Labouring under an unfair ban
Manitoba to outlaw ‘scab labour’
Here’s a curious line from the Canadian Labour Congress’ statement on Manitoba’s NDP government introducing laws to ban replacement workers: “Workers everywhere should be able to exercise their right to strike without worrying about the threat of scab labour.”
It would be like if Loblaw came out with a statement saying that, “Grocery stores everywhere should be able to exercise their right to inflate food prices without worrying about the threat of Sobeys, Metro, Costco, Walmart and independent grocers.”
Of course, workers who replace striking union members — referred to as “scab labour” — are workers, too, just like Sobeys and Metro are grocery stores. So when the Canadian Labour Congress says “workers everywhere,” they don’t actually mean “workers everywhere.” They mean “unionized workers everywhere.”
And when they say “should be able to exercise their right to strike without worrying about the threat of scab labour,” they mean unionized workers everywhere should be able to go on strike without worrying about competition from other people who might want jobs, as those other people will be banned from competing for those jobs by the government.
Extending the analogy further: Notwithstanding the intense persecution Loblaw faces from grandstanding politicians, you would expect it to have more political power than a small, independent grocer. Similarly, unions have lots of political power and privilege, while potential replacement workers have none. And the unions wield this power via union-friendly governments, like the Manitoba NDP, to oppress less privileged workers.
In public finance, “Director’s law” states that government spending doesn’t generally help the poor, but instead benefits the middle class at the expense of both the very rich, who have the most money to be taxed away, and the very poor, who have the least political power.
The Manitoba NDP puts the same principle to work with its labour relations laws, which benefit politically powerful middle-class unionized workers by oppressing those at the bottom. It is a reality that runs contrary to the myth, emanating from NDP and union headquarters, of labour unions standing up for the little guy.
In addition to banning replacement workers, the NDP proposes to end the requirement for secret-ballot voting to form a union. Instead, unionization will be allowed if a majority of workers at a workplace sign a union card.
“I applaud Premier Kinew’s efforts to restore the streamlining of unionization and workplace democracy,” said the president of the Canadian Labour Congress. To be sure, democracy is much more “streamlined” if you don’t bother having a vote. Whether that still counts as democracy is rather more doubtful.
Years ago, the Manning Centre (now the Canada Strong and Free Network) did research into secret-ballot votes versus card checks. Based on labour board data from 2009 to 2015 from five provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick), out of a sample of 1,057 union certification votes, there were at least 160 cases in which support for unionization dropped by at least five percentage points between the card check (required to trigger a vote) and the actual vote.
And there were at least 81 cases — likely more, the report noted, given the incompleteness of the data from some provinces — in which support for unionization fell by 15 percentage points or more.
Why the drop in support in a secret ballot? One reason is that secret ballots
UNIONS HAVE LOTS OF POLITICAL POWER AND PRIVILEGE.
protect against intimidation by union organizers. Another is that when there is a vote, workers have more of a chance to hear arguments against unionization and consider evidence of its negative effects.
Examples of such evidence include a 2022 study by two MIT economists who analyzed 24 years worth of American data on privatesector unionization and found that, “Unionization decreases an establishment’s employment and likelihood of survival, particularly in manufacturing and other blue-collar and industrial sectors.”
Another study, published in the Journal of Labor Economics in 2021, concluded that, “Unionization substantially decreases payroll, employment, average worker earnings and establishment survival.”
Similarly, a C.D. Howe Institute study in 2010 found that replacement worker bans reduce investment, wages and employment in the long run, and a study in the journal Industrial Relations in 2014 found that such bans reduce annual wages.
The negative effects that unionization has on workers, which have been documented by empirical studies, are unsurprising: the economy is not a zero-sum game, and things that hurt employers generally hurt workers in the long run, too. That is, unless those workers are NDP politicians who increase their votes, and union activists who increase their power with the sort of policies being proposed in Manitoba.