A woman died today in New York City who was the last survivor of a fire in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. This fire killed many factory workers in this terrible sweatshop. The reason I tell this story is that in 1991 in Hamlet, North Carolina a fire occurred at another factory for the third time from the same cause. The owners of this factory used to lock the doors from the outside because they were concerned factory workers were stealing chicken byproducts. The workers were stealing the gizzards and the wingtips to take home and make soup. This was a right to work state so the women were very poorly paid. This factory caught on fire for the third time and 128 women died scratching at the doors trying to get out. That happened in 1991.
Where unions are not given the ability to function and prosper and do their job, we see standards slide as in the right to work states which is what the Reform Party is promoting here. In the free states of the United States where free collective bargaining is still allowed and not legislated away, we see much higher social conditions on just about every measurement we can think of, whether it is wages, money spent on education or health care issues.
I think we should pause and reflect when we are engaged in such an unsavoury pastime as taking away worker rights. I think it is fitting that we take pause and reflect on what unions have done over the years to make our communities better places to live.
I want to dwell a bit on the actual case in point which is the strike that is about to be terminated by this back to work legislation. I have been getting a lot of letters sent to my office from public service alliance members. These are personal letters, some handwritten, from people encouraging and thanking the NDP for all we are trying to do to keep their issue alive.
These people are reminding us about the issues of not just the pay zones but the differences in pay between the public sector and the private sector. It used to be that it was almost comparable. As a carpenter I could work in the private sector for $20 an hour and I could also work in the public sector for a comparable amount of dough. Now that spread is $5, $6, $7 an hour different because wages have been frozen for so many years. Workers have fallen way behind.
Workers can take some comfort that even though they got a lower wage they had job security. Over the last couple of years there is no more job security. Everybody in the public sector is working with that sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. They are wondering who is next.
After that added insult to injury there was always the comfort level that they got lousy wages and not much in the way of job security but there was a reasonable pension plan. People could feel good about that. On April 15 the President of the Treasury Board announced he was going to loot the surplus of the pension plan, take the $30 billion surplus out of the pension plan and use it for God knows what.
I would think there is a huge political price this party will pay if it has the unmitigated gall to dip its hands into that pension plan and try to take that surplus. That is workers' money. It is deferred wages. It is paid to workers for their purposes. If there is any surplus, it should go to indexing the pension to raise benefits or give it back to the workers who actually deserve that.
When I talk about a political price, the irony is that an awful lot of public sector workers vote Liberal, which has been a long history and tradition of public sector workers. Everybody knows that Tory times are tough times. They got the heck kicked out of them by the Mulroney government and they were kind of relieved when the current Liberal government took over in 1993. I am sure they were optimistic that they would get some kind of break. I think a lot of them worked very hard to put that government in.
What do they get for it? Looted pension plans, about a third of the civil service laid off, kicked right out of a job, frozen wages for six, seven, eight years. Thanks a lot. I think they are fed up. I think the some 150,000 members of the public service alliance are justifiably angry and there will be a political price. The next time around I do not think the Liberals can count on that kind of support.
It hurts me as a trade unionist to even have this debate, especially in the middle of the night. It hurts all of us to be here, I suppose. It is such an unnecessary thing. As I said at the start of my remarks, we should not be here at all. If the government had the money to sweeten the offer tonight, why did it not have it on March 12 and prevent this whole disaster, this whole two or three weeks of misery that it put people through?
We cost out what the spread is. They were only three percentage points apart when the talks fell apart on March 12. Between the union position and the government position it was 3.1%, $7.8 million a year. They have lost more than that by closing down the ports and with the impact of the strike in that period of time. It is does not add up from a cost point of view.
Another matter is the way this whole back to work legislation has been treated. This is the package, 534 pages without an executive summary, without even any reference to what the wage increase was to be. People have to go up with this book the size of a Manhattan phone book to their offices to try to tabulate and calculate the offer that we are being asked to vote on. When government members give us a book that size and then tell us we are to have time allocation and closure, not only is there no time to debate this properly, there certainly was not time to go through it.
We think this collective agreement that forms part of the back to work legislation is probably loaded with all kinds of, if not deliberate changes that we cannot find, omissions that we do not have time to find, omissions such as the one on page 3 that in the English translation contemplates same sex couples and in the French translation says that a common law spouse is a union between a man and a woman or talks about people of the opposite sex. That is just one example we found without digging too hard. We found that in the first five minutes. How many more errors are there in this pile of stuff here that we are forced to deal with?
The real issue now is why will the government not accept the conciliation officer's report for the table 4 corrections officers. Why are we voting on back to work legislation for corrections officers who are not on strike? They have not lost a day's time. They are not on strike. How do we vote people back to work who are not even out on strike? It is ludicrous.
The question we need the Treasury Board minister to answer is why he will not accept his own conciliation board recommendations for settling the table 4 talks.
