Pat Martin

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 1st, 2002]

Return to sender.

[Canada Post, April 25th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Canada Post has just reported its seventh consecutive profitable year, doubling its net income over the previous year, yet it continues to deny the most basic labour rights to thousands of rural route mail couriers. These workers have no EI, no CPP and no health and safety legislation and they are denied the right to free collective bargaining.

Will the minister for Canada Post finally remedy this historic injustice and will he agree that rural route mail couriers should be entitled to all the rights that all ordinary workers in Canada enjoy?

[Supply, April 25th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Windsor--St. Clair for a very knowledgeable speech. I know he lives with the reality of the downturn in the auto industry representing the area of Windsor.

He raised some very specific points, steps the government could take if it truly valued the auto industry as much as it claims. One of the things the hon. member mentioned had a dollar value or cost factor to it. He talked about the right to work states, the anti-union and non-union states in the deep south of the U.S. where a state like Alabama is offering a $400 million subsidy for a $500 million plant and wonders if we can play that kind of a game.

Would the hon. member agree that at least some intervention, as a gesture of how serious this downturn is, could come from the enormous surplus that the government has built up in the EI fund? I do not think there is a direct connection but I would point out that the EI fund is showing a surplus of $750 million per month. Every month workers' money and business money goes into that surplus fund. In a context like that would the hon. member agree that $400 million to create all those jobs may not be such a bad bargain?

[Supply, April 25th, 2002]

Where?

[Supply, April 25th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the previous speaker for his thoughts. However in terms of real ideas there was only one theme coming from the Alliance member: tax cuts. If one had a toothache the Canadian Alliance would probably recommend a tax cut to cure it.

Does the hon. member agree that there are specific active measures the government could take if it was truly committed to the health and well-being of the auto industry in Canada? Does he agree that the auto industry should get the same kind of interest the aerospace industry gets in terms of the Technology Partnerships Canada or TPC loans which flow so freely to all things to do with the aerospace industry?

I know the hon. member will call it corporate welfare, but when the money is available and the Minister of Industry has it in his power to sprinkle industries with largesse, would he not take the auto industry as seriously and recommend a $500 million per year intervention by Technology Partnerships Canada?

[Petitions, April 25th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition signed by thousands of first nations citizens in the province of Manitoba.

The petitioners reject the first nations governance initiative put forward by the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. They suspect it to be nothing more than a thinly veiled effort to either extinguish or diminish their treaty rights. They point out further that the minister's consultation process has been a sham and they serve notice that they will present more names on these petitions than the minister did in his consultation process.

[Petitions, April 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise today to present a petition which contains literally thousands of names of first nations citizens in the province of Manitoba. The petitioners reject the first nations governance initiative put forward by the minister of Indian affairs. They believe it to be nothing more than a thinly veiled guise to diminish or even put out their treaty rights.

The petitioners point out that the so-called consultative process has been a sham. They point out that they intend to submit more signatures of people who oppose the initiative than of people who were involved in the consultative process.

[Canada Business Corporations Act, April 24th, 2002]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-448, an act to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to introduce this private member's bill which seeks to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act to require the auditor to divulge to shareholders whether he or she is providing other, non-audit services to the same company.

This is an issue of increasing interest after the Enron scandal which was one of the factors in the collapse of Enron. We do not believe the auditor should provide non-audit services to the same company he or she is auditing. Bill C-448 would oblige the auditor to divulge in his or her annual report whether that was the practice.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

(Bill C-42. On the Order: Government Orders:)

Second reading and reference to Standing Committee on Transport and Government Operations of Bill C-42, an act to amend certain acts of Canada, and to enact measures for implementing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, in order to enhance public safety

[Shorter Work Week, April 23rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank all those who chose to take part in the debate, especially most recently the hon. member for Elk Island who shared his views with us, as well as the hon. parliamentary secretary and the member from the Bloc.

I am pleased with much of the interest shown. I raised this issue as a policy issue that the government should be addressing. We hope that it would be a long term goal, to work toward a more fair and equitable redistribution of the country's bounty and benefits. That means monetary compensation but it also means sharing in the benefit that I have pointed out, that shorter work time equals a quality of life issue for many Canadians.

