Tag: labour.

CGT demonstration
in Marseille, May 26,
2016, part of nationwide
strikes and
protests against
Hollande Socialist
government’s antiunion
labour bill.
Posted on
theguardian.com;
By Bertrand Langlois/
AFP/Getty Images.

One of Canada’s leading young Left economists, MICHAL ROZWORSKI
is co-author of a forthcoming Verso book on economic planning.
He is a union researcher and writer and blogs at Political
Eh-conomy. NICK SRNICEK is the author of Platform Capitalism
(Polity 2016) and co-author of Inventing the Future:
Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015).
He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics.
CD’s Andrea Levy talks to both about Basic Income;
the transcript has been edited for length, style and clarity.

Q: The Left has long been divided on the issue of
Basic Income. The argument recurs every generation
or so. In the last few years it has resumed
throughout much of the global North, especially in
the wake of campaigns and initiatives in Switzerland
and Finland, for example. And the debate is now
ablaze in Canada, where apparently serious interest
in some form of BI is being expressed by the neoliberal
governments of Kathleen Wynne in Ontario,
Philippe Couillard in Québec, and Justin Trudeau at
the federal level. Broadly speaking, what is your
position on Basic Income?

Nick Srnicek: I think there are many reasons why a BI is a useful
policy option. For instance, some point to the salutary
effects of BI experiments on mental and physical
health. For other mainstream proponents, the
argument for BI tends primarily to be an economic
one: they see it as a way to redistribute income in an
era of high inequality and to provide the basic means
of consumption to sustain consumer capitalism. My
chief argument for supporting BI is a political one,
however. If people are less dependent on the labour
market for an income, they suddenly have much more
political power. They can turn down jobs that are
demeaning or unhealthy or simply too stressful. And
they can withdraw their labour at any point and for an
indefinite amount of time, rather than relying on a
dwindling strike fund from the local union. None of
this is revolutionary in itself, nor is it an endpoint in
the struggle, but it does offer a major step forward
from neoliberalism’s onslaught against workers.

Michal Rozworski: For me, there is a big difference between the idea of
a universal BI in the abstract and what is concretely
on offer. Even within the bounds of today’s slightly
fraying neoliberal consensus, it is curious that BI is
being embraced by various forces on the right and
centre-right. This alone shouldn’t make us discount
the idea, but it does say something about how it is
liable to be implemented in our present
political situation. For the right, BI is a
means of extending markets and ousting the state
from the role of providing social services such as
healthcare and education. Because BI programs are
so expensive if truly universal, they would only be
funded today with enormous cuts to existing services.
BI is a backdoor to commodifying social services
and subjecting people further to the vagaries
of the market. The Ontario Liberals, by the way, are
likely to implement a “minimum income” that is simply
a rationalization and reorganization of welfare.
Like their “free tuition” policy, it is a way of putting a
progressive spin on small potatoes.

Contrary to Nick, I doubt that BI would truly challenge
the power disparity between labour and capital,
particularly when labour is so weak. It can just
as well be thought of as a subsidy to employers, giving
workers some breathing room but potentially
have little effect in the long term, especially if the
new money is accompanied by new markets for previously
free public services.

If the rallying cry of the Left has been to democratize
more spheres of life, I worry that BI would actually
diminish democracy by relegating more of our
lives to the market and foreclosing even the possibility
of popular control. All this doesn’t mean that
labour and the Left shouldn’t make utopian
demands, only that our demands should be strategic:
more public services that take more dimensions
of our lives off the market; workplace democracy;
higher wages, full employment — these are
demands that directly challenge capital. In this
sense, my main reason to oppose BI at present is
also political.

Basic Income vs. full employment

Q: One of the key arguments made for Basic Income
is precisely the improbability if not impossibility of
anything approaching full employment (defined
here as ensuring that everyone who wants a decent
job can have one). The trend in recent decades,
especially in Canada, is toward the growth of nonstandard
employment, including a significant
amount of involuntary part-time and temporary
employment, on top of an unemployment rate that
remains higher than what it was prior to the financial
crisis. Moreover, the technological displacement
of work looks more and more to be a tidal wave, with
jobs disappearing through automation (and not just
low-skill jobs either) at a rate faster than new jobs
are emerging. A higher minimum wage doesn’t
amount to a living wage for the barista working 20
hours a week and isn’t much use to the translator
whose job just disappeared because the federal
government is now using machine translation to cut
costs. Isn’t BI a worthwhile option in this context?

MR: Worries about technological unemployment are as
old as capitalism itself. I recently saw a compendium
of headlines from the last 200 years, all warning
that this time really is different, this time the robots
really are coming for all of our jobs. So far capitalism
hasn’t had a problem finding new ways to keep us
busy. Work isn’t just a technological process but a
social relation.

In fact, the rise of temporary employment, involuntary
part-time and such, while much-heralded in
the press, is not that visible in the data in Canada or
the U.S. The so-called gig economy remains a small
part of the labour market, and in fact may be accentuated
in popular perception because journalism is
one of the fields that has seen a marked shift to contract
work.

This isn’t to say that working conditions haven’t
deteriorated and wages haven’t stagnated over the
past several decades — they have enormously and
across the global North. But this is a reflection of
labour’s weakness and capital’s strength. The major
transformations we are witnessing are not primarily
in how work contracts are organized but how work
itself is organized — its speed, the way tasks are
assigned, how production (whether of goods or services)
is managed, and so on. Globalized and ever
more finely-grained supply chains have been instrumental
to this.

Without looking to the root cause in the weakness
of labour, demands like BI will play out in a neoliberal
guise. We have to think about how to overturn
the ability of capital to capture an ever greater part
of the social surplus. Full employment, shorter
working time for all and a rising share of national
income for labour are the major risk to capital, not
an increase in income security. With capitalism
lately returning to its more conflictual roots, we
should return to the original vision of the labour
movement: less work for all and a socialization of
the products of work as the way to harness the fruits
of technology.

NS: I think there are two issues worth separating out
here. One is whether we can imagine/design a universal
BI that would be worth fighting for, and the
other is whether that particular BI could be implemented.
Most of Michal’s points here tend to emphasize
the latter issue, and of course there are very
legitimate concerns about how it would be implemented
in the current context, and what it would
mean for the nature of work. I think we could come
to an agreement, though, about what a desirable BI
would look like: it would be set at a high level (typically
indexed to a country’s poverty level), it would
be universal and not means-tested, and it would
supplement most of the welfare state rather than
replacing it. If those conditions were met, I think BI
would bring about an immense power shift in favour
of labour.

