Skip to content

Official Statement of Position

I will happily take working outside on the farm over sitting in front of a computer any day of the week, rain or shine.

Eating Our Own, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Man Keeping Me Down

As I write, a city-wide outside public worker strike has brought many vital services (including garbage collection and public day care) in Toronto to a screeching halt. Neither side had done a good job of handling the politics of this, and both the city government and CUPE have come off looking ridiculous for their respective parts in bringing things to this point. Coming together in an impressively destructive lose-lose situation for all concerned, the smart money among the local punditry expects the strike to drag on for weeks if not months. Torontonians on both sides of the strike might look on the example of Windsor and despair.

Even though it shouldn’t really surprise me anymore, I was struck while reading the opinions about the strike posted online by my various acquaintances by the prevailing anti-union sentiment. The obligatory complaints about smelly garbage piling up in the streets and closed day care centres aside, what got me were statements like the striking workers should be “just happy to still have a job” and that “(a) trained chimp could do the outdoors workers jobs”. Such comments go beyond venting about the inconvenience caused by an interruption of city services, and slide towards jingoistic demonization of the strikers. Obviously, this is easy for me to say since, as a resident of St. Catharines, my garbage is still be collected. (For the record, I live in a region that already outsourced its garbage collection to a non-union company, yet somehow our property tax rates are higher than Metro Toronto’s. Go figure.) None-the-less, I find this kind of vitriol against the union curious — especially when it’s being spewed by those who are otherwise socially, politically, and economically onside with the interests of organized labour.

How does one explain this? Perhaps it’s simple jealousy, with workers who struggle to eke out out their living resenting the guys with the cushy union jobs. Again, the example of St. Catharines is illustrative. Before its prodigious fall, the biggest employer in St. Catharines was General Motors. These days, St. Catharines’ biggest employer is the Niagara District School Board. Union support runs deep in this town, but just as deep is the anti-union resentment of those who (usually through lack of a nepotistic hook-up) can’t get one of those union jobs with the better pay, better benefits, and greater job security.

The seeds of working-class contempt for organized labour get sown in this way, with workers turning their anger on their fellows who manage to win concessions from their employers rather than the employers themselves. Instead of seeing organized workers as compatriots whose success is an example to follow, workers on the outside  see unionized workers as overpaid do-nothings who strike whenever they don’t get yet another raise. These seeds are nurtured by those who serve the interests of employers, in very much the same way that North American conservatives have castigated the public sector as being “inefficient” and “anti-business” for the last 100 years. The end result: members of the working class fighting each other and diluting the gains of the last century of organized labour rather than working together to make things better for everyone.

Do I support CUPE in this struggle? Yes, here is where my default sympathies lie, but the broader truth is that I despair of why struggles like this are necessary at all in our society. Organized labour is only half of a good idea, since it still pre-supposes and pre-necessitates antagonism against the ownership class. Conceiving labour relations as a struggle between worker and owner is endemic of Western modernity’s focus on self-interested individualism, that each of us is only out for ourselves. Worker versus owner, non-union worker versus union worker: both are manifestations of the possessive individualist spirit of our modern age, and both are instances of how that spirit makes us consume each other in a zero-sum game where no one wins. Until that is addressed, painful struggles like the one making Toronto stink to high heaven are inevitable and we will go on blaming each other instead of doing something about it.

Update, and Reading

I’ve let more than a week go without an update. This bodes ill for the future of this project.

Tomorrow is my last day at the call centre. Tuesday I resume working for my father-in-law again, trying to get his farm ready for a big food safety inspection in August. This will take at least a week. Then it’s back to the farmers’ markets — 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. If I’m to keep up with this whole blogging thing I hear the kids are into these days, I’ll have to double my resolve at least.

My long-suffering wife continues with her bed-ridden pregnancy. There has been little change there. Her last OB/GYN visit was positive, and the doctor sees no pressing need to induce labour at this time. Good news for my son (since this means he’s healthy), while bad for my wife (since this means her bed rest restriction is on for at least another week).

I’ve done a bit of reading in the last week, however. I finished The Wrecking Crew, and recommend it to all and sundry. I’m also close to done with Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem. This has been a fantastic book; one I wish I’d had 18 months ago for writing one of the last papers of my Masters. Replacing these two books, I’ve started two more: John Ralston Saul’s newest A Fair Country, and Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. I am just at the beginnings of both, so I’ll report when I read more.

Happy Father’s Day.

Aphorism

All philosophy speaks to the present. The decisive difference between greater and lesser philosophy is the extent to which it speaks to the perpetual present, the permanent human condition.

Reading, and other matters

I spent the morning with my long-suffering wife in the OB/GYN’s office, where we waited over 2 hours for her to be seen. In the interest of avoiding grinding my mental gears, I left the philosophical reading at home for the occasion and instead took with me Thomas Frank’s newest, The Wrecking Crew. It’s an enjoyable read; a pleasant presentation of stuff I mostly already knew. Democracies are prose to corruption by those who peddle in cognitive dissonance and suck up to the wealthy? Quelle surprise! If this is really new information for people, maybe there is a good reason we should still read Plato in political science classes.  😉

My wife is on the last weeks of our first pregnancy, and is doing somewhat well. Her blood pressure fluctuates and she remains on bed rest, but all other test that would suggest serious trouble are thus far negative. All I have to do is make sure she stays down and not doing things she shouldn’t and all will be well.

Films

In the last 24 hours, I had the chance to finally see Rachel Getting Married and Into the Wild. I strongly recommend both these films, and especially the latter as a demonstration of what happens when one poorly understands Rousseau.

Quote

“In every tradition, the answers gain the upper hand over the questions, and in fact to such an extent that the answers come to be taken for granted and are no longer questioned; thus considerable effort is ultimately required in order once again to become conscious of which questions they answered and how the alternatives looked.”

Henreich Meirer, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem

Random Political Philosophy-related Thought

Both Plato and Nietzsche are famously critical of democracy. Nietzsche’s disparagement of democracy is much more oriented towards its corrosive effect on philosophy as a way of life, however, where Plato suggests that democracy is actually conducive to the philosophic life. What, then, is the decisive difference between ancient and modern democracy? The most obvious difference is the fact of the mass society and the technology that exists in symbiosis with it. Ancient democracy was conducted face-to-face by citizens who all know each other and cared what everyone else thought of them and, when you voted, everyone saw you vote. It is the easy anonymity with which we moderns sate and express our private passions that gives rise to Nietzsche’s last man and the death of philosophy.

Superstitious

My last work-related post seems to have roused slumbering mystical forces. Call volume has increased significantly, a bunch of my fellow agents have been calling in sick, and one has even quit since last I wrote. Work is busy again, so no more furloughs for me.  🙁

Welcomed Furlough

For those reading this who don’t already know, my current day job is as a technical support agent in a local call centre. I’m not at liberty to disclose the client or the product, but let’s just say that I provide support for a headless network appliance running the home variant of Windows Server 2003. See if you can connect the dots, with the knowledge that I will not confirm or deny on this forum. The last thing I need is for these bastards to sue me.

This day job is winding down, with today being the fifth day out of the last seven that I’ve been sent home early due to overstaffing/low call volume. If I was staying at this job, I’d be concerned. Fortunately, I’m going back to my last day job soon enough — selling my father-in-law’s fruit at local farmers’ markets. For the time being, I am happy to lose the few hours’ pay everyday so I can tend my poor pregnant wife, confined to bed rest for the next four weeks, and tend to last-minute tasks before putting our house on the market.