Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join this debate. I have been extremely excited to listen to my colleagues over the last number of hours that I have been here.
Let me take a different tack in this debate and talk about the terminology that we interchange among ourselves. Sometimes we need a hand in understanding what it is. We do not use it in a wilful way. We simply repeat it over and over again. We think we are actually using it in an appropriate way or are helping to clarify.
In her remarks last evening, the Minister continually talked about a strike, when actually that strike ended when the lockout started. I think she came to recognize that.
We on this side recognize that indeed there was a rotational strike. There is no doubt about that. There was a rotational strike. That is a fact. No one denies that. We have to use the proper language and recognize that this has ended and we now have a lockout.
A lockout is a totally different thing altogether in labour relations. It is a different thing altogether. We now have to recognize that it is no longer a rotational strike that went from place to place, some small places and some large, and then moved on. We are in a full-scale lockout. The entire system is shut down.
In the Canadian labour act, only one side can do a lockout. That is the employer. Workers can never lock out themselves. They can withdraw their labour, but they can never actually go and put a padlock on the gate. They cannot do that.
The other piece that has gone back and forth over the morning is this term “union boss”. Let us explore who is a union boss and what a union boss really looks like. The terminology of “union boss” suggests that somehow that person is the boss of the workers represented by this particular individual.
Actually, the pyramid needs to be inverted. It is those workers who hire the union boss. They democratically elect the union boss. Every three or four years, or in some cases five years depending on the organization, the workers can get rid of their so-called union boss if he or she did not do what they asked him or her to do.
The same thing happens to us. Some of us are back from the 40th Parliament to the 41st Parliament and some of us are not. Clearly their bosses, their constituents, said, “Thank you for your time. I no longer wish to have you here. Please move away. I'm choosing someone else.” In the labour movement, that is indeed what we do in many circumstances.
Let me put a face to the union boss. The members who are sitting here today and looking at me are looking at an ex-union boss. I do not have two heads. I did not grow horns. I represented workers who elected me to do a specific task on their behalf, which was to bargain collective agreements, and that is what I did.
When we were finished bargaining collective agreements, I brought it back to them and said, “Here is the best that we have done. We think this is good. Would you like to vote on it? Tell me yes or no.”
Sometimes they said yes and occasionally they said no. What did it mean when they said no? It meant the union boss went back to work. He or she works for the workers. The workers do not work for the union boss.
The terminology we use can sometimes start to impinge upon people's reputations and give a connotation that is not necessarily true. I would ask the members, when we talk about and use interchangeable terms, to actually use the terms in an appropriate way.
There is a boss at Canada Post, and that is the CEO. Workers do not elect the CEO. The CEO comes to them. The workers do not get an opportunity to say, “You have done a rotten job. It is time to move on.” They do not have that democratic right. However, inside their union they have a democratic right to get rid of their “boss” simply through the electoral process.
I would simply say that sometimes we all use improper terminology. I am not suggesting that we all are not guilty of it. From time to time on this side of the House we are guilty of using terminology that maybe we should think about when we are actually doing those sorts of things.
Let us get past the terminology and talk about the fact that these new workers are about to receive less than the present-day workers under this agreement and the offer that comes from management. Who are they? In my community, they are actually not young people. Many of my colleagues here are younger, and have expressed the sense of what it would be like to be young workers who end up making less than those they work beside.
In my community, a lot of these workers are over at John Deere. They are at Atlas. They are workers who are in the midpoint or sometimes late point of their careers who have to find other work because the places they work for have closed.
Those places are gone. John Deere packed up a little over 18 months ago and is gone. Atlas closed down a number of years ago. We have seen the literal gutting of the manufacturing sector in my riding, just as we have seen across this country.
Here is what happens. When people get a job at Canada Post, they do not start as full-time employees. They start as casual employees. They are told to stay home, that they will be called if somebody calls in sick. Stay by the phone, they are told. So there they are, workers hoping to finally get a job at Canada Post, and they stick by their phones in case a fellow worker calls in sick and they are needed for the day. They get a call and are told, “Come on in today.” Then, if they stay there long enough, they might become part-timers.
Meanwhile, they still have all the responsibilities they had before. Young people have responsibilities, but I am talking about folks who look more like me and less like the young folks we know out there, like my children, who are in their mid-twenties. These folks still have mortgages to pay and children to raise, and yet they find that they are still casual employees or maybe, finally, part-timers. Then, when they are about to take that final step and become full-time employees, they are told, under this collective agreement, to just take less. They will work beside others who are doing exactly the same job, but they are told to take less.
So if they are taking less, why would we allow folks to work side by side doing the same thing? Is the corporation saying that it values one employee more than another as far as rewards are concerned? Whether that will be through the pay scale, because the pay scale is going to be reduced for new hires, talking about the sense that somehow--