Dear Editor
In the early days of the automobile industry, the going wage for skilled workers was still only about a dollar a day. Shortly after Henry Ford started making those early Ford Model Ts, he decided to pay his workers the then generous wage of $5 a day, much against the advice of his contemporaries. When asked why, Ford answered he would want his employees to be able to purchase his vehicles. Although he later became a strong opponent of labour unions (when he became much wealthier), Henry Ford had unwittingly sounded out a truism of the workings of modern economies: in order to sell the stuff you produce, there have to be people earning enough to buy that stuff. And the more people earning enough, the more stuff can be purchased, and the better the economy will be.
Today, the long battle of the wealthy elite against labour unions and against governments which are "for the people" is beginning to show results. Recessions are more frequent and more severe, and the income gap between the obscenely rich (getting richer) and the rest of us (treading water or sinking) is now a lot wider than it was even a few years ago. At the peak of the recession in 2009, while high unemployment was beginning to rear its ugly head for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Canadians, Canada's 100 best-paid CEOs averaged $6.6 million in compensation - about 155 times what the average worker made that year.
Food banks have become a booming business. Unions have been in decline for a few decades, and now the power elite smells blood and has begun to go for the jugular, especially in the United States. Encouraged by the success of union-busting governments south of us, right-wing governments in Canada, such as our federal Conservative government and our own Sask. Party government, have also been delving into the union-busting business with anti-labour and back-to-work legislation.
Those of us ordinary folk who were born during the Great Depression of the 1930s, have lived to see our standard of living get better and better after the Second World War, with child labour laws, workplace health and safety legislation, minimum wage and employment standards legislation, government pension plans, medicare and rising income for workers generally. But now we can feel real sympathy for those who will follow us. A lot of the improvements were brought about - directly and indirectly - largely through efforts of labour unions, but if the current trend towards inequality continues, the "good life" will have been eroded for all but a few elite.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