There is nothing to stop motivated people from working longer hours if their family life permits or if their job demands but as a policy point of view there is no good reason to be going in the wrong direction in terms of the average work week for Canadians. If anything, Canadians are working longer.

The member from Nanaimo mentioned that it is not really a problem because the average person works only 42.5 hours per week. I challenge those figures. Our figures are closer to 46 or 47 hours per week as the average in Canada. In fact in some households there are two people working, so the average household is actually working 60 to 80 hours a week in order to enjoy the same quality of life that one single bread earner used to provide for an average middle class family living.

The analogy I used and will use again is that if ordinary working people gained in the productivity gains the same way CEO compensation went up, the average carpenter would be making $250 an hour and the minimum wage would be $50 an hour. There is more than one way to reflect that compensation. One is to have more time off for leisure.

The Donner commission, a federal government advisory group, noted that there was a major split between those in the workforce who worked long hours for good pay, and were frankly stressed by that, and Canadians who had too little work or had to work two or three part time jobs pooled together to make one reasonable income. Many places in Europe have negotiated shorter work weeks and implemented a combination of policy legislation and negotiations, and have benefited in terms of job creation and increased productivity, not reduced productivity.

I would like to point out some of the things the government could do in respect of policy. The federal government could, without intruding on any jurisdiction, do away with some of the perverse incentives that lead to long hours and overtime. We can change the way payroll taxes, like employment insurance and CPP, are structured by taking away the cap. In other words, if people were to pay those premiums on every hour worked it seems to me employers would probably think twice about having someone work the longer hours.

That is the same principle as overtime. The reason we implemented overtime was not so workers would earn more money but as a disincentive so that employers would not be compelled to cause their workers to work longer hours and, therefore, open up opportunities for other people.

I know this is something the Alliance would object to but I would suggest a tax on all overtime hours be levied on employers. If it were made a revenue neutral thing this could be combined with lower overall payroll taxes. In fact it would be revenue neutral and the employer would not be paying more tax. The disincentive would be working people longer and the incentive would be providing them with a more reasonable work week.

Exemption on the first $10,000 of annual earnings is another thing we have been told would help. An incentive package to reward firms that create jobs would perhaps motivate them to hire more people to do the same amount of work.

I have enjoyed the debate and the input from all groups, and I appreciate the opportunity. However in actual fact working harder is not working for many Canadians. A shorter work week should be an objective of the government.

[Shorter Work Week, April 23rd, 2002]

moved:

That, in the opinion of this House, the federal government should take all public policy and legislative steps necessary to encourage the adoption of a shorter work week and reduced work time in the public sector, federally regulated industries, and the private sector as a whole.

Mr. Speaker, my private member's motion finds its origins in the simple fact that for many Canadians, working harder is not working. In spite of views to the contrary, in 2002 we find ourselves in the situation where rather than working shorter hours and enjoying more leisure time, people are working harder to try and maintain the same standard of living. Canadians are not just working harder, they are working longer and longer hours.

The motion I put forward that the federal government should take public policy steps and legislative steps to encourage the adoption of a shorter work week is really a very pluralistic concept. By no means do I want to trivialize the argument by asking that government simply to intervene and dictate this. I hope to have time to put forward realistic solutions that would lead us over time to a reduced work week, which is in fact a sharing in the nation's wealth and prosperity that we have seen develop in recent years.

This issue is at the very top of the minds of many Canadians. I bring it forward because there is a growing realization that a person's workplace situation can become a major stressor for them. With the changing workplace environment and with the changing pressures Canadians face, it becomes a health issue for many Canadians and disproportionately for many women who are struggling work longer. Women are traditionally lower paid and may find themselves in the situation of working two or three part time jobs to pull together a reasonable living. They also face a disproportionate burden in terms of being the primary caregiver in the home, be they single parents or married with children. It is increasingly the case that they are part of the sandwich generation where they are caring for youth at home and for elders in their home, be they their own parents, their in-laws or other family members.