But the real question is what is achievable — what
would a universal BI look like if it were implemented
tomorrow, or in the next five years? And here I think
Michal is right that we are looking at a largely neoliberal
approach which deploys BI as a pretext to
replace the welfare state and commodify ever
greater swaths of the public sector. It might well go
hand in hand with eliminating the minimum wage,
thus serving as a wage supplement to business. I
think that is a very likely outcome if there is a push
to introduce BI right now. The question for me, then,
is how do we build up the political power to implement
a more meaningful universal BI?

That brings us to another important question,
namely whether full employment is possible and
desirable. Presumably, if we had the political power
to implement a meaningful universal BI, we’d also
have the political power to implement other desirable
policies (like full employment or the extension
of the welfare state). As important as it is to continue
defending and extending the welfare state,
this is not going to lead to social transformation. We
would still remain bound to a system of wage labour
and market dependency, and the welfare state
doesn’t give labour any new means to exert power.
So that’s one point. But perhaps we could imagine
pushing for full employment? Here there are two
points to be made.

First, capitalism does appear less and less able to
produce good (secure and well-paying) jobs. In the
U.K., for instance, after the 2008 crisis, over twothirds
of net job growth was from self-employment
that on average involves lower pay and longer hours.
In the U.S., all of the net job growth since the crisis
has been in contingent and non-standard employment
arrangements of which the gig economy is only
a small part. We’ve seen high levels of unemployment
across Europe, and we’ve seen sluggish job
growth globally since the crisis — remaining far
below pre-crisis trends. All of which suggests that
capitalism is not capable of producing full employment
today. Second, let’s say we could press government
to introduce massive stimulus programs to
produce jobs (green jobs, for example). Here we run
into the problem that full employment makes all the
new automation technologies very desirable for capitalists.
If workers are pushing for higher wages and
there is a shortage of labour, that new robot will
look like a very attractive investment, with the result
that capitalists will start increasing business investment
levels and raising productivity levels as they
automate in the face of full employment. In this way
full employment negates itself.

MR: There is much truth in the argument that if we were
powerful enough to extract a socially progressive
universal BI, we would be powerful enough to have a
full employment economy and much else. But there
remains the strategic question of how to acquire this
power: which demands could start to create conditions
that end up breaking the back of capital’s
reign, of its domination of both the distribution of
goods and the nature of work?

That capitalism doesn’t seem to be able to produce
full employment today only seems novel because of
the anomalous post-war period. This anomaly was
complex in its origins, although it was in part about
the subordination of the labour movement into a
short-lived grand bargain that, as Nick points out,
marginalized radicalism. But while I generally take
full employment to mean a job for everyone who
wants one, that says nothing about the length of the
working day or average annual hours worked, nothing
about the nature of work and nothing about the
distribution of employment between private and
socialized branches of the economy. Full (or
approaching-full) employment would, of course,
provoke capital to introduce more mechanized forms
of production, but it would also give labour a greater
share of national income, which would raise effective
demand. This expansionary pressure and the
need to produce investment goods would at least
offset technological unemployment. Full employment
also fulfills one of Nick’s goals for a BI: the
ability of workers to hold out for better jobs. It gives
workers greater power to press for more favourable
working conditions, from reduced working time to
workplace democracy. It is precisely because of this
potential for transforming work that full employment
is most dangerous.

NS: There is a fundamental philosophical divide here: I
take it that waged work is what we want to eliminate,
not produce more of! But even if one thinks
work is a fundamental good, job growth is dependent
on economic growth which is dependent on
growth in greenhouse gas emissions. I think any
future society that is going to deal with climate
change will necessarily have to move towards less
work, rather than job guarantees.

Further, if we can agree that full employment is
unachievable, the problem then becomes how people
interpret that inability to attain it. I think the
most likely answer under current conditions is that
people do not blame capitalism, but rather blame
foreigners, laziness, and welfare-scrounging. I don’t
see the demand for full employment as leading to
anything that strengthens the hand of workers.

Now there’s an alternative way to reach full
employment, and that’s through reducing the working
week. I’m entirely in favour of this, and for a
number of reasons I think it’s a more immediately
achievable goal for the Left than a universal BI.
But here’s a key issue that never seems to be
raised when claims are made for full employment
giving power to workers: namely, that we have
empirical examples of hyper-employment societies
— Japan and Germany in the 1960s — where unemployment
was below 1 per cent and there were more
jobs available than workers.

Yet even in these conditions of full employment,
we did not see wages rise any higher than productivity.
If labour was significantly stronger under full
employment we would expect the gains from productivity
to be distributed more in favour of labour,
but they weren’t.

MR: I brought up full employment as a demand not
because it is the pinnacle of my dreams if achieved,
but because it can be used instrumentally. It is precisely
because full employment may be unachievable,
as Nick maintains, that it is useful. It exposes
the system’s need for the heavy hand of the boss,
for unemployment and for precarious life.

Put differently, it is easier for capitalism to accommodate
BI than it is for it to accommodate any type
of full employment for an extended period of time
and especially within its metropolitan centres. The
examples from the 1960s are short-lived, from a
period of labour’s waning power as we’ve already
discussed and with women still unabsorbed into the
labour force. Today, on the other hand, it is primarily
governments of the right that are experimenting
with BI (or, more likely, minimum income schemes
that are not universal and are clawed back against
earnings and other sources of revenue). BI doesn’t
challenge the fundamental dynamics of private ownership
of capital and workplace exploitation central
to capitalism the way full employment does.

Unconditional Basic
Income in Montreuil,
France, December 6,
2015. Posted by
Revenue de base.

A unifying demand?

Q: Arguably one of the virtues of Basic Income is
that it has the potential to appeal to constituencies
beyond organized labour. A well-formulated demand
for a reasonably robust universal BI that would not
dispense with all other social programs could conceivably
create a rallying point for a broad social
movement. It could mobilize many women, for example,
who may not wish to engage in full-time waged
work, by recognizing and rewarding their unpaid
reproductive labour (which remained unrecognized
and uncompensated during the post-war period).
Other significant groups who might welcome the
prospect of a BI are the underemployed and precariously
employed, and artists. Rather than rejecting
BI for fear of a neoliberal contortion, mounting a
dynamic Left campaign for a socially progressive BI
could have real educational value, allowing us to
talk, for instance, about who appropriates the
returns on the social investment in technology and
to undermine prevailing notions of labour market
participation as the sole valuable activity.

