightfully theirs being diverted from their grasping hands. For get that much of that wealth eventually finds it way to their hands, they must have it all now.
To those who work for the public service I send out my deepest sympathies for today we have a government that does not value its own people and an opposition so scared that it will not stand up to this corruption and disregard for servants of the Canadian people. We stand on tragic ground when we can honestly say those who work for the countries best interest are neglected by those who are elected to uphold the nations best interest. So to all those hard working public service workers who's pensions will diminish, your wages will be frozen, or worse you will become unemployed, I send out my best regards and wish you all the luck. Mind you lets get real, if no one will stand against these grasping autocrates, you will just be one more subset of the population rolled over by the figurative bulldozer of profit.
Hi Informed, well said. You nailed it with this: "The problem is not the public services wages or pensions, rather the problem is that all wages and pensions, especially fair ones, remove large sums of wealth from gready hands of these few individuals."
I love your screen name.
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