You've got to hand it to organized labour. Our unions certainly know how to put on a show and they organized a dandy on Parliament Hill over the lunch hour May 30, a warm, muggy spring day in the nation's capital.
Several thousand union members travelled by bus from across Ontario and Quebec to protest the hemorrhaging of jobs that has been occurring in Canadian manufacturing in recent years.
Most of them wore red T-shirts and matching bandanas and they waved flags, banners and placards.
They even created a temporary "Job Loss Cemetery" complete with some 500 headstone-shaped markers, each listing the name of a company, the number of positions eliminated and the affected community.
Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, addressed the gathering.
So did Canadian Autoworkers president Buzz Hargrove, who dresses more like a corporate CEO than the leader of a blue-collar union. Liberal Leader Stephane Dion and the NDP's Jack Layton also spoke.
These labour demonstrations tend to be so noisy, colourful and slickly produced that someone watching from the sidelines runs the risk of getting caught up in the entertainment and overlooking the substantive issues at stake.
And, in this case, organized labour had a serious point to make.
Canadians in all walks of life, no matter what their political views, ought to be concerned about the job losses that have occurred in manufacturing.
The CLC puts the figure at 250,000, or one in 10 over the past five years.
These positions, the congress noted, paid on average $20.68 an hour.
Most also included handsome benefits, generous vacations and good pension plans.
Citing Statistics Canada research, the CLC says that those who lose such positions generally see their annual income shrink by 25 per cent, or about $10,000 annually. That implies a total loss of individual earnings approaching $2.5 billion per year.
There are four generally accepted reasons why our manufacturing sector is bleeding: Appreciation of the dollar, which some experts say will be par with the U.S. dollar by the end of the year; competition from emerging economies, either in the form of cheap imports or through outsourcing of production; rising energy and commodity prices, which make our products more expensive; and a slowdown in the U.S. economy.
But in an interview following the Parliament Hill protest, the CAW's Hargrove told this columnist that Canadian workers are being shafted by unfair trade practices and weakness on the part of our own government.
"Every government in the world is protecting its home base except Canada," Hargrove says. "There are governments that have passed restrictions on foreign takeovers of major business, especially natural resources.
"Japan protects its auto industry and is manipulating its currency," he continues. "The yen is the only currency in the G-8 that has depreciated against the U.S. in the last two years, while we've appreciated over 40 per cent.
"It gives them a subsidy on average of about $6,000 per vehicle that they ship into North America. Their policy means that we're closing plants in southern Ontario, throwing middle-aged people out of work and creating no opportunities for our young people."
Hargrove argues that the problem requires a North American solution. Canada and the U.S. have the most open markets in the world.
Every low-cost producer on the planet is shipping product here. But they're not buying much in return, except perhaps natural resources.
"Let's have a trade agreement that says you can build your products wherever you want and sell them in our markets," Hargrove adds, "but you must buy from us, too. You can't just sell to us."
Hargrove and his union brethren are having a hard time getting the public's attention these days because the Canadian economy is doing so well.
Unemployment is at a 30-year low. Inflation appears to be under control. And interest rates are at a tolerable level.
So it's hard to persuade Canadians they ought to be concerned when another plant closes and a few hundred workers get severance notices.
And that's unfortunate because the erosion of our manufacturing base raises some fundamental questions.
What will we be making in this country in the future? And what happens when well-paid industrial jobs disappear and are replaced by lower-paid employment in the service sector?
I certainly can't answer the first question.
As for the second, it seems to me that if we are moving from an industrial to a service economy, individuals are going to be poorer, communities are going to be less well off. And so is the country.
That's why we all need to pay attention to this problem.
(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
