Friday, December 07, 2012

Great news - 4,500 people are going to lose their jobs

My grandfather - my mother's dad - was proud of his 40-year pin from General Electric.
There were a few years when he didn’t work, during the Depression. My grandmother served up food to the desperate men who showed up at the door, despite her family’s own hard times. 
But mostly, over more than four decades, Arthur Jones walked a long block down Lansdowne to the Davenport Works each day, came home for lunch, and went back in the afternoon.
There was an implicit deal - do the job well, and GE’s managers would do their job well so you would continue to be employed.
I thought about my grandfather this week, when a National Post headline sounded a familiar theme. “CP Rail shares climb on CEO's plan to cut 23 per cent of workforce,” it said. 
I like the psuedo precision, and neutrality, of phrases like “23 per cent of workforce.”
While shareholders were bidding up CP Rail stock, about 4,500 families - that’s the number of jobs to be cut - were coping with very bad news. People learned they would be unemployed, losing a good job a time when finding any work can be challenging.
I know CP Rail isn’t in business to provide jobs. That if managers didn’t cut these positions, then customers might go to a more efficient railway, and more jobs might be lost. And that shareholders deserve to have managers who run the business effectively and prudently on their behalf.
And I know that no one is being malevolent. CP Rail CEO Hunter Harrison and the management group are charged with - and rewarded for - increasing shareholder value. If they can run the railway with a fewer people, they have an obligation to do so. I’ve been a manager, and made those decisions.
But it’s troubling that we don’t see, or talk about, those 4,500 people and what’s ahead for them, as we talk about the share price. Can government help them, or should there be policies that protect the jobs, or support retraining?
I saw a lot of newspaper stories about Harrison’s plan to cut costs and jobs. But I didn’t read any stories about the family dead terrified by the prospect of unemployment, wondering how they would tell their kids that they had to move because they couldn’t make the mortgage. 
Who does speak for those people?
And how did the social contract between good employers and good employees change so dramatically, without a public discussion?
My grandfather’s tenure with GE came at the end of an era. Celebrity CEO Jack Welch won great praise for chopping more than 100,000 jobs at the company in five years in the early 1980s. 
It’s quite a contrast. My grandfather built giant transformers, as a worker and a foreman. When he was getting older, the company moved him into the guardhouse at the entry to the works, instead of eliminating his job. (He died too young, of lung cancer. You might wonder about the PCBs in those transformers. Or the roll-your-own cigarettes he smoked for 50 years.)
GE wasn’t an anomaly. Employers considered it correct to look after the people who did the work.
That’s changed. Global competition, reduced unionization, tremendous pressure on managers to produce better results every quarter - the social contract has been rewritten.
What’s troubling is that we haven’t talked about the change. We haven’t tallied the cost, or considered policy options, or discussed mitigation strategies. We’ve just adopted policies that resulted in millions of lost jobs. And millions of damaged families.
I doubt the CP Rail jobs could be saved.
But attention must be paid. (Yes, it’s a quote.) People’s lives should not be so casually altered for the worse.
And our public policy debate should be based on more than share prices.

4 comments:

Kim said...

I am thankful you are still paying attention Paul. This news affected me the same way. I've been watching the markets lately, with a sense of horror at the perversity of our financial system, the fluctuations start to resemble a whip, like our crazy overheated jetstream, bringing financial tsunami's and typhoons raining down upon humanity.

Anonymous said...

No matter. We will also lose our resource jobs to China. There are 2,000 Chinese workers coming to BC, to take BC mining jobs. Anyone wanting jobs in BC mines, must speak Chinese Mandarin, in our own damned English speaking province.

Harper selling out the tar sands to Communist China, will likely soon have to speak Mandarin to work there too. Chinese resource workers, earn up to $17.00 per hour less than Canadians. The Chinese send their money home. That money does not get spent in Canada.

No doubt, the CPR will get sold too. It is surprising how another country, can make a Canadian railroad pay good money. Needless to say. Gordon Campbell said, the BC railroad was losing money. That was the best run railroad in all of Canada. The BCR was sold to our other railroad, the CNR.

These days, Canada is no good at anything, other than corruption. Strange, how a country with such vast resources, is given to a Communist country? Must be Harper's terrible mismanagement, that has destroyed, our once good and decent country.

Anonymous said...

Hi Paul. Well your question's one that keeps getting asked a lot, but is answered in only the most shallow, economic terms. It ought to be obvious to one and all that there's simply not enough work (at least of the type that provides wages, higher standards of living, etc)to go around. We're at that magic point seen in all those 40's and 50's futuristic advertisements where the machines are going to do the huge amount of work we so dread. It's a good time to be asking questions about the point of labouring for a dollar, what with the climate change issues looming larger by the day. Trust me, I could offer tons of opinion on this, but I often just let the respected and highly admired writer of the Wire explain my thoughts, because a) we're near perfectly aligned on what we see as the essential problem and b) people love videos!

Anyways, have a listen to his marvelous take on what's transpiring. Don't be put off by the title - the American empire he discusses in this clip has more to do with the post War consensus that business made with labour than it does with the hundreds of military bases the US maintains. Our big question this century is really and truly one that served as a title to a Wendell Berry book many years back. We're going to have to answer, "What are People For?"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJNkL12QD68

Anonymous said...

And almost every british columbian having been fed a constant diet of fraser institute dogma on global/ctv/cbc/sun/province here in pattisons province will believe this is right and just.