FLOATING IDEAS FOR SINKING UNIONS.

The Labour Day Parade of Bad Policy Initiatives rolled through the media last weekend, an annual event that this year floated out ideas that seemed particularly unhinged. But they did have a purpose: Saving the union movement.

Parade Float No. 1: The Globe and Mail reported that one of Ottawa’s NAFTA negotiating positions includes a demand that Washington pass federal legislation “stopping state governments from enacting right-to-work legislation.” The story said this information came from “a source,” who also leaked the news that the White House had not agreed to this Canadian demand.

No kidding. The pathetic surprise of this story is that the Trudeau government and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland would table such an absurd demand. Well, maybe not a surprise. This is a fake negotiating position, not an actual attempt to change U.S. labour laws that make it difficult for unions to organize and collect dues from workers who don’t want to join unions. What it is really is a sop to Jerry Dias, leader of Unifor, and other union bosses.

Di as claims that U.S. right-to-work laws keep U.S. wages low and ultra-competitive with Canadian workers. Canada is losing jobs to the U.S. and Mexico, he says — without acknowledging the implied counter-argument: Are Canada’s protected union powers making Canadian workers uncompetitive? Of course they are, which leads to… Parade Float No. 2: Labour Day also saw the launch of a new Canadian Labour Congress campaign: “Canada’s unions are marking this year’s Labour Day with the launch of a campaign calling for universal prescription drug coverage for all Canadians,” the CLC announced.

CLC President Hassan Yussuff, whose views the CBC gave much prominence to throughout Labour Day, said “3.5-million Canadians can’t afford to fill their prescriptions. Nobody should have to choose between paying for groceries or the medication they need.”

The CLC did not immediately provide any detail on the cost of introducing universal prescription drug coverage. Nor did it say how big a tax increase would be needed to fund such a plan. Nor did it mention that universal drug coverage would be beneficial to unions that are losing their ability to maintain and negotiate health-insurance coverage in the public and private sector.

The pharmacare move is a rerun of last year’s self-serving CLC pension operation. Last May, Yussuff launched an ad campaign to raise awareness about “the need for a universal expansion of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP).” As with drug coverage, there was a pension gap. “With 600,000 Canadian seniors living in poverty, and 11 million workers lacking a workplace pension plan, retirement is something all Canadians need to start thinking about today. Even for employees with workplace pension plans, affording a modest retirement can be a struggle.”

Ottawa and the provinces subsequently agreed to an expansion of the CPP that would, among other things, help relieve the union pension crisis, especially the federal employee pension schemes that are unfunded to the tune of $150 billion. No wonder the Canadian Union of Public Employees was a big backer of CPP expansion.

The CPP benefits expansion — as with pharmacare — requires increases in taxes. According to a Fraser Institute analysis, the increase in pension premiums, spread out over several years, “will more than wipe out the benefits” of the Trudeau government’s key tax talking point, the famous middle-class income-tax cut that Finance Minister Bill Morneau keeps referring to as background justification for tightening tax rules for private corporations and small-businesses.

Parade Float No. 3: The most bizarre of our three Labour Day proposals came from three industrial-relations/ labourmanagement academic sat three universities: Richard Chaykowski at Queen’ s; Maurice Maze roll eat Ryerson; and Rafael Gomez at the University of Toronto. In a published commentary, they wrote that while we all enjoyed the Labour Day long weekend “we should also turn our collective thinking to how best to ensure that our labour policies serve and advance the interests of Canadian workers.”

Collective thinking is a dangerous business, especially when practised by labour academics. They start by identifying an alleged problem: “the overwhelming majority of workers in the Canadian private sector are, for the most part, lacking a provider of voice and representation at the workplace.” In other words, the vast majority of private-sector employees have no union. And they probably don’t want one. That’s why privatesector union membership has dropped from 30 per cent to 16 per cent since the 1980s.

What to do? Change Canada’s labour-relations laws, say the academics, to allow individual workers in different companies or industries — including small businesses — to form employee associations that would cover multiple employers. Thinking collectively, they propose “strengthening” the ability of individual workers to join “single or multiple-issue employee groups that could represent all or just a fraction of the workers in a workplace.”

Part-time workers at a flooring company in Sudbury could join Pilates instructors from Hamilton and McDonald’s employees in Toronto in an association seeking sick leave, triple pay for overtime, or increased health benefits. The academics say that “At a minimum, any employee group that decides to form an employee association (which could be aided by the provision of ‘ boilerplate’ union constitutions) should have the potential protection of unjust dismissal.” Labour boards would have the authority to reinstate workers fired for attempting to form such associations.

They describe this as an “in-between model of employee representation” — in between union-free and unionized. But it also provides “a stepping stone for workers who may one day choose to organize and certify in the traditional way.”

This product of collective thinking, the big- labour campaigns for protective trade deals, their billion-dollar pension schemes and their pharmacare plans, are designed for one purpose: to keep the sinking union movement afloat.