Below is the text of a letter I sent today to Graeme Bowbrick, BC Minister
of Advanced Education, Training and Technology:
July 21, 2000
Graeme Bowbrick, Minister
Advanced Education, Training and Technology
Parliament Buildings, Room 166 F
Victoria, BC, V8V 1X4
Dear Minister Bowbrick,
Last March I wrote to Gordon Wilson, Minister of Employment and Investment
about an intellectual fraud I have documented that is denying quality
employment to hundreds of thousands of British Columbians. That fraud
maintains that redistributing working time is not a viable remedy for
chronic unemployment, under-employment and over-work. Today, I read in the
Vancouver Sun about a more conventional economic fraud -- involving
so-called career colleges -- that is thriving in the climate of real
despair and phony hope fostered by the intellectual fraud I am speaking
about.
Minister Wilson wrote back in April expressing the government's sympathy
with the policy direction of redistributing working time and referring the
matter to his Assistant Deputy Minister for Economic Development,
Mr. Gordon Robinson. During an amiable discussion in May with Mr. Robinson
and a Senior Advisor, Mr. David Gray, I was cordially advised that
although my research findings were indeed of interest, the ministry could
not be expected to act on them or to offer any funding to support the work
I have been doing. There are simply too many other pressing matters to
attend to and no particular political pressure to do anything about the
maldistribution of work and working time. It was suggested that I continue
the task of educating the public about the matter, as I have been doing
for the past five years, without aid of any government funds.
I want to stress that I am not putting forward the suggestion of
redistributing working time as an original proposal. Rather, I have been
motivated to continue in the direction laid out by a federal Advisory
Committee on Working Time and the Distribution of Work and supplemented by
Lars Osberg's analysis of the policy obstacles to redistribution work time
in the federal Collective Reflections on the Changing Workplace. Over the
years, I have been assured by several provincial Ministers of their
appreciation of my analysis and its importance.
In my most recent research, I have documented an intellectual fraud
underlying widespread textbook misinformation about the economics of
working time. A chapter outlining some of the results of my research is
forthcoming from Routledge as a chapter in a graduate-level text on
Working Time: International Trends, Theory and Policy Perspectives, edited
by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart. I have also developed computer
spreadsheet tools for cost/benefit analysis of working time. I have
brought the matter to the attention of federal authorities who show no
sign of responding to the issues I have raised.
So here we have a situation where the federal government pisses away a
billion taxpayer dollars on untracked HRDC job creation programs and
refuses to address the job destruction resulting from payroll taxes that
discriminate against the average worker and central bank policies that
ensure a comfortable cushion of unemployment, supposedly to fight
inflation. Meanwhile, the provincial government jumps on the ill-conceived
"active re-employment" folly by ladling out tuition money to sleazy career
schools. There's plenty of money to shovel down rat holes but not a cent
to find out where the rats are coming from.
I took the hint from my meeting at Employment and Investment and therefore
won't bother to ask you for a meeting to discuss this matter further. I
have taken my educational effort directly to the public through a
sandwichman project I call "a fixed amount of work". I wear a sandwich
board and walk around handing out flyers. I am enclosing a copy of the
flyer I hand out on the streets. If you, or your representatives would
like to discuss this matter further, you are welcome to accompany me
sometime as I perambulate the streets.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Walker
cc. Gordon Wilson, Minister of Employment and Investment
Lori Culbert, Chad Skelton, Harold Munro, Vancouver Sun
Tom Walker
#111-1035 Pacific Street+ Vancouver, B.C.* V6E 4G7
( Telephone: (604)669-3286 : Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Temps Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
