There is power in a union

Of the thousands of bits of information that we are bombarded with each day, some are retained in our memory because of who said them or what was said.

Occasionally, a bit of information will trigger a thought and other memories will join it to manifest themselves in a revelation. I had such a revelation while listening to Prime Minister Mark Carney speak about how the middle nations would have to unite to keep them from being exploited by the superpowers.

My father was born in Canada to parents who had recently immigrated from Poland. He didn’t learn to speak English until he attended school and he quit school after Grade 9, not his choice but his father’s.

He went to work at the local steel mill at the age of 15. My father told me how he and the other workers would gather in front of the steel mill every morning. He relayed a memory of a typical winter morning and how a big black car would pull up and a man in a fur coat would get out and mount a raised platform.

The man would point out who would work that day and tell the others to go home. It was known that a chicken or vegetables delivered to his home on the weekend could influence his choices.

My dad said that this man was English, as were his other bosses and from the way they treated him he knew that they thought that they were better than him.

He said that with his limited knowledge and witnessing their privilege and finery he accepted this and thought that all English people enjoyed such status. That all changed when he went to war and was stationed in England. There he witnessed the poverty and the drudgery of their factory workers, who had no hope of ever rising above their station. He said that he has never forgotten a woman in the market dressed in rags with most of her teeth missing and a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Her situation was so alien to what he had imagined the residents of England would be.

He said he and his fellow soldiers returned to the steel mill with this knowledge, and the attitude that they were as good as the men that they worked for.

When the bosses proved slow to accept this, they formed a union and with its united strength, demanded to be treated with respect and fairness.

So how do I get from there to Carney’s speech? There was another step and it, too, involved my father.

Whenever I spoke disparagingly about someone less fortunate or even a criminal, my dad would say, “ A man’s a man.”

He would not elaborate, acting as if I should know what he meant.

Just the other day that phrase popped into my head and I decided to do a computer search.

What I came up with was a poem by Scottish poet Robbie Burns, written in the 1700s, entitled A man’s a man for a’ that or “A man’s a man for all of that.”

My father wasn’t educated and I am certain that he never read this poem, and yet it parallels his story. Burns wrote that the honest, hard-working but poor man can look at the gentry with all their finery and laugh at them. He can take pride in being honest and hard working.

Strip away the finery and indulgences of the rich and the two are equal; “A man’s a man.”

This all played into the revelation I had when I heard Carney’s speech in Davos, Switzerland.

He said in his opening “It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

Carney went on to describe how the middle powers must unite to keep from being exploited by the superpowers.

My revelation was that poor and middle-class Canadian workers are being exploited by super-rich individuals and corporations. These workers only have to watch TV or go on social media to see the riches and the finery the super rich indulge in.

These workers are now facing what my father faced in the 1940s and what Robbie Burns wrote about in the 1700s. But must they, the poor “suffer what they must”?

My opinion is that honest