Mr. Speaker, I am greatly honoured to stand in this place and speak about one of the most important and fundamental issues facing our country, the relationship people have with one another in the workplace.
I often think the role of government should be to reduce coercion. If we are a free democratic society that believes in the freedom of individuals, then the government should have a role to reduce the lack of freedom certain individuals have in the workplace.
I have had a varied work experience in my short lifetime. Having worked in locations with and without union agreements, it is not at all clear to me that the best place to work is where there is a union shop. There are pluses on both sides.
I remember fondly decades ago being a student and working as a truck driver. Members can see I picked up some of the truck driver characteristics and never lost them. I had a wonderful experience working for a Saskatchewan firm. I was able to earn $1 an hour and I made more money than I knew how to use. Educational expenses were reasonable in those days and I went year to year with a balanced budget.
I came out at the end without a debt. I had only my taxes to pay when I got my first job. That was my way of repaying the student loan which I did not have but which I am paying to this day, gladly so because my education provided me with a greater income and has provided me with the ability to pay higher taxes. I gladly pay them, to a limit.
I worked in a non-union shop. We were paid by the hour at the going rate. I was paid less than most of the people I worked with because I was part time student help. Some of the others in our shop were paid more. I benefited greatly from the fact this was not a union shop. I tried very hard. Since I came from a farm in Saskatchewan I learned to work hard and never to complain about long hours. As a result I ingratiated myself to the boss.
Since he had the flexibility not to give all the trips to the guys with the seniority, he gave me some of those long trips. He knew I could be counted on since I was one of those strange people who did not drink. He knew that if I went on a trip I would find my way home again. As a result I got priority over some of the others.
If that were a union shop there would have been trouble. The union would have said that another individual had seniority and should be able to get the job. Our business did well. I say our business because I felt a part of it. I was a good contributing member of the business. I did my best and we had a good relationship, a win-win relationship.
I contrast that with other situations in which I have worked where the union was involved and where I got the short shrift as part time help. The union was not there to help me at all. The union was there simply to enforce a pecking order which had been established over time and gave no one the chance to move up in the ranks unless somebody older and more experienced died or left the business. That does not provide for high motivation.
I am not anti-union. An examination of my work history will reveal that I have been a union steward, I was the president of a local in a place I worked. We were forced members of the union. I remember being greatly offended by the fact that the union to which we were forced to belong actually used a portion of our union dues for political party contributions. I will not mention which political party it was but members can probably figure it out. Unions have a symbiotic relationship with at least one of the parties in this country, a relationship I do not particularly agree with.
The union was able to have a rule that the place where I worked required that I belong to the union, it required that I give it money and it required that I support a political party which is 180° out of sync with my true beliefs.
I think other people would feel just as bad. I sincerely hope those union members who are strong supporters, for example of the NDP, would be very offended if that union decided to give a strong political donation to the Reform Party. I hope they would be offended and would say “you cannot do that, that is my money”.
The point I am making is that we need to have more individual freedom. I think that when the marketplace prevails we will find that a very good economic balance is reached between employers and employees 99.9% of the time.
I remember, again looking back before we were forced members of the union at the place where I worked, I was an instructor at a technical institute. It was run by the Government of Alberta. It was before the union there was a forced issue. We did not have a union when I first started there. One year the institute had trouble getting instructors. The economy was booming and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology had the policy of trying to get the best. That is I suppose how I got there. I was just wondering whether anyone was listening. It had trouble getting qualified instructors. In the middle of the year without any negotiations suddenly there was an announcement of a pay increase.
Later on we had a union. The same issue came up. The employer said they wanted to open the contract so they could increase the salary schedule. The union said they could not do it because there was a union contract which goes for two years and it could not be opened unless they opened the whole thing. It would not just open the money clauses. To me that is so totally absurd. It is a total infringement of individual freedoms.
I have just given a couple of examples of when one is forced into a union where one loses one's freedom, loses bargaining position and to a certain degree loses benefits.
I am going to give the other side as well. I have also seen situations where individuals have not been fairly treated. The contract has not been fairly applied to them for one reason or another or they have been mistreated by supervisors. I was involved as the president of the local branch of the union. I went to bat. I think even if a person is innocent he deserves the right to a fair and prompt hearing, trial or whatever we want to call it. So we supported each other that way. There is some merit in that.
Do not read into it that I am anti-union. What I want to do is make unions more democratic.
In this bill we have before us today unions are strengthened. To me that is upsetting a balance. It is an intrusion of an unnatural force in the relationship between employers and employees.
I have been involved in a number of cases where we have had contract disputes. After we were forced members of the union for a number of years it was decided that our institute, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, would go to a board of governors. I was honoured by my fellow staff members, 750 of them, to be selected as the founding president of the academic staff association at NAIT. One of the first things we did was bargained away our right to strike because we found that nobody wants the right to strike. If the right questions are asked they will say emphatically “I do not want the right to strike. I do not want the right to be without a job and without an income. What I want is a fair income. What I want is to be treated fairly”. That is what they really want.
Unfortunately the means to the end, the strike process has sort of juxtaposed itself into it and now there are members of the union and the NDP who claim that it is an indistinguishable right to belong to a union and to strike when that is not their primary purpose. Their primary purpose is to achieve their monetary and job security goals.
I found that in my work as academic president when we made arrangements to have a dispute resolution mechanism, with time lines and arbitration, everything worked out a lot better.
I hope that I will get another opportunity to speak on this topic when it comes up for third reading.