MR: I completely agree that the post-war consensus continued
the domination and discrimination of women,
racialized minorities and others in significant ways.
It was an anomaly and not something to which we
can return. What it showed was the power that
labour could have over capital. Rebuilding that
power will require new strategies and new tools. I
simply don’t see BI as a major fulcrum. Work has
always been mostly precarious. This is the normal
dynamic of capitalism. We should acknowledge this
and not look for an easy out, especially in view of
the risks associated with BI today. Talking in terms
of cash transfers risks re-creating markets for those
spheres of life we’ve managed to extricate from the
market. A reduction in working time and more socialized
investment and production also aim at the key
goal of undermining the labour market.

NS: I agree with Michal about the overemphasis on precarity.
Precarity is a long-standing feature of work
under capitalism, not something particularly new.
But I think the notion of precarity can usefully be
applied to household finances, given that levels of
household savings across many countries have been
dropping for decades, and this has been accelerated
by the crisis. Large numbers of people have no savings
and would be unable to support themselves in
the event of a financial emergency.

And I think Andrea’s point about the constituency
that can get behind a universal BI is also important.
Unlike full employment policies, we can see how
students, stay-at-home parents, care givers, and
other unwaged workers could immediately benefit
from BI. And universality would make it harder to
scuttle the program down the road. A significant
body of research shows that universal programs are
significantly more difficult to scrap once implemented,
precisely because there exists a vast political
constituency who benefits from it. A full-employment
focus risks reinstating traditional divides
between waged and unwaged workers.

MR: I think the constituency argument is important, but I
would look in the other direction. BI has support
among the charter school executives who would like
to privatize education, the healthcare companies
who would like to privatize hospitals and many
right-wing ideologues who would like to extend the
reach of the market to all spheres. This isn’t to imply
guilt by association, but simply to point to a real
danger. The Finnish BI pilot project, one of the more
likely to get anywhere, explicitly makes the connection
between BI and greater market provision.

I whole-heartedly agree with Nick that not only is
universality a desideratum of social programs, but it
also protects them from attrition. I worry though
that BI can yet undermine the drive for deeper
democracy by enlarging and extending the sphere of
“one dollar, one vote” implicit in the market. New
public programs that guarantee services as a right
follow a different logic and offer greater openings
for transformative change.

Finally, compare UBI to a campaign like the Fight
for 15. The latter engages people not only as workers,
but also as future workers (students) or as family
members of workers or as dependents on the
wage income of others. The challenge is to broaden
the constituency and include the non-waged as community
members, but with less concomitant risk of
co-option from capital as this campaign challenges
it directly. At best, campaigns like this can be
infused with clear class content, open confrontation
and real organizing (with the caveat that this is a
reality not always lived up to).

The point, however, is not to pit demands and campaigns
against one another. I think this debate is useful
because it draws out the bigger picture of tensions
within capitalism and the space for new movements
to exploit them. A friend of mine recently remarked
that while people make much of Marx’s musings on
the tendency of rate of profit to fall, and on automation
and technology, there is much less attention
paid to his understanding of capitalism’s tendency
to socialize production and ownership in the long
run. The latter, though, may be more important to
how we build a better world. It is also a reason why
I focus so much on the work process and on the prospects
for democratic control over direct distribution.

A cost-prohibitive reform?

Q: A final question on financing: We are right to
worry when we hear about BI schemes that are “cost
neutral,” which usually implies dismantling existing
social programs. But there are certain programs that
would be made redundant by a universal BI, such as
means-tested welfare. Beyond that, various proposals
have been put forward, such as a tax on financial
transactions or the diversion of subsidies to ecologically-
destructive activities. Is it impossible to imagine
a viable approach to funding BI?

MR: If indeed BI is to be truly universal and provide for a
liveable income without the sacrifice of public services,
the cost would be enormous. My point
here isn’t to sound like the right-wing economist
spreading doom, but simply to raise awareness
where it is often lacking. Much of what I’ve read
about BI, and many of the private arguments I’ve
had, have either neglected or dismissed this point
out of hand. Even assuming less spending on health,
police and other government services that are overused
due to the ill effects of poverty, a decent BI
would require a near doubling of government revenues
in a province like Ontario. The social power
necessary to extract these kinds of revenues from
the wealthy (and the wealthier) is sorely lacking.
The central question here again is that of power
dynamics and of what strategy is most apt to change
them in our favour.

I did a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation for
Ontario. Even given the elimination of welfare, child
benefits and low-income pension supplements
(replaced by BI) plus a one-third reduction in healthcare
and police budgets (due to less crime and
improved health owing to poverty reduction), we
would need nearly 20 per cent more of GDP to fund a
universal BI guaranteeing every person $15,000 per
year. These figures are just an example and we could
quibble about details but they indicate the scale of
the necessary expenditure. For comparison purposes,
PERI at the University of Massachusetts-
Amherst (a Left economic research institute) calculates
that a viable financial transactions tax could
raise 1.7 per cent of GDP in the U.S.; the figure is
probably lower in Canada due to the smaller role of
finance and the openness of our economy.

I’m all for increasing government expenditure,
albeit while democratizing the state, but we have to
understand the class battle that would be required
to win a decent universal BI. I fear that few proponents
are truly aware of the economics.

NS: Yes, it would cost lot of money to fund a universal BI,
although for most countries, even with targeted benefit
supplements, it would reach roughly the same
percentage of GDP as the Scandinavian welfare
states, which is not out of the realm of possibility. Of
course, we all agree that it won’t happen anytime
soon. But I think that as part of a broader push to
reduce the amount of work we need to do, BI is an
important goal, even if it is never fulfilled. Which
brings me to a final point I want to make: universal BI
tends to get pitched as a single cure-all policy. I think
this is entirely wrong. It needs to be situated within a
broader narrative that gives meaning to what its
advocates hope it can help accomplish. If the aim is
to help the worst off in society, that means that BI
can’t eliminate targeted benefits and the provision of
public goods. If, on the other hand, the intention is to
diminish government intervention, then that may
well mean demolishing the welfare state. If, by contrast,
we hope that BI will contribute to reducing our
reliance on the wage, then we start to get a properly
Left vision of what it must mean. Universal BI is useful
as a goal, and a potential policy, but only in the
context of a much wider conversation about the role
of wage labour in society. And that conversation has
to address concerns about minimum wage and public
ownership and workplace democracy.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

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Occupy Detroit rally, Grand Circus Park, October 14, 2011. By Stiofan 1919 (Flickr).

