Unionists and Academics = Ugly Alliances
There was a time when unions in the Western world had their place. They led the struggle to attain fair wages, hours of work and workplace safety for countless unvoiced workers and working immigrants, when rapacious, profit-hungry factory owners viewed their labour force as expendible creatures of inconvenient requirements. How times have changed.Unions, and those who lead them are no longer the altruistic and courageous entities they were once perceived to be, but rather self-interested and ego-driven more interested in the perceived power they are able to wield than workers' interests. By and large, a self-correcting Western society sees the utility of treating workers justly if for no other reason than when workers are paid well and treated fairly they reciprocate in kind. That, in any event, is the ideal, not always realized, but there to be had when both 'sides' in the equation are mature enough to recognize and act on achieving co-operative mutual success.
Unions, on the other hand, believe most governments, corporations and businesses have the bottom line in mind, and they are profit-driven without regard for workers' rights. And they're right too, for the most part. In this modern world, when workers' demands are seen to become too onerous and impede both progress and profit, it has become relatively simple to move operations offshore where low-wage economies produce cheaper-produced goods that will sell at the same price, but yielding larger profits.
Still, unions are a force to be reckoned with, and they still wield great influence in some countries. Much as do academics in the universities of Western societies who, like their union brethren tend to be left-leaning, almost as a tenet of pride: here we are, the super-intelligent who educate the fortunate young who will truly inherit the reins of corporate power and government, but we're also aligned with the downtrodden, the underprivileged, the disadvantaged. We lead the way! they seem to proclaim - Toward a better world!
The ancient Greek philosophers saw great utility in hard physical labour, while at the same time honing the mind to understand nature's deepest- and most dearly-held secrets. Someone who worked as a potter could also be recognized by his coevals as having the greatest enquiringly logical mind of all time. So perhaps the partnering of unions and academics in a joint mission to champion the oppressed, to shed light on the problematical, the offer solutions to better mankind, shouldn't be all that puzzling.
All that is theory, of course. The reality can be different, and quite, quite nasty. That the Canadian Union of Public Employees has followed others of their ilk to join an international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel is incomprehensible. Labelling the State of Israel as an apartheid state, the protective wall as a racist divide, serves only to demonstrate the gross stupidity of those CUPE delegates whose decision it was to use the union dues of hundreds of thousands of CUPE members unwisely, to say the least.
Of course in so doing they join the ranks of leftist academics who have themselves formed race-driven campaigns to stigmatize the State of Israel and, presumably pressure and shame the country into self-abnegating surrender of their very existence in favour of completely abandoning the ideal of a Jewish homeland which also happens to be an ancestral homeland, one which practises a democratic ideal, one in which workers' rights are recognized and awarded to its citizens, one in which the citizens are forced to live in fear of their very survival, surrounded by belligerents determined by any violent means available to them to deny their right to exist.
In so doing the unions and the academics bring shame upon themselves for their deliberately ignorant lack of awareness of where the truth lies, in favour of a misconstrued situation moulded to fit their very peculiar, and most particular ideas of a just society.
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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