In responding to Sally Lerner's request for ideas on better ways to implement workfare, I said the following: "As you know, the Government of Ontario has put Bill 22 (An Act to Prevent Unionization with respect to Community Participation under the Ontario Works Act, 1997) before the legislature in order to block any attempt to unionize people who are on workfare. .... Mrs. Ecker, who sponsored the Bill, says it is not directed at the poor, but rather at unions who are trying to subvert workfare and thereby deny the poor access to it. What the Bill suggests is a fear of the potential power of the poor. As long as solutions are imposed from above - like workfare - there is little to worry about. But if the poor were an organized political force proposing solutions of their own, there is no telling what might happen. Better to cut that possibility off." In a forwarded posting from Mike Gurstein, David Ellerman said: >Let's take another analogy to be clearer and to help break out of the >mental stereotypes that "business unions" have accumulated over the last >century. When people are fighting against undemocratic control of say a >city or a country, they won't get far by ceding any design on democratic >control and aiming only to "bargain about" how the autocrats will govern >them. Instead of ceding the city or country to their rulers, they >should assert that it is "their city" and "their country" and that they >speak to what is best for the city or the country. That can be >denigrated as "city consciousness" or "national consciousness" as >opposed to "international solidarity," but acting locally is the >beginning of real social change. There is a convergence of thought here. Earlier in his posting, Ellerman argues that the role of unions has changed from being "agents of social change" to being "bargaining agents" - that is, from promoting the concept that the worker owns what he produces to the concept that the work merely has an input into a product that someone else (the capitalist or the entrepreneur) owns. Under the former concept, the worker must be fairly rewarded for his product; under the latter he must try to convince the owner to pay him fairly for helping out. The Government of Ontario's Bill 22 raises two points. One is that the government does not want to see the poor organized into an effective political force able even to bargain with the autocrats, let alone develop a sense of ownership of, and entitlement in, their society. The poor currently have almost no political voice and almost no political allies. If they had the power to make the autocrats listen, who knows what conditions might have to be set around welfare and workfare. The other point is about the nature of unions. If the unions were able to organize the poor, they could be seen as reverting to their old role of agents of social change. At least with respect to the poor, they would be like the unions of old, and not merely bargaining agents. Ed Weick
