There cannot be any bystanders: James Clancy

Inequality has grown in the 30 years since unions have been under attack by the Right.

by Ish Theilheimer,  transcription by Zachary Rankin, with video by Matthew Penstone and Zachary Rankin

An interview with James Clancy, president of the National Union of Public and General Employees.

A new report documents how income inequality in Canada has increased in the 30 years since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power with their anti-union offensive.  In March, the Canadian Foundation for Labour Rights released a report called Why Unions Matter,  at a Toronto  conference sponsored by the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), the United Food and Commercial Workers  (UFCW Canada), and the Canadian Teachers Federation (CTF). The report documents a divergence in those years between Canadian union coverage and income inequality, with inequality rising as the rate of unionization has fallen.

On April 9, NUPGE's national president James Clancy met with Ish Theilheimer of Straight Goods News  to talk about the significance of the report. Ironically, they met on the day after Thatcher's death. In a wide-ranging interview, transcribed by SGNews intern Zachary Rankin, Clancy laid out the systematic attack that conservatives have waged against unions since 1980 and how these attacks have driven down the wages and well-being of working people.

Here is the full transcript of SGNews' interview with James Clancy:

Straight Goods News:
James Clancy, the National Union has released a new report called Why Unions Matter, and I think — from my reading of it — at the core of it there is this notion of equality and inequality. Why is your work being driven by equality and inequality?

James Clancy:
Our union believes income inequality is the number one issue facing Canadians and indeed the number one issue facing the world. The growing gap between those that have and those that don't is injurious not only to those individuals but to communities and societies as a whole. It has grown each and every year since 1980.

Let's look at Canada. From 1945 to 1980 the gap closed each and every year, and yet since 1980, the income inequality gap has grown each and every year. So let's think of it as a murder-mystery. There's income inequality, it keeps rising each and every year, it's injurious, we know it does damage to communities  and individuals. Who did it? What we did was set out to answer that question. Who are the culprits, who committed this?

Our analysis tells us there are three reasons for the absolutely relentless attack on labour over the last 30 years.  In Canada there have been over 206 new pieces of labour legislation passed federally or provincially across the country. Of those 206 pieces of legislation, 199 have restricted or eliminated the ability of working men or women to organize themselves into unions and to bargain collectively.

After 30 years of this trend — this attack on unions and rising income inequality — social scientists are pointing out that about 20 percent of the rise in income inequality is directly attributable to the attack on unions. So that's one reason income inequality rises.

James Clancy of NUPGE lays out how the rise of income inequality has been tightly linked to attacks over the past 30 years on unions.

The second reason is that, in Canada, we don't have a modern industrial strategy. This idea of just pulling the resources out of the ground or off hillsides and shipping it overseas unprocessed and not creating good jobs here in Canada — doing some primary manufacturing or work with the product — is absolutely absurd.

What it has meant is that increasingly in Canada we have what I call a MacJobs economy; increasingly people are scrambling to piece together two or three low-paying jobs together,  just to make ends meet.  Again, we have to ask the questions, “Who did it? Why is this income inequality rising?"  The second culprit is that we have had governments that have failed to provide and to build what I call a modern industrial strategy — a strategy that has at its core people and nature. So we need to get working on that if we're going to reduce income inequality.

The third reason income inequality continues to rise in this country is that we have no tax fairness. We have no tax fairness in this country. If we take the period from 1945 to 1980 where income inequality was declining, we had a tax system that was much more progressive.

Today we have some people paying too much taxes — while there are some people living in the big house at the top of the hill that aren't paying any. The taxes we collect are our common wealth. We're using our common wealth, our taxes, for the common good.  

That's the purpose of a progressive tax system. But increasingly we've got some people, corporations which were taking these scarce taxes and spending these taxes on tax breaks for the wealthiest and for corporations that are doing fabulously well.  So when you do that, when you don't have a fair tax system, what happens is public services get squeezed, cut, chopped, eliminated, privatized. And as you attack public services, there's a direct relationship between the attack on public services and rising income inequality.

So again to answer — if we looked at it as a who-done-it — income inequality is on the floor. Here it is, it’s rising, here it is, who did it? We have three reasons: the attack on labour rights, no modern industrial strategy and the third reason is no tax fairness.  So we're running campaigns with our membership. We’re all together, one member talking to another member about this analysis I have just shared with you.

One of the groups that we're working with is a group called the Canadian Foundation for Labour Rights. We’ve got citizens, academics, legal practitioners, some trade unionists. They held a conference last week in Toronto, an international conference on labour rights.  They were trying to get at this question, trying to get a broader understanding of why unions matter.  

Unions brought us the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour work day and so on and so forth, but that is a rather narrow description of what unions do in a modern democracy. So this conference was first of all looking at the assault on unions in the last 30 years, the 199 pieces of legislation that have been passed that are really restricting the ability of working men and women to organize and bargain. But we're also looking and questioning what role unions play in society today, in a modern democratic state or society. What role do unions play?

The conference began with the presentation by Richard Wilkinson, who authored the book The Spirit Level, which looks  at this question of income inequality  and why it is important, why does it matter to communities, to provinces and indeed to the country, why should we be concerned with rising income inequality . So Wilkinson led off the conference and then a number of speakers talked about the role that unions play. To put it simply, unions have a role to play and do play a role in society that's more than simply bargaining wages for the members they represent. Unions play a much larger role, essentially why do unions matter, and Unions are essentially about fairness.