Back in the 1950s and the 1960s all the futurists and experts were predicting that with the technological revolution we would not know what to do with all our free time. Most of us thought the future would be something like the Jetsons on TV. George Jetson would pretty much have his feet up most of the time, when he was not flying around in his neat little space car.

Our biggest problem was going to be how we would fill our day, what we would do with all of our leisure time. Recreation and leisure were to become growth industries. As we all know, the truth is anything but. In spite of huge gains in productivity and technological change, Canadians find they are working harder and more hours than ever and they are wondering what went wrong with this dream of an idea, with this concept. For many of them working harder is not working for them.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, a one income family with one person working 40 hours a week afforded a reasonably good middle class standard of living. Something went terribly wrong.

The fact is that 40 years after this promise of a utopian dream of a land of milk and honey, Canadians are working longer hours, not less. Instead of one good job supporting a family, most Canadian families have two wage earners. Often three or more part time jobs are pieced together to earn a living.

Canadian workers are not sharing in the incredible advances made in corporate profits and increased productivity. If working people enjoyed the same gains in the last 15 years as have CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, a carpenter would be making $250 an hour and the minimum wage would be $50 an hour. Obviously that is not the way the system works.

Going further back in history, before the turn of the century the average work week was six days of ten or even twelve hours a day. It is hard to imagine, but in a picture of squalor out of Dickens, workers went from the day's drudgery to the evening's despair often without ever seeing the light of day. They would go to work before the sun came up and return home in the darkness as well.

It was one of the labour movement's great struggles to gradually chip away at those inhumane hours of work. The Knights of Labour started a campaign as early as the 1860s in North America.

In the 1880s Samuel Gompers of the united cigar rollers union and Peter J. McGuire of the carpenters union became the founders and first leaders of the American Federation of Labour. McGuire became known as the father of the eight hour day. The popular theme of the campaign was “As long as there is one person who wants work and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long”. It was as simple as that.

Many of the courageous women in the textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts were of Acadian background and came from New Brunswick and Cape Breton. Many also came from the rural Quebec countryside. In the 1890s these women took up the struggle for the eight hour day in the famous bread and roses strike. They eloquently made the case that some semblance of quality of life had to go with the bread on the table they earned in their daily work. The famous hymn they sang to commemorate the strike included the lines “our lives will not be sweated”, ”ten that toil while one reposes”, and “give us bread, but give us roses”.

Eight hours a day for work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for rest, relaxation or to cultivate one's mind by whatever hobby or leisure pursuit one saw fit became the rallying cry of the labour movement. After 40 years of strikes, battles and bloody riots like the Haymarket riots in Chicago where workers were gunned down by hired company goons, labour finally won the eight hour day.

However even then the average working week consisted of six rather than five eight hour days, so it was a gradual and slow process. It was only after great struggle and perseverance that Saturday became half a work day. At noon on Saturday beer wagons began going by job sites and dropping off wooden kegs of beer. This is where the song Roll Out the Barrel came from. After more years of sacrifice and struggle the work week of five eight hour days finally became a reality. I used to have a bumper sticker that read “Unions: the folks that gave us the weekend”.

Members should have heard the objections from industry as this progress was being made. Business leaders howled, shrieked, gnashed their teeth and rent their garments. They said we could not have this. They said idle hands did the devil's work. They said factories and businesses could never survive an eight hour work day. They said the economic stability of the country would collapse. Exactly the same refrain was heard when people tried to stamp out child labour around the same time.

The eight hour work day finally became a reality. Working people made many advances and gains in their working lives that ultimately created the most important element of the North American economy: a healthy middle class of consumers, our most stable feature on which we rely for the economic prosperity we enjoy today.

I should note in our history lesson that in 1933 the U.S. senate proposed a bill that would have gone beyond the 40 hour work week. It would have made 30 hours the official American work week. Anything more would have been overtime. The bill failed by only a few votes. President Roosevelt opposed it by arguing that his New Deal job creation program was a better way to battle unemployment than a 30 hour work week.

