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House Hansard - 268

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 14, 2023 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 268 - Dec/14/23
Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)
  • Dec/14/23 1:06:52 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-58 
Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the House. I am certainly very proud to rise on Bill C-58, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code and the Canada Industrial Relations Board Regulations, to end the practice in federally regulated workplaces of being able to bring in scab labour. This is something that New Democrats and the labour movement have fought many years for, and we are determined to make this a reality. At the outset, I want to thank the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay who spoke about the history, because history is important. He mentioned the history of the Rossland miners and the Western Federation of Miners, and the transformation they brought across this country. I am proud to be from Cobalt where the 17th district of the Western Federation of Miners was formed under Big Jim McGuire. The fact that the fight for the eight-hour day began in the mines of Cobalt on April 28, the international day of mourning for workers killed on the job, relates directly to the Cobalt Miners Union winning the right to workers' compensation in 1914. My grandfather, Charlie Angus, died at the Hollinger Mine, and my other grandfather, Joe MacNeil, broke his back underground at the McIntyre Mine. Both were members of Mine Mill and then the Steelworkers. When I was growing up, anybody who came from a mining town had a relative who had been injured or killed on the job. However, organized labour fundamentally changed that. The right of labour to organize, the right of labour to fight for a better future, is the history of our country and of the United States. They talk about the birth of the middle class in the United States as being the 1938 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan where the auto workers were not going to put up with precarious work—
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Context: House Hansard - 268 - Dec/14/23
Mr. Charlie Angus
  • Dec/14/23 1:09:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not surprised that they are trying to shut down a discussion on labour rights. We know the deep, anti-labour history of the Conservatives. If they do not want to know history, they can go have a walk around the block. We know that the modern middle class was formed in Canada in 1945 at the Ford Windsor strike. That was a follow-up to what happened in 1938 in Flint, Michigan. What happened in Flint, Michigan, matters to Canada. Conservatives do not understand that, but it matters because it was the piece of Detroit that established the post-war consensus of labour, capital and government that started the biggest transformation of wealth and success in the history of the world. The movement of the working class from precarious crap jobs to stable housing, proper wages and pensions, came out of out those strikes. In my region in 1941, the Kirkland Lake gold miners' strike was a brutal strike that won the right to collective bargaining. In 1973, it was the steelworkers going on strike again and again, and the wildcat strikes. Those were illegal strikes in Elliot Lake that forced fundamental changes to the workers' compensation acts everywhere. Health and safety became a fundamental issue because workers were dying on the job and they were not going to take it anymore. This is our history. This is the history of New Democrats. This is the history of my family. The other history is a dark history and it begins in 1980 when we saw the planned destruction of the modern working class, middle class that was put in place by the gurus of the Conservative movement, like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Friedrich Hayek was so opposed to the growth of wealth of the North American working class that he wrote an essay calling for a planned depression. He wanted to force a depression on North America in order to break the backs of the working class. That was picked up by Ronald Reagan. That was picked up by Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve. It began in January 1980 with massive increases in interest rates that led to millions of jobs lost across the United States, and that spilled over into Canada. What we saw then was that Ronald Reagan targeted the union movement and from then on, we started to see the loss of rights of workers, the loss of wages and the loss of security. In Canada, that effort was undertaken, but thankfully, we had the solid backing of some very strong labour leaders. At the time, Bob White and United Auto Workers, before it became Canadian Auto Workers, came out with a no-concessions policy. Under no circumstances were they going to give concessions. They stood up to Chrysler. They stood up to GM. They stood up at factory after factory to defend the rights of workers. We know that modern Conservatives would not support that. Bill Davis, who was an old-style Conservative, actually sided on a number of occasions, with the auto workers along the 401 belt to say that they did have rights, even at a time of massive job losses. We saw the damage that was done from the 1980s on. We can count it in the lost wages and lost security. The neo-liberal attack on worker rights was so overwhelming. Let us talk about the RAND Corporation. Under the present Conservative leader, one might think the RAND Corporation is a rabid lefty, but it actually usually works for the U.S. military. The RAND Corporation did a study of economic inequality to deal with the issue of democratic instability in the United States. Certainly, we have seen what is happening with MAGA, and the issue of economic precarity, the loss of the North American working class, and the creation of economic instability and political instability. From the period around 1980, when the attack on organized labour in the United States began, to what followed in Canada, we have, in the United States today, a Black worker making $26,000 less than they would if the 1980 wages remained constant. A college-educated worker is earning between $48,000 and $63,000 less a year. All that wealth, according to the RAND Corporation, was plundered directly for the benefit of the 1%. What we are seeing is that it identified the loss of wages, pension security and benefits to be in the order of $50 trillion of lost money that belonged to the working and middle class. It was then was hoovered up and put in the pockets of the 1%. That is what created the political and economic instability of our age. In the United States, that loss of income means that for every worker, it lost $1,114 a month, for every single month for the last 40 years. That is what created MAGA. Although we hear the Conservatives talking about inflation and how hard it is, we have seen no efforts by the Conservatives, ever, to stand with workers, ever to stand up on these issues, but this is the issue that has to be dealt with. This is why workers came to us again and again, to talk about anti-scab legislation so that we could restore the balance of negotiations with labour and management, the right of workers to have a seat at the table. I want to quote Paul Mason from his book, Postcapitalism. This is a really instructive statement that: the destruction of labour's bargaining power - was the essence of the entire [right-wing] project; it was a means to all the other ends. Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring – not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation. That was the whole Milton Friedman, Stephen Harper, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan agenda for the last 40 years. Guess what? Those days are over, because what we have seen in this past year is unprecedented victory for workers' rights. Remember, just a few years ago, Bill Morneau, the privatized pension king in Canada, “bill no more”, told young workers to get used to it and that they should suck it up as precarious, crappy, gig jobs are the new normal. That was the new normal for Bill Morneau. Then what happened? We got COVID. We had to break up supply chains and we had a young generation of workers who said they were not going to put up with crappy work. They started to walk off the job, to refuse to take the job or to organize. In this past year, the UAW, in their strikes against the big three, ended the tiered wages that were forced on them in the eighties and the nineties. Unifor won the biggest wage increase in their history of negotiations with Ford. When the Hollywood writers went on strike, everyone they thought they would cave. They did not. They won three times the original offer that was put on the table. We are seeing young people organizing at Tesla, Amazon and Starbucks. They know they cannot count on right-wing governments to protect their interests. They are going to organize; they have a right to be at the table. The worst thing that we can do is to allow scab labour to come into our workplaces to try and undermine their rights to restore balance and to have proper wages, proper pensions and proper housing. That is going to be fought by organized labour. This bill has to pass. We support it as New Democrats.
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