Benns’ Belief: Value of unions should be taught by schools, media
Roderick Benns is the publisher of The Advocate. An award-winning author and journalist who grew up in Lindsay, he has written several books including Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World.
When I open my Globe and Mail newspaper, I can easily find the business section. I can learn about the latest corporate acquisitions. I might find an analysis of how the economy is faring. Others so inclined may check their stock performance. But what I will almost never see is an article about labour, unless it is framed as opposing big business and its goals (such as strike action.)
In other words, we only have business stories, not labour stories, unless the latter is a disruptive side note. Quite simply, though, a business is nothing without workers. Workers animate a company’s vision. They bring life to business owners’ ideas and they fulfill corporate bottom lines.
Yet the prevailing attitude sees a large portion of Canadians denigrate the labour movement. We’ve been taught by big media and by the powerful interests that insidiously shape it that business is what shapes our economy — and in turn, have we not then become more consumer than citizen?
Professor Dennis Raphael writes of the value unions bring to nations and individuals all over the world. He also warns the dominant media voices are ignoring labour and its health benefits — and so is the education system.
While every classroom experience is different and there are certainly excellent history teachers, how much time are most educators spending on the Winnipeg General Strike and its ripple effects? How much time do we really spend on Tommy Douglas, the prairie firebrand who almost single-handedly rescued this country from being America Lite? (After all, our universal health care system is one of the great differentiators between Canada and the U.S.) More to the point, how much emphasis are Ministry of Education documents guiding teachers to instruct on these topics?
Similar to our newspaper comparison, high schools offer courses in “business studies” — and it is hardly well balanced with the concerns of labour. There are only two references to unions in the 136-page Ontario Curriculum for Grade 11 and 12 business studies .
I guess it surprises me that unions are not held in higher esteem, considering so many of the things we value were union-driven, even if we were not personally part of a union. This includes the eight-hour workday, pensions, paid lunch breaks, paid vacations, maternity and paternity leave and much more.
If union voices seem a little extreme sometimes, consider they are a counterweight to the extreme brand of capitalism that has plagued our country since the rise of globalization in the early 1980s. If you feel your wages haven’t kept up to inflation; if you feel you’re getting a raw deal from your factory or your large scale employer, your fight is with corporate greed, not the union voices who are fighting in the trenches for fairness.