Straight Goods News:
You have been saying a lot of these things for most of your career as a union activist. What was new in the report, what surprised you here?

James Clancy:
Unions play an important role. They act as a counterweight to the tremendous rise in influence and power that the corporate world has over public policy formulation. We often talk about the role that corporations play when it comes to elections themselves. That's well documented.  

What the report really flagged for us was the incredible rise in authority and influence that they have in terms of shaping public policy between elections, particularly over the last 30 years, not at the ballot box, but in terms of the policies that governments bring into play. The attack on unions means that one of the counterweights to that influence and that authority is being diminished, is being lost as unions are being attacked. So unions play an important role as a counterweight as part of a democratic state and democratic society, and also counterweights the influence that the corporate world has over public policy.

Another point that emerged was that unions play an important role in ensuring that there is fairness of opportunity for people in our communities, in our society. Unions are able to ensure that a host of groups who have concerns or issues that they want raised in the public arena, unions have been instrumental in ensuring that they got that support and in some cases the resources to make sure that their voices were heard. So I think that was another important part of the narrative of 'why unions matter'.

Straight Goods News:
It's interesting to be having this conversation on the day after Margaret Thatcher died because she ushered in so many of the changes that you are talking about. Could you talk about what Thatcher meant and represented and her significance in this story?

James Clancy:
Thatcher took office in 1979, [Ronald] Reagan in 1980. Again I go back to 1945 to 1980, when income inequality was narrowing.  If we look at 1980 as a watershed period, income inequality rises.  It coincided with the policies that were ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and other people of that persuasion.

This idea that somehow if the markets are unfettered — somehow we reduce regulation, get government off the backs of business — that somehow this economy was going to flourish and that all the benefits were going to trickle down and all boats would rise. Well we can say with certainty in the year 2013 that that was absolute nonsense, all their predictions for what would happen didn't come true.

What we've got is greater income inequality. We've got people scrambling piecing two or three jobs together. People are carrying much more personal debt in order to maintain themselves. So all the policies and philosophy, ideology that they were promoting — when I think of Thatcher, I think of her saying, "There is no such thing as society, we’re all simply individuals and it's every man for himself." I don't think you can build and sustain an economy that way. I don't think you can build a healthy community, I don't think you can build a healthy province or indeed a country that way.

Straight Goods News:
And we've seen the outcome of that over the last several decades. Where do you go with what you have learned from this report? Where is your union going to go, where are other unions going to go?

James Clancy:
The trade union movement has to redouble its efforts and really create a new narrative about who they are, why it's important and why it plays an important role in a democratic society.  I think it all starts with the word 'fairness'.

What are unions about? Unions are about fairness. It's always about fairness. It is fairness of opportunity, it's fighting for democracy, it's fighting for people to have a voice, to have a say. It's fighting to ensure that the workplace is safe. It's fighting to ensure that public policy is a reflection of what everybody needs and what everybody wants. It's fighting for the least advantaged in our communities, on our worksites. So I think the narrative starts with the word fairness; that's what unions are about.

And then I think we have to go out and assert that in a way that we haven't  done in years. The narrative over the last 30 years — beginning with Reagan attacking the air traffic controllers and Margaret Thatcher attacking the miners —  I mean we could go on and on. They captured the narrative. Their argument was that unions stood in the way of progress — that if you removed regulations governing business, created more freedom for the corporate world, more freedom for the financial world and you eliminated those nasty, pesky unions — that all boats would rise.

I'm saying after 30 years that that is absolute nonsense, it hasn't panned out. So what I’m suggesting is — we don't have to go out and create new reasons why unions should exist. The reasons are there.  

The new narrative has to talk about fairness, it has to be predicated on values. What are the values that we as unionists bring to our work and bring to the public policy debates every day? It's about sharing, it's about caring, it's about empathy. It's about ensuring that no one is left behind.

So it begins with reframing the narrative and asserting the narrative and it continues from there.

On this question I don't think that there can be any bystanders . We're reaching a point here in this country — as we witness the tremendous push for American-style labour laws here in Canada — I think we’re at a watershed moment.  I think unionists themselves have to stand up and assert why unions are important, why they should exist, why they play an important role in a democratic state.

I also think that we have to call on all Canadians to take a stand on this. Whose side are you on, whose side are you on? There cannot be any bystanders on this one.  

There are many people out there who don't belong to unions, but they understand the values that are behind what we do each and every day. I think we have to call on them to step up and stand forward  and they have to take a position on this.  

In the last 30 years, this notion of fairness has been turned into a vice, and greed has been made into a virtue. It's like Alice in Wonderland. Up is down, down is up. It's crazy. So I think we have to reassert our values, reassert what we're about and do that in a very demonstrable fashion, but we also have to call on others to join us, others who are not unionists but understand the values that we're trying to promote, the values that we're fighting for are values that serve them well.

Fundamentally, the report backs up the argument with work by social scientists, academics, a number of people who are now turning their attention to this question and who are demonstrating that unions have an important role in economic justice, not simply for their own members but for others in the community. The report talks about the role that unions play in ensuring that we have democracy itself in this country.

© Copyright 2013 Ish Theilheimer, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca