The Fugue State

Blogger Oxygentax , has a post on a National Post piece consisting mainly of a plea to return power from the many hands at the helm of unions back to a few hands in at the helm of large corporate interests.  Fair enough.

The Fulford National Post piece glossed over details, contained little data, mostly pitch.  In other words, it was a typical National Post piece.  Really didn’t contain anything there for critics to discuss; its whole point appears to be to further solidify the opinion of people it’s already convinced — Hardly a great essay as oxygentax made it out to be.

Second, and more damning — there was no link in the NP post to the original OECD content.  This is absolutely, utterly embarrassing to read in this day and age, and there is no excuse for it.  It is the main part of what was being talked about, there is no reason why it should not be linked to.  The NP’s not doing so is only a clear example how utterly ignorant, backwards and completely lost in the dark they really are.

As for the post linking to the NP itself;

First of all, it brings up the almost strawman-bad argument ‘unions are bad because look what they’ve done to the auto industry | my auto industry town’.

Granted, there are some truly stupid people involved in those unions, but GM and Chrysler both had colossal management problems — it was management that sold both of those companies’ long term interests for their short term, and blew their chances at long term survival without state help.  Sure the union wasn’t helping things, but it was a textbook management problem(in fact it was covered in our BUS375 class at a fair level of detail as such).

“Someone in the private sector has invested their own money in the business being run”

Unless it’s angel money.  Or bank money.  Or “network” money.  Or government money(=”Economic Action Plan” lately).  It’s usually “somebody else’s money”.   My current workplace is a typical example of this — we basically do business for someone else, and they in turn contract out.  From the perspective of our customers, not clear that work ever actually happens, but they sure do get their money taken from them.  And then it becomes their money that moves the system, and the cycle continues.

What gets lost in the shuffle and short-term profit is making meaningful, long term connections with customers, and the only result is pissing a solid percentage of this country off at us, meaningless metrics, and what can only be described as a kafkaesque work environment.

ie it’s a typical private company.

Compare and contract the crown corporation I worked for, which strived to make sure that we kept our customers, and had big-scale projects in place to serve more and more people, more communities at a higher and higher level of service(even if they were somewhat misguided in how to accomplish this, which in turn is mostly due to the upstream providers and other firms in the global industry being private, and the lack of democratic participation).

In general, you only get to run businesses if you can already afford to start a business in the first place.  But even so — even assuming that this weren’t true, this ‘ownership’ obsession is exactly what allows the short term, absolutely greedy decisions that, for example, allowed the cratering of Nortel and countless other firms happen(for example, by taking the “risk” and moving it to people who cannot push it down the pipe further, often the workers, or people who can’t defend themselves from such things), to exploit good workers(killing goodwill between productive sectors of society that erects barriers that have long-lasting negative side effects).  It’s not the case that all businesses act in this way, or that they have to, but it’s also not the case that all unions act in this way, or that they have to.  But the more pressure privatization and similar classwar tactics put on unions, the more you’re going to see tit-for-tat style, even if insular, greedy and ultimately ineffective(at the cost of even so much as damaging to society) responses from the unions.

“With the public sector, it’s more about covering my butt first before engaging in a risk that may not pay off.”

This is true for many people in the public sector, but not everybody.  There are plenty of people that are engaged with their community, raising good decent families, plenty of volunteers improving their community, and plenty that will give you good service just to be good neighbours / just out of goodwill.   Know what kills this?   Privatization.  Treating labour like a commodity.  Treating human beings like capital, input to a machine for producing wealth.  Treating communities as inexhaustible resources to be exploited.  Treating businesses as the centre of society.  And hey, maybe it does produce wealth, and maybe it works very well in the short term, but if you’re serious about getting rid of the “cover my ass” professionalism culture, the big leverage point to overturn is not merely unions(and sure they are part of the problem lately and pressure needs to be put on them on this, but they are clearly the lesser evil here and in most other situations), but unbridled private power.

The really crazy part is that the people I know in the public service who justify their actions with “CYA” style responses the most tend to be anti-union conservatives).  Careful what you wish for, in that case — you may just get it.

Also, a lot of the lack of perceived efficiency comes from the fact that without a clear profit motive, the public service has impacts in  many different, unmeasurable ways that for example OECD beancounters do not count as valuable.  OECD is better than the typical think tank that the NP would use as a source on this kind of article, and I haven’t read the report, but colour me skeptical.

As far as when the government should step out of the way in an industry with private interests … there are probably a lot of factors, including

1. when there is a public interest in the government being there
2. The nature of the public interest (for example, having a resource feedback loop that allows for, for example, the government to be funded without resort to general, regressive taxation is in the public interest, but having free internet access, free healthcare, or a slow but reliable form of communication for official documents may have qualitatively different aspects to the public interest)
3. How the government finances are doing in general, how desperate they are for short term benefit (for example, by private industries cratering entire province-wide economies as in the case of the auto industry and ontario right now)
4. how difficult it would be for the government to move back in after it moves out of the sector
5. how difficult it would be for private industry to move back in after it moves out of the sector/move in to begin with
6. how well regulation/taxation can work to produce desirable results in the public interest (see land tax versus carbon tax)
7. such things as trade policies of our neighbours (if the US is known to force us to deregulate industries against our interest it might be better to just leave the government in place where it can be managed to the public interest closer than a foreign firm might be interested in providing)

and on, and on.
For Canada Post, personally, I think there are changes that could be made, but they need to be made by Canadians as a whole looking at what Canada Post does for us, and deciding from there whether or not there needs to be a change.  In particular, they need to stop acting as a public subsidy for private junkmail publishers, or work on a way to allow the price discrimination to continue in a less environmentally damaging way(say, have a Canada Post ‘flyer’ website).  But this is the sort of thing that can wait for more serious issues to be resolved (such as the keeping the federal budget from balooning from conservative ineptitude).

I am employed by, and a member of the New Democrat Party of Canada.  However I do not represent the party, its views, the views of its members, blah blah blah.  But you may as well know this, in case you don’t read my other feeds.  I am biased, but I try to minimize my bias in general.