In the last interview Jack Munro gave before he died Nov. 15, the man — who was, at his peak, one of the most influential labour leaders British Columbia has seen — expressed his frustration.
He told reporter Rod Mickleburgh: “Everybody’s struggling. The world is somewhat upside down. I think we’ve lost some really important values. Too many people have forgotten that it was the labour movement that was able to bring about changes in our society, in our way of life, in our social consciousness. But we’re no longer headed up, we’re headed down.”
Munro’s life and his work in the labour movement spanned that rise and fall.
Last month Robert Reich, the noted American economist and Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, took to the stage of the Orpheum Theatre to make essentially the same point. He told a packed house that it was the growth of the labour movement and the successes that were achieved after the Second World War that created the biggest middle class in history and the re-distribution of wealth that went with it.
The deterioration of those gains and the increasing wealth gap between the top and the rest in our society is the subject of his film Inequality for All.
The Globe and Mail, by the way, is now in the midst of a two-week series called “The Wealth Paradox,” which examines how the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is shaping Canada.
The rise of the labour movement could not have happened without sympathetic government support. And that began with legislation.
In the United States that included the 1935 Wagner Act. It gave workers in the private sector the right to organize and form trade unions. It came in while Franklin D.
Roosevelt was the Democratic president. He led the U.S. through the Great Depression and the Second World War and set in place a series of reforms known as The New Deal.
In Canada we had the Rand Formula. The formula, also referred to as automatic dues check off, came out of settlement to the 1945 strike at the Ford Motor Company in Windsor, Ont. that was arbitrated by Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand. It meant that no employee could opt out of the union simply to avoid paying dues while benefitting from gains including job security and higher wages.
Ironically, 30 years earlier Henry Ford was credited with helping to build the U.S. middle class when he more than doubled his average autoworkers pay to $5 a day and cut the workday to eight hours from nine. For him it meant that he could have three shifts a day in his plants and, most importantly, also to have workers who could afford to buy the cars they were building.
There are a number of factors that reversed the robust status of trade unions. In B.C., automation, which Munro and others supported because it meant better working conditions, also meant fewer forestry jobs. In areas dependent on manufacturing, highly paid union jobs were shipped offshore and replaced with low paid non-union service sector jobs at home.
The prospect of a young man in B.C. leaving high school to work in a mill where he could earn enough to buy a house, a boat, a family where his wife could stay home to care for their children and a secure retirement, simply faded.
All the while relations between governments and organized labour became more hostile. While more women entering the workforce and the increasing number of two-income earning families may have masked the relative loss of economic security for families, union influence diminished.
Reich points out that at its height 30 per cent of the U.S. workforce was organized. Now that is seven per cent.
We have similar declines here if not as great.
Reich notes that while the bottom continues to rise slightly, the top is accelerating to the point where the gap has returned to what we saw almost a century ago. As a result of all of this, it is now unlikely that our children will succeed in achieving what the past few generations have almost taken for granted: they will not be better off than their parents. It is just as unlikely we will soon see union leaders with the influence of Munro.