It is a central irony of the history of the Left that
it so frequently comes to defend the very exploitive
and unjust institutions that were its sworn enemies
from the outset. One of these is certainly the sovereign
nation state, the strengthening of which
became the fulcrum of first Stalinist and then social
democratic politics. The state and its bureaucracy —
the critique of which was very much part of the early
Left’s inspiration (anarchist and Marxist) — is now
seen as an essential bulwark against capitalist globalization.
The consequences of this statist orientation
are that the Left has not infrequently had to surrender
the critique of a complacent and self-serving
political class and its national security and other
bureaucracies to a rhetorical if hypocritical libertarianism
of the Right. With a few exceptions, plans to
decentralize and democratize power are pushed off
into some distant future.

A parallel case is that of the system of wage
labour. The fight against wage “slavery” (the word
says it all) has been a core inspiration of critiques of
capitalism from the earliest days of that system. For
Marx the critique of wage labour was essential to
his labour theory of value and the notion of surplus
value derived from the labour of workers above and
beyond the wages they were paid. For the pioneers
of early socialism, getting rid of the wage system
was a first principle. Another less discussed part of
their critique of wage labour was that its authoritarian
core — the boss/worker relationship — undermined
the basic tenets of a democratic society. If a
vast majority of people spend most of their waking
lives under the direction of external management —
autocratic habits and discontents will deform all
social life. There is much evidence from contemporary
psychology and the study of alienation that a
significant truth resides here. Whether under capitalism
or state socialism, the wage relationship saps
the autonomy and self-determination of workers
needed to underpin a truly democratic society. This
view, too, was pretty much a pillar of the critiques of
the pioneers who envisioned a world beyond capitalism.
But gradually the economism of a more vulgar
Marxism displaced the belief that it was core
social relationships of hierarchy and the wage relationship
which needed to be transformed in order to
move beyond capitalism.

As socialism became a serious political contender
— either in its parliamentary or Bolshevik form —
wage labour came to be accepted as the only way
the wealth of society could be effectively distributed.
When pressed, some still expressed a belief
that this was a transitional phase to a remote and
rarely invoked future in which the wage relationship
would be transcended. The focus of the Left shifted
to the quantity of wages paid (did these amount to a
fair living wage?) and other conditions under which
wage labour was carried out — work safety, holidays,
pensions and other fringe benefits. The idea
that the labour market (or its centralized planning
equivalent) was a questionable way of deciding
thorny questions of income distribution ceased to
be considered a point for serious discussion.

Neoliberal revolution

Socialists and the labour movement instead advocated
a macroeconomic position in favour of full
employment, reasoning that this would leave the
working class (their prime constituency) in the best
position to occupy decent jobs at good wages in a
situation of high labour demand. Full employment
was only imaginable in the context of robust economic
growth, where labour and everything else
was in high demand in a rapid “flow through” economy.
The golden age of this model dates from the
1950s up into the 1970s, a span of time that witnessed
a relative fairness in the division of economic
surplus between capital and labour. This all
came to a crashing end in the 1980s with the neoliberal
counter-revolution spearheaded by Thatcher
and Reagan, aided by capital’s increasing globalized
flexibility. The two together succeeded in making
good wage settlements a piece of nostalgia. Instead
we entered an era of labour “flexibility” (read discipline)
marked by precarious employment, austerity
and shocking levels of inequality.

Fast forward to the year 2016. To socialists who
take humanity’s ecological crisis seriously — and it
is hard to take seriously those who don’t — the
growth that underpinned the full employment dream
is fast becoming a grave threat to the very existence
of our species, in addition to making the planet
entirely inhospitable to a good many other species.
One can see the flickering ironies in the flames that
are consuming the tar sands capital of Fort McMurray
— that ultimate job magnet drawing workers
from Eastern Canada to Somalia and Sudan —
destroyed by the very climate degradation its dirty
oil helped produce. Only the rankest cowardice prevents
our political class (Elizabeth May excepted)
from drawing the obvious connections.

Fact is we already have too many jobs and use too
much wage labour performing tasks in our speed-up
economy whose only real purpose is to generate
profit and as a side effect perhaps create more jobs.
But this kind of growth is something we can no longer
afford. There is a credible case being made by
ecological economists that what we actually need is
a kind of degrowth to regain a sense of ecological
balance as we face a series of cascading environmental
crises — climate degradation, resource
depletion, deterioration of the quality of soil, air and
water, a garbage explosion and widespread chemical
poisoning.

Capital “off the leash”

A few on the Left still yearn to return to “the golden
age” of the 1950s and 1960s and the era of decent
jobs where our exploitation is regulated by consensus
agreement of capital and labour. But there will
be no going back. Capital is “off the leash” and will
not likely be reined in by calls for fairness and ecological
sanity based on contradictory notions of full
employment and “green growth.” The Centre-Left
politics that underpinned the old consensus has
now largely capitulated to one form or another of
neoliberalism. Precarious labour has long been at
the centre of the political economy of the Global
South. With the aid of globalization and the hollowing
out of manufacturing work, precarity has
migrated north for good. Most of the new job growth
is part-time and/or low wage.

The main ideological tool in capital’s arsenal
remains the promise of more wage labour that never
seems to arrive, at least in the quantity and quality
promised. Whether it’s large transnational corporations
or the business-oriented think tanks that dominate
the policy superstructure, there is an almost
constant drumbeat of job blackmail. It is holy writ
that the business class must get its way in enacting
this particular tax policy or that particular free trade
deal or pushing through the latest pipeline or mining
project. Otherwise we will all suffer. They just
won’t invest, and the jobless and under-employed
can blame the politicians who failed to provide that
holiest of all grails: the “sound investment climate.”

This endless braying for jobs by everyone from
chambers of commerce to trade unionists traps us in
the logic of capital forever. It is frequently accompanied
by the glorification of any work at all as a morally
upright end in itself no matter its ecological and
social impact. Jobs are synonymous with wage
labour in most conventional understandings and it is
assumed that without the direction of some external
management we would all lay about doing nothing—
or worse, after all “idle hands do the devil’s work,”
as the expression goes. Wage labour is taken as the
natural condition through we distribute the wealth
of society based on the status and bargaining power
attached to the job in question. Those without jobs
end up both poor and unworthy.

Of course the corporate and related oligarchies,
who are quick to champion a life of compulsory
labour for the rest of us, now tend to draw their
income from securitized wealth such as stock portfolios,
derivatives, bonds and trust funds. These
have little to do with how the owners of significant
capital pass their waking hours. While they are
deserving of our animus for their self-satisfied
hypocrisy, we could also view them as pioneers in
destroying the centrality of the wage system as the
main means for distributing wealth. The massive
personal wealth that the one per cent has managed
to accumulate (up to one-third of global wealth is
currently nestled beyond the reach of tax authorities)
proves there is certainly enough pie to go
around without us expanding it even further.

