Labour Day

In response to Labour’s Day, Labour Day 2011, the emotions and opinions will be as varied as the number of picnics and parades. These opinions are likely to fall into three significant categories; support, ambivalence and opposition.
Support is pretty easy to understand as it is founded in the inherent understanding that every single advance or improvement that workers enjoy was brought about by workers and their progressive partners and no one else. A very brief representation of these improvements would be the 40 hour week, week-ends, health and safety legislation and the right to organize with access to union representation.
Ambivalence is the domain of a large piece of the population that for any number of reasons have conflicts in their view of unions and worker’s rights. There is no way possible to address this group in a letter to the editor.
The opposition camp, while easy to recognize, is not understandable on any level but greed and avarice. For decades a social contract between government, employers and workers existed that evolved into a relationship that provided benefit to all people. In the last 30 years the social contract has been ruptured such that government no longer acts in the interest of working people, but acts in the interests of corporate Canada (except of course when these same governments dump money into communities to gain votes at election time). Those that will discuss Labour’s celebration with disdain do so not to demonstrate a conviction, but for the clear purpose of seeking the undermining of the Labour movement to deny the working class / middle class their share of the wealth of a land where no one should ever live with poverty, experience unemployment or any form of social prejudice.
Long live the ideals of a Labour Movement where social justice is the pillar of existence.

Dave Trumble
President, Grey Bruce Labour Council