Mexican migrant workers leave Canadian union

Subject: Mexican migrant workers leave Canadian union Fri Aug 14, 2009 1:10 am

According to the CBC:

Migrant Mexican farm workers in Manitoba – the first in Canada to join a union – have now voted to decertify.

The farm employees have decided they would rather not be part of the United Food and Commercial Workers union because they can make more money working longer hours, without mandatory overtime pay, which they say caused employers to cut back on their hours.

Heladio Martinez-Perez is a foreman at a farm west of Winnipeg. He said under the collective agreement the workers negotiated two years ago, they could not work more than 70 hours weekly.

"Today, we're gonna start at 6 o'clock and maybe finish at 8. That is a big difference, the union and not the union. We don't need overtime or $1 extra per hour when we can make more hours. That is a good thing for everybody."

Now that they've broken from the union, Martinez-Perez said many of his co-workers ask to work up to 15 or 16 hours a day.

This is a perfect example of the primary problem with the labour movement. This story does not say that unions are bad, it says that the almost religious conviction that unions are always good is bad. There are times that unions are good and there are times that they only interfere. The article goes on to quote promoters of unionism:

One expert said the decision to decertify is a setback for migrant workers. David Camfield, who teaches labour studies at the University of Manitoba, said migrant workers in Canada don't have the same rights as other workers who are not in agriculture.

Of course these workers have the same rights as other workers. They have the same protection of laws that every other worker does in Canada (or that every other foreign migrant worker has). What the professor means to say is that they don't have the same contract as other workers, and it is clear that they don't want this contract.

There is an assumption here that without a union these people are going to be abused by greedy capitalists, yet they do not seem dissatisfied with their pre-union working condition. In fact I have heard before that this type of employment is in high demand. It is easy to understand why:

"It's for my daughter's school," said Martinez-Perez. "That's the idea why we are here."

http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2009/08/mexican-migrant-workers-leave-union.html

Mexican migrant workers leave Canadian union

Mexican migrant workers leave Canadian union

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