However the plan was seriously contemplated to the point that in the same year cereal magnate A.K. Kellogg, although known as a capitalist who ran his company with an iron fist, proved to be a pioneer with a radical idea. He introduced the Kellogg six hour day, believing that leisure time and not economic growth without end represented the true crowning achievement of capitalism. Kellogg offered his workers 35 hours of pay for a 30 hour work week. He also built parks, summer camps, nature centres et cetera.

The plan ultimately created 400 new jobs in Battle Creek, Michigan where his plants were located. It was an unexpected byproduct of his altruism that productivity spiked so rapidly that within two years, instead of having his workers put in 30 hours a week for 35 hours of pay he raised it to 30 hours a week for 40 hours of pay. His workers were quoted as saying they were not worn out when they left work and had energy to do other things.

The last thing I would point out is that what got us to where we are today is that in the post war era we made a labour compact with capital. Labour and capital sat down at the table and said that to put an end to the wildcat strikes and the labour unrest that typified the labour movement as we fought for these historic gains, they would make a deal that when profits and productivity went up workers wages would go up in a corresponding way. It was more than a handshake; it was an official labour accord in the post war era.

That compact has been broken as we can plainly see. Even though the standard of living has gone up since the post war era, we surely have not shared in the enormous prosperity and wealth that the business community has enjoyed in that same period of time.

With that bit of history, I would like to point out that elsewhere in the world people are catching on to the idea of reduced work time as a positive, not a negative, and as a way to boost productivity not just the redistribution of wealth and benefits to employees.

With reunification, Germany was faced with enormous unemployment challenges as East Germany and West Germany joined forces. Volkswagen and BMW adopted a 30 hour work week with no loss in pay. Their experience was that productivity spiked again and for obvious reasons. With a 30 hour work week, not only were employees given more leisure time but they were given more time to do personal things. They did not have to take a day off to go to the dentist during the work week. They did not have to take a day off for child care issues and so on. All those things led to the expansion and enhancement of the productivity of the company to the point where there was a net gain.

As time becomes an issue, I should talk about France. In 1998 France moved to the 35 hour work week in a very gradual and negotiated way. It was not a heavy-handed imposition by the state. Through meetings with business, labour and government in a tripartite way, it introduced a 35 hour work week with the immediate creation of 280,000 jobs. In the statistics I have, from the year 2000 another 250,000 jobs have been created by reducing the work week from 37.5 hours to 35 hours. I call that a success not just for all the personal reasons of working people who wanted more family time or wanted their hectic schedule to be less stressful, but also for the creation of many hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In more local examples, Bell Canada in Ontario and Quebec adopted the 36 hours over a four day work week and saved 2,000 jobs. OPEU, Office and Professional Employees' International Union, which represented the workers in my office for the many years while I was running the carpenters union, over a period of five years negotiated itself down from a 37 hour work week to a 30 hour work week with no loss in pay. Instead of negotiating a 3% raise in pay, it took 1% in cash and 2% in reduced time. Gradually over years these people, mostly women on the technical staff in my office, were working a 30 hour work week. This was a very civilized thing. Many who had children could stay at home to see their children off to school and then be at work. Later in the day they could be home again at night in time for their children to arrive back from school. I am not saying that was the only reason, but it certainly was one of the benefits that the women in my office enjoyed.

The only example I can find across the country that is going in the opposite direction is the Liberal government in British Columbia. I want to take this opportunity to condemn it in the strongest possible terms. It has introduced a bill which says that overtime kicks in only after 160 hours a month. In other words, an employer can work an employee for two weeks at 80 hours a week without paying any overtime, then hire another person to work another two weeks at 80 hours a week to fill out the other 160 hours. I condemn that. That is wrong-headed, backwards and stupid, if that is a parliamentary term.

There are so many more things I want to share but with the one minute that I have left I would like to look at some ideas that governments could consider in terms of working toward a reduced work week. Governments have the opportunity to influence policy regarding taxation.

I see I have to wrap up. Many of the issues have to do with the penalties currently in place regarding payroll taxes et cetera. Maybe at the end of the hour I will be able to explain some of them.