Be afraid, Canada, be very afraid. Those evil public sector workers are at it again, going on strike, holding the public to ransom and distorting the economy. At least, that’s what the ruling class wants us to believe. The think tanks that the rulers fund have been hard at work spreading this alarming and false view of public sector workers for decades.
As public sector workers take job action this season and anti-union propaganda floods the media, it is useful to take a look at the anti-union line, who spreads it and who benefits from it. Spoiler alert, it’s not us.
As recently detailed in an essay by Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives researcher Jon Milton, the federal government has imposed back to work orders against unions enthusiastically in the recent past, and it will not be a surprise if the noxious Section 107of the Canada Labour Code is used against the public sector workers now on strike. As Milton notes:
“Since June 2024, the federal government has used Section 107 eight times to end strikes and lockouts. It prevented a strike among WestJet mechanics, temporarily ended a strike/lockout of Canada Post workers, sent workers at the ports of Montreal and Vancouver back to work, and ended job actions at CN and CP rail. It has become the go-to tool in the federal government’s toolbox to put an end to worker action.”
As this column is being written on October 1, postal workers are on a recently called a strike across Canada The BC General Employees Union (BCGEU), which represents the bulk of unionized public servants in BC, is back in the streets after the employer turned what was supposed to be a negotiating session into a cheap political stunt by arriving three hours late to the negotiation and tabling offers only minimally different from those already rejected by the union.
Despite the widespread propaganda that portrays public sector workers as overpaid and lazy, the facts don’t support this insulting version. As the BCGEU points out in a recent release: “The average wage in B.C. has increased by 40% since 2016, while public service wages have risen by just 27% during the same period.” And even The Globe and Mail, which no one could mistake for a serious friend of labour, published an essay two years ago arguing for higher pay for civil servants.
The author argued that:
“Canadians loathe spending money on our civil servants, be they bureaucrats or politicians. But the alternative – the flight of our best talent from the public sector – is worse. Competitive salaries and flexible remote arrangements are necessary for these jobs to compete. If Canadians want quality services, we have to pay for them. And that starts with the people doing the work.”
This opinion is consistent with that taken by civil service unions like BCGEU and Canadian Union of Postal Workers. For example, Paul Finch, President of BCGEU observed that:
“The provincial government returned to the bargaining table this week with an offer of just 2% per year over two years-totaling only 4%. The government’s offer remains below inflation, and it does nothing to close the wage gap faced by public service workers. The average wage in B.C. has increased by 40% since 2016, while public service wages have risen by just 27% during the same period. The BCGEU is on strike to close that 13.4-point gap and keep up with the cost of living. Nearly 30% of public service workers now rely on a second job to make ends meet.”
The BC based, right wing Fraser Institute unsurprisingly, takes a different view. In a 2024 paper, Fraser Institute researchers claim that public servants are already getting wages and benefits better than average private sector workers. They say:
“Available data on non-wage benefits suggest that the government sector enjoys an advantage over the private sector. For example, 86.7% of government workers are covered by a registered pension plan compared to 21.8% of private-sector workers. Of those covered by a registered pension plan, 91.5% of government workers enjoyed a defined-benefit pension compared to 40.7% of private-sector workers. In addition, government workers retire earlier than those in the private-sector—about 2.2 years earlier on average—and were much less likely to lose their jobs: 0.6% in the public sector compared to 3.2% in the private sector. Moreover, full-time workers in the government sector lost more work time in 2024 for personal reasons (15.7 days on average) than their private sector counterparts (9.3 days).”
While many of us would see these alleged differences as evidence that public sector unions have been successful at improving the lives of their members and that the ruling class has been more successful in the private sector at breaking unions and driving down real wages, the Fraser Institute wonks cite them as support for their argument, put forward over many years of Fraser Institute screeds, that public sector workers are overpaid and lazy.
The Fraser Institute, of course, is not the only business-funded think tank making this anti-worker argument and slandering civil servants. This toxic nonsense is everywhere, showing up in op-ed columns in mainstream media, in the mouths of angry talk show hosts, and right-wing politicians. The intent is to split workers against each other by suggesting that civil servants are the villains in the cost-of-living challenges faced by many workers in the private sector, and to oppose any moves by unions to improve the lives of all workers. This anti-worker propaganda has long been a mainstay of the Right’s war on workers across the developed world. For example, as reported by In These Times in 2011 the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) heard one speaker, Tom McCabe, enthuse that:
“I think it’s okay right now to talk about unions and tell the truth about unions. And I think the public is starting to understand.”
McCabe led the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) for two decades. The night before, McCabe received CPAC’s Ronald Reagan Award for his activism.
“It’s thanks, of course, to the think tanks on this panel…You can say stuff now in Washington, in New Jersey, any liberal state, that you could not say ten years ago,” he said.
As evidenced by the current effusions from the Fraser Institute cited above, the axis of evil represented by ruling class groups and the right wing think tanks they fund is alive and well and spreading confusion and anti-worker canards wherever they can. If they succeed in further weakening our unions and other grassroots organizations, they will continue to feed on us and on the work we do. Perhaps we need to add another slogan to our repertoire, “Workers of the world, unite. We have nothing to lose but the BS being rained down on us from above.”
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