Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have almost made it through the whole shift and I have not apologized to anyone yet today, so I would rather not start now. However, I will suggest that it is perhaps this piece of legislation that I find gutless and cowardly and not the member who put it forward.
I am offended by this piece of legislation, personally. I used to be the head of the carpenters union in my home province of Manitoba, and the carpenters union in my industry is the only friend a worker has. The only friend a carpenter has is the union that is looking after his fair wages, his pension plan, his health and safety, his apprenticeship and his training. I started my carpenter apprenticeship indentured to the carpenters union because I could not find a private employer who would sign my apprenticeship documents, and that was the vehicle by which I got my post-secondary education, which is my journeyman carpenter's papers.
I started my career in the asbestos mines, as a labourer. I was 17 years old. Believe me, there was no friend in that mine except for the union too, because we were the ones going to the company and saying “Isn't it true that asbestos is bad for you?” They said, “No, get back to work; this is Canadian asbestos; this is benign asbestos; this asbestos won't kill you”. The only friend a working person has, frankly, is the union.
Let me take this opportunity to use this completely meritless piece of legislation to celebrate some of the contributions the labour movement has in fact made and explain why this war on labour on the left that the neo-conservative right wing zealots and reactionaries are so intent on pursuing is in fact folly economically. There is no business case for smashing the labour movement.
I challenge members to look south to the United States. The United States' greatest strength and greatest asset was a consuming middle class that received fair wages that could feed and sustain a family, which led to consumerism and led to the greatest economic powerhouse the world has ever known. Somehow, in their wisdom, the neo-conservatives during Reaganomics decided they should smash the labour movement. By cowardly, gutless legislation like this, they systematically, by legislation, dropped the unionization rate in the United States from 33% down to 6%. With that went fair wages. With that went the right to organize, the right to free collective bargaining, pension plans and health and welfare benefits. All these things are just a pipe dream now. The American dream is over. If we were to talk to working people in the United States, those lucky enough to have a job, we would find they are earning $8 or $9 an hour with no benefits. In whose best interest is that?
In the short time I have, let me give one illustration of how far we have come and how far we have fallen. This year will be the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. In New York City, in 1912, 700 women were working in a sweatshop in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. A fire started and hundreds of women were killed. That was the impetus of the workplace safety and health movement that led to the cleaning up of workplaces all across the United States, and by extension, all across North America. It was the birth of the trade union movement in the garment industry.
I had 43 garment manufacturers in my riding. I know full well the contribution that UNITE and those unions have made to the safety of those workers. That was a hundred years ago. Then we got cleaned up. We had health and safety provisions, clean workplaces and fewer accidents. Then Reaganomics came along and smashed the labour movement.
In 1995, in Durham, North Carolina, there was a chicken processing plant, non-union of course, with mostly black women working in there. The assembly line would go so fast that, with the number of cuts they made per minute, often they would not even know they had cut themselves until they saw the blood on the floor. A fire started. They had locked the doors from the outside because the women were taking home giblets and pieces of neck and wing tips to make soup with, to supplement the crappy minimum wage they were getting. What happened? They had bolted the door shut from the outside so the women could not steal the goddamn byproducts of the chickens. And what happens? Another fire—