An adequate basic income for all is, in this sense,
a good starting point for the Left to renew its assault
on compulsory wage labour. The organization of
work could be freed up to take on more cooperative,
decentralized and democratic forms in which workers
could decide for themselves what work is desired
and useful. Many seeds of this kind of work organization
already exist. Such reforms should be welcomed
insofar as they would significantly weaken
the power corporate job blackmailers currently
wield over society.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

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Winnipeg railway underpass, 2008. Photo By Ken Yule.

The North American Basic Income Group held
its 15th annual congress in Winnipeg on May 13 to
16. The event brought together activists, researchers
and people with experience of poverty from
across North America and beyond to discuss an idea
that is gaining momentum as a tool for poverty
reduction: Basic Income, a program which would
pay a guaranteed amount monthly or annually to
every adult member of society.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest
in the concept at home and abroad. Pilot projects
have been implemented in Kenya and Finland, and a
national referendum on basic income was held in
Switzerland.

All over Canada, support from community organizations
and political parties, along with media interest,
has pushed the idea into public consciousness
over the past few years. During Manitoba’s last provincial
election, the Manitoba Green Party put forward
a detailed policy proposal for a negative
income tax, while the Manitoba Liberals promised a
Minimum Income Pilot program. The federal government
has been exploring minimum income and other
provinces such as Ontario and Québec are considering
implementing programs as well.

It is a concept that goes by many names: basic
income, negative income tax, guaranteed annual
income, among others. While the basic income
rubric covers a wide variety of policy proposals, the
public’s enthusiasm about basic income centres
around a fairly intuitive idea: our current system of
social assistance is not working to end poverty. If we
simply gave people enough money to live, we could
save elsewhere on administrative costs. And the
simple fact of reducing poverty would give rise indirectly
to additional savings by relieving pressures
on the healthcare and justice systems, for example.

The idea is broad in its appeal and has historically
attracted support from across the political spectrum.
But as with many good ideas, the difficulties
reside in the details. Anti-poverty advocates see the
potential of using basic income as a means to
reframe the debate about poverty, and as an argument
for increasing assistance to low-income people.
On the other hand, market fundamentalists like
Milton Friedman and Fraser Institute researchers
Charles Lammen and Hugh McIntyre have long promoted
basic income’s potential for administrative
simplification and cutting public sector employment.
Between these positions, there is wide room
for debate.

Bringing women’s voice forward

A range of approaches and topics for investigation
were put forward during the Congress. A key theme
was how basic income could meet the needs of communities
and groups with higher levels of poverty.
One session brought together feminists who talked
about how women’s voices could be brought to the
fore, and how basic income could be used as a tool
for their empowerment. Too often the discussion on
basic income becomes mired in technocratic theoretical
perspectives far removed from practical realities
and lived experience. Previous NABIG congresses
have focused on how basic income could be
used to help economies transition to a future automated
world without work. But such concerns are
remote from the immediate preoccupations of
women with jobs and families who continue to work
double shifts or victims of domestic abuse seeking
to escape violence. The voices of people with lived
experience of poverty, including Indigenous people
and communities of colour, need to be heard if we
hope to develop basic income policies that will work
in the real world. Congress 2016 was a welcome step
forward in this area.

Mincome project centre stage

The conference also aimed to look at what can be
learned from various pilot projects over the past few
decades. Holding the event in Winnipeg provided an
opportunity in particular to reflect on experiments
that were conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s. The
Manitoba Mincome project was a joint federal/ provincial
initiative which operated from 1974 to 1979. It
featured the only community-wide “saturation”
study ever conducted in North America in which all
the adult residents of the town of Dauphin were eligible
to apply to the program, subject to a means
test. Low-income households in the study were
given an income equivalent to 60 per cent of lowincome
cutoff levels, extending benefits to households
not previously eligible for welfare programs.
The amount of the benefit declined at a rate of 50
cents for each dollar earned.

With changes in government and shifting priorities
at both the federal and provincial levels, interest in
the program waned and funding was cut. The results
of the program remained unanalyzed for decades.
However, over the past several years, researchers
have begun to systematically assess the Mincome
program. The 2016 Congress brought researchers
together with some of the original civil servants and
administrators who designed the program as well as
some of the participants who benefited.

In Dauphin, there were noticeable improvements
in physical and mental health status and a drop in
domestic violence, while employment participation
did not significantly decline. By 1978, Dauphin had
significantly lower rates of hospitalization than
demographically comparable communities in Manitoba,
especially for illnesses frequently associated
with income insecurity. There were some modest
reductions in work hours across the population,
estimated at approximately 13 per cent during the
duration of the program. However, most of this
labour force withdrawal was associated with young
people staying in school longer and mothers delaying
re-entry to the workforce in order to look after
children. There was no significant decrease in the
working hours performed by primary wage earners
as a result of the program.

Narrow labour market focus

Early proponents of basic income were faced with
having to prove that the introduction of benefits
would not adversely affect the labour market. Since
any reduction in labour market participation was
seen as lethal to the implementation of basic
income, advocates went out of their way to minimize
the extent to which recipients chose to work less.
However, one of the main purposes of basic income
is to provide much needed time — for studies, child
care, recreation and other necessities that are too
often deemed luxuries for working class people.
Similarly, basic income programs of the 1970s were
heavily criticized for some data in U.S. experiments
that showed basic income tied to increased likelihood
of divorce. Today, it is possible to recognize
that at least some of the family breakdown reported
in experiments was the result of women having the
modicum of economic freedom that allowed them to
escape domestic violence. Renewed analyses of the
basic income experiments of the 1970s have taken a
more nuanced view of these effects.

One practical concern that attracted considerable
attention during the conference was the extent to
which advocates of basic income should content
themselves with government promises of further
pilot projects, which are often an excuse for governments
to defer implementation of any substantial
program, rather than push for immediate implementation.
With cost-constrained politicians looking for
cheaper ways to say “yes” to activists, pilots can be
a dangerous distraction from long-term objectives.

The conference was held jointly at the University
of Manitoba and at the Neeginan Centre, an Indigenous
training and community development centre in
downtown Winnipeg. Thus it successfully wedded
community experience and academic research in a
way that is often lacking at conferences organized
exclusively by universities. Unless we learn from the
people experiencing poverty, the data and analyses
will remain limited and partial. Meanwhile, the community
has much to gain from studies and debates
on how basic income has been applied elsewhere.

Despite regrettably minimal media coverage, the
conference succeeded in raising the level of debate
on basic income and its potential role in creating a
more equitable and sustainable society.

---

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

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Photo by Ranjith

On Friday, an estimated 150 million workers refused to show up for work in India and instead took to the streets to demonstrate against labor conditions.

***

UNIDENTIFIED: We are demanding that ordinary workers should also get a rock-bottom of 18,000 a piece minimum pay, take-home pay, so that they can have a good, a happy family life. We want that every worker should get at least, at the fag-end of their life, 3,000 rupees minimum pension. We want that in–there are many contract employment in perennial nature of jobs. Those jobs should be regularized. And also they should be given protection of social security and job security.

***

PERIES: The unions involved issued 12 demand to the government of Prime Minister Modi, which included raising the minimum wage, enforcement of labor laws, introduction of universal social security, and a stop to foreign direct investment in railways and national defense.

Joining me now to examine all of this is Vijay Prashad. Vijay is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and professor of international studies at Trinity College. He’s the author of many books, including The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution.

Vijay, good to have you with us again.

VIJAY PRASHAD: Thanks a lot.

PERIES: So, Vijay, it is estimated that this one-day strike could be one of the largest in history. Workers are clearly unhappy. Will it have any effect on the Modi government?

PRASHAD: Let’s first register what you just said. It’s probably the largest strike in the history of strikes over the last 200 years, up to 150 million people. This is extraordinary. It’s larger than the strike last year, which we thought was very, very robust presence on the street.

But the reason I say last year’s strike was robust is that it had minimal impact on the Modi government. The Modi government is hell-bent upon a growth strategy that requires, essentially, crushing labor laws, rolling back labor laws, and seizing, allowing private business to have a larger section of the social surplus produced by these workers. So both in terms of workplace democracy and in terms of the share of the surplus that workers have been demanding in both these directions, the Modi government has tilted firmly with management against labor. So it will not directly influence the Modi government, but it certainly strengthened the confidence of the Indian workers to stand up and not allow this government to basically run roughshod over them.

PERIES: And let’s talk about some of the conditions that these workers are facing that they want fixed by this demonstration.

PRASHAD: Well, the labor laws that the Modi government have put forward have such things as increasing the threshold of hours before overtime can be claimed. Previously the threshold was, say, 50 hours. Now they want to increase it to much higher threshold. So before you even come near that threshold, you cannot claim overtime.

At the same time, they are making it very difficult for new labor unions to be formed. It’s important for people to understand that in the Indian labor market, 90 percent of the workers are in the informal sector. That is, they are in the sector outside the ambit of most labor law, and certainly trade unions. This strike, I think, very particularly, in a very focused way, was a strike of all kinds of workers, workers in the formal and informal sector. And both workers in formal and informal sector made it very clear that the demands they were fighting were not merely for formal sector workers, for bank employees or railway employees, etc., but they were also for the women who work in crèches, for instance, the Anganwadi workers who are very, very militant in their opposition to this government because they have been pushed against the wall for the work that they do. So this particular strike is about linking the formal sector workers to the informal sector workers and to fight for the rights of informal sector workers to create trade unions and recognize those trade unions within Indian labor law.

PERIES: And in the demands that was made by the unions, they isolated particularly the foreign direct investment in railways and national defense. Why are these sectors particular to the concerns of the trade union?

PRASHAD: Well, there were three that they picked: railways, insurance, and national defense. And there are several reasons why these are important.
The question of national defense of course raises issues of sovereignty. These are political questions, not merely questions of workers’ rights directly.

The area of railways and insurance, I think there is a great worry. Railways are one of the largest employers in India and certainly one of the backbones of the formal sector unions. And the increase of foreign investment in railways will come in a very compromising way from labor. It’s going to probably move the workers in the railway industry towards more contractorization, you know, where there’ll be more subcontracted work, there’ll be more so-called casual labor rather than full-time labor. So the unions in the railways are very concerned that the increase of FDI is going to increase casualization of the workforce and the railways.

With insurance, I think there’s again the issue of insurance companies from abroad coming in, you know, basically rationalizing their procedures, firing very large numbers of workers. You know, this is again a strong public sector side of the Indian labor market. But again here there’s a political dimension, because there’s a fear that foreign insurance companies will come in, they’ll use the massive pension funds or the casino Wall Street, and not for the betterment or the protection of labor as labor ages.

So, for these political and workplace reasons, the unions are very much opposed to foreign direct investment.

PERIES: Now, lastly, Vijay, of course this kind of massive protests in India is resonating throughout the world. We see these kinds of labor protests in France and other parts of the world. Can you link these struggles?

PRASHAD: Well, of course they are in many ways against the kind of neoliberal policy slate that most of the governments around the world follow.

But let’s just consider the scale of this. You know, this is about 150-180 million workers who have gone on strike. These are workers from the tea plantations of northern Bengal to the small factories that link Madras to Coimbatore. I mean, this has been across India. This is the largest strike perhaps that we’ve seen in 100 years at least. So the scale is just so gigantic that the comparison at one level is not possible. But certainly the issues that they’re all fighting for are related.

You know, one of the striking features of this, Sharmini, is going to be that the press is barely going to report the fact that such a large part of the Indian workforce went on strike. There will be barely a mention of it. And this has got a lot to do with the fact of who owns the press. But I would like to say something to my friends in the press, that many of the newspapers and television channels are also running with labor practices that have been challenged by the Indian trade unions, so they should feel a personal stake in the struggles of the Indian trade unions. Those who work in television channels in France, in the United States, etc., they know what it’s like to have their pensions squeezed, they know what it’s like to get their benefits cut. So that’s precisely what the Indian workers are fighting for. They’re not fighting simply for themselves; they’re fighting to imagine a new dispensation.

PERIES: Alright. And, Vijay, in your article this week on Alternet you made a very important connection between these kinds of labor protests that are going on in India to what’s happening in France. What was the objective in doing that?

PRASHAD: Well, part of it is the idea of backwardness, you know, when in the old colonial days the suggestion was made that the people of the East, whether they are from North Africa, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, they are somewhat backward to Europeans. And the idea that was put forward is that backwardness was premised on culture, not on material conditions. That was sort of left off the table.

And the reason the West largely left that off the table was that they understood that the plunder that the West was conducting in places like India benefited the West, and so to then say let’s create education or drinking water for the Indians would somehow appear criticism of themselves. So they understood backwardness to be simply or merely a cultural phenomenon.

So this new debate about burkinis and things like that in France is just a repetition of this old argument that somehow the people of the East are backward in cultural terms.

What they don’t want to talk about is that the economic and political policies continue to make people in various parts of the so-called East have a difficult time producing their own futures, their own reality, their own kind of dignity, their own kind of advances. And suffocating them in that way and then criticizing them so-called on cultural grounds is the oldest colonial trick in the book. So when workers rise up in a place like India, they are rising up, I think, not only on the terrain of politics and economics, but also culture, because what they’re saying is, after all, we are human beings and we deserve to be treated like human beings, including how we decide to imagine our way of life.

PERIES: Alright, Vijay. As usual, enlightening. Thank you so much for joining us today.

PRASHAD: Thanks a lot.

PERIES: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

This interview originally appeared on TheRealNews.com.

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Photo by Fibonacci Blue

Labour Day Weekend is upon us, and many union activists and their families will be out marching and picnicking, joining with brothers and sisters from other unions in a show of solidarity. While their participation is heartfelt there is no doubt many of them are asking what is there to celebrate? There are a few recent victories but not enough to prevent workers from concluding that the current Labour movement is in crisis.

Labour Day is recognized by most unions in Canada and the U.S. as a day to promote labour’s role in the community. In 1894, it became a national holiday in Canada. The Canadian government was seeking to accommodate the Labour Movement after the rise of the Knights of Labor and the strengthening of unions in the 1880s. Shortly after, the American government followed suit, wanting in particular to offer a counterpoint to May Day, which commemorated the state violence against the 1886 Haymarket demonstrators. The contrast remains between the North American Labour Day holiday and May Day, which is Labour’s day elsewhere. While May Day stands for the international struggle against capitalism, Labour Day signifies the accommodation of workers within the capitalist system. Canada and the U.S. are the only countries where Labour Day rather than May Day celebrates the achievements of workers.

Postwar Legal Recognition

With the postwar settlement in Canada and the legal recognition of workers’ rights to organize, bargain and strike, accommodation of labour within the system was realized. By linking union certification and recognition of state-defined bargaining units in specific workplaces, the collective bargaining regime channeled unions away from broadly-based struggles and toward a narrow form of unionism centred on negotiating the price and use of labour-power at the level of the workplace. Workplace disputes were required to be resolved through formal grievance procedures rather than collective action helping to lead to the legalization of conflicts. Collective bargaining was confined to the economic issues of the workplace and separated from decisions made in the political realm. This process was powerfully reinforced by the cold war hysteria of the 1950s (and after) that resulted in the shunning and expulsion of both communists and socialists from U.S. and Canadian trade unions.

While this regime did allow for the growth of unions and material benefits for a few decades, it was already evident by the 1980s that it had reached a state of crisis. Stark evidence of this can be seen in the USA. In 2013, the percentage of workers belonging to a union was 11.3%, compared to 20.1% in 1983. The rate for the private sector was 6.7%, and for the public sector, 35.3%. In Canada (according to Statistics Canada), the rate of unionization has fallen from 37.6% in 1981 to 28.8% in 2014. There have been no significant organizing advances. Meanwhile the continual spread of precarious forms of work, such as part-time, casual, zero-hours, and contingent labour, makes organizing in the service and other new industries such as call centres extremely difficult.

There is a real danger that the Canadian labour movement, as it now stands, will go down the same road as its U.S. counterpart. The decline of union density in the private sector has reached a critical point, and the neoliberal turn to austerity has reduced the effectiveness of unions to make gains. At best, unions are fighting against rollbacks. But in many instances, the acceptance of concessionary collective agreements continues – particularly with respect to defined benefit pension benefits. Public sector union benefits are constantly under attack with insidious comparisons made to non-union private sector companies. The recent embrace of social movement unionism by many unions as the way forward has done little to boost the capacities of labour. While this has led to greater involvement of unions nationally and locally with other social movements, it has not entailed the significant changes in union structures, practices and priorities that might have prevented the crisis of the current model of trade unionism from deepening.

Signs of Revival

If overall unions, in both the U.S. and Canada, have been slow in recognizing the need for major changes, recently there have been some encouraging developments. The ‘Fight for $15’ in the U.S. stands out as a movement that has bypassed the union certification process and has developed a community-based strategy in support of workplace-based actions to redress grievances. Starting with a few hundred fast food workers right across New York City in 2012, who went on strike for $15 an hour and union rights, the movement has grown considerably in a short period of time. In April 2015, tens of thousands of striking fast food workers in more than 200 cities were joined by other low paid workers, including childcare and homecare assistants, Walmart workers and airport staff, many of whom were women and racialized workers. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) now supports this community-based movement and is helping to organize the strikes and demonstrations. In November 2015, Bernie Sanders spoke out in support of the movement pushing Hillary Clinton to support $15 as a minimum wage standard.

Another widely noted example concerns the determined efforts of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to break out of the confines of a narrow collective bargaining system through an ongoing fight for real systemic change within the education system. In September 2012, they went on strike against school privatization and the broader “corporate reform agenda.” But they realized that they couldn’t depend on collective bargaining alone to fix the failures of the public school system. They are continuing to build the capacity of education workers, parents, and the community as a whole in a broad alliance in the working class areas of Chicago to challenge the racist inequality of the system.

Turning to Canada, the Leap Manifesto: A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another offers another example of ambitious, imaginative thinking. The Manifesto proposes a restructuring of the economy away from fossil fuels and has forged alliances with unions and community groups in the hope of moving the project forward. The Leap’s support of the One Million Climate Jobs project has brought the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and Indigenous and environmental organizations together to work together on a climate job creation plan. While Leap doesn’t explicitly address the problems of capitalism (and its social relations of production), it does call on the labour movement to go beyond its traditional focus on the price of labour and its use and instead concern itself with the character of production and public control of investment.

The CUPW Example

Then there is the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) with its ambitious vision for the Post Office of the future. CUPW has often been noted as a union prepared to break new ground. This has included founding the Winnipeg Workers Action Centre to support unorganized and vulnerable low-income workers. More famously, CUPW organized rural and suburban mail contractors for several years despite a legal prohibition against forming a union, and ultimately pressured Canada Post into voluntarily agreeing to the creation of the certified RSMC (Rural and Suburban Mail Carriers) bargaining unit in 2003.

The recent developments arose out of the union’s efforts to respond to four hard years of concessions-infused bludgeoning at the hands of the Harper government and the market fundamentalist leadership of Canada Post Corporation. These included the decision by Canada Post to completely eliminate door-to-door delivery and 8000 good union jobs in late 2013. If the union couldn’t find a response, it could have faced a future of growing irrelevancy, so its activists chose to fight. The first step was to develop a campaign around postal banking. This not only served to answer the argument that the Post Office was a more or less hapless victim of the digital crisis; the banking initiative also opened up the prospect of a host of real benefits for some of the most vulnerable in our society.

In order to advance this campaign, CUPW nourished a growing relationship with the Canadian Postmasters and Assistants Association (CPAA, a much smaller rural union) and ACORN, the well-known national organization of low-income community activists which has long fought against predatory lenders and the policies of the big banks (ACORN now embraces CUPW’s project of postal banking). At the same time, CUPW developed a strategy of community based initiatives to Save Canada Post, featuring door-to-door campaigning, aggressive demonstrations and sit-ins, a call for a postal mandate review under a new government, and then began working with the new organization, Friends of Public Services, to expand its outreach.

It soon became clear that the upcoming negotiations for a new collective agreement were inextricably connected to the development of a forward-looking proposal about the future role of Canada Post as a public service. With the election of the Justin Trudeau Liberals and the promise of a postal review, this objective developed into an alliance including ACORN, CPAA, Friends of Public Services and the Leap Manifesto group. This alliance developed the widely distributed program Developing Community Power. While still a work in progress, it envisions Canada Post as a green hub providing community economic development and social care along with postal banking – imaginative new possibilities for the role of public services in what is now often called the “new economy.”

The first fruits of these initiatives were reflected in the negotiations for a new collective agreement with Canada Post that was just concluded. CUPW succeeded in forcing the post office to abandon all of its key demands for concessions including a ‘defined contribution pension plan’ for new hires, the right to close up to 500 retail outlets, and changes to work rules. The union also won a modest wage increase and a commitment to address its main demand of pay equity for its rural members within 19 months following an expedited review by a Pay Equity Committee. This last achievement was greatly assisted by CUPW’s outreach to women across the country, including the release of a powerful open letter to the Prime Minister signed by 200 well-known women insisting that he live up to his pay equity commitments.

**The Struggle Continues

CUPW’s victory at the bargaining table means that the union is in a much better position to promote the vision of Community Power that it developed with its allies. The Canada Post Review process, which was a Liberal election promise, is well underway and has the potential to give the proposal high visibility. Community groups have started to hold meetings around the proposed vision and support from activists around the People4Posties national network and the Developing Community Power group is ongoing. Support from the CLC, other union centrals, and individual unions is crucial to the process. But the solidarity initiatives need to go further and an awareness needs to be built that all unions are implicated and have a stake in the fight for the expansion of public services.

This is precisely because the next phase of the struggle is not going to be easy. Both Leap and Delivering Community Power have laid out remarkable visions of how we could transform our communities. At the same time, neither in and of themselves is particularly radical. There are large postal banks in many major capitalist countries including France, England and Japan. As for Leap, as Avi Lewis himself noted when speaking in Ottawa, the only really radical thing about the Leap manifesto is its implicit suggestion to leave the oil sands in the ground.

The radicalism of both proposals lies in the need to confront and challenge capital if the visions are to be achieved. The banks and the pay day loans they support will fight tooth and nail against postal banking. The petroleum companies will strenuously oppose any suggestion that they give up billions in profit by leaving the oil unexploited. Moreover, leaving the oil in the ground poses a serious threat to thousands of jobs and indeed to Fort McMurray as a whole, and will meet with serious resistance from some parts of labour. This will not be overcome by promises of new retraining programs. Restructuring the oil industry will require serious planning, including financial planning, and this won’t be possible without challenging capital. This also won’t be possible without a much more powerful, politicized movement of community and labour organizations than exists now. It will need to be a transformed movement which sees itself as an integral part of working class communities in cities and towns across the country.

This Labour Day there are hopeful signs that this transformation is beginning. The strategy of community-based initiatives that CUPW developed to save Canada Post from further cuts and privatization was a crucial part of the union’s strategy going into this round of negotiations. Victory at the bargaining table could not have been achieved without them. Other struggles, such as that of the Chicago teachers and the North American-wide Fight for $15 campaigns for low-paid workers have raised the possibility of breaking out of the straight jacket of the current labour relations regime. These struggles not only open the way to new possibilities for labour’s collaboration with other popular-based groups and organizations; they also raise the political aspirations for the entire labour movement and for the Left as a whole.

Evert Hoogers is a former CUPW National Union Representative. Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett both taught at Carleton University for many years.

This article originally appeared on SocialistProject.ca.

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How have labour unions benefitted our society? Union activism brought us:
Weekends! Literally. There used to be an expression: “Don’t come to work on Sunday, don’t come to work on Monday.” Meaning, if you took one day off, you were fired.
Vacations – any vacation
Paid vacations
The 8-hour work day
An end to child labour, so every child could have an education
Rest breaks
Equal pay for equal work for women
Sick leave
Canada Pension Plan
Universal health care
The minimum wage
Pregnancy and parental Leave
The right to strike
Anti-discrimination rules at work
Overtime pay
Health and safety rules
The 40 hour work week
Worker’s compensation for on-the-job injuries
Employment Insurance
Pensions
Public education!
Collective bargaining rights
Wrongful termination laws
Whistleblower protection laws
Anti-sexual harassment laws
Holiday pay

Unions even help nonunionized workers get better pay and benefits. Here’s how.

Unions have a substantial impact on the compensation and work lives of both unionized and non-unionized workers. This report presents current data on unions’ effect on wages, fringe benefits, total compensation, pay inequality, and workplace protections.

Some of the conclusions are:

Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28%.

Unions reduce wage inequality because they raise wages more for low- and middle-wage workers than for higher-wage workers, more for blue-collar than for white-collar workers, and more for workers who do not have a college degree.

Strong unions set a pay standard that nonunion employers follow. For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25% unionized is paid 5% more than similar workers in less unionized industries.

The impact of unions on total nonunion wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages.
The most sweeping advantage for unionized workers is in fringe benefits. Unionized workers are more likely than their nonunionized counterparts to receive paid leave, are approximately 18% to 28% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are 23% to 54% more likely to be in employer-provided pension plans.

Unionized workers receive more generous health benefits than nonunionized workers. They also pay 18% lower health care deductibles and a smaller share of the costs for family coverage. In retirement, unionized workers are 24% more likely to be covered by health insurance paid for by their employer.
Unionized workers receive better pension plans. Not only are they more likely to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement, their employers contribute 28% more toward pensions.

Unionized workers receive 26% more vacation time and 14% more total paid leave (vacations and holidays).

Unions play a pivotal role both in securing legislated labor protections and rights such as safety and health, overtime, and family/medical leave and in enforcing those rights on the job. Because unionized workers are more informed, they are more likely to benefit from social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and workers compensation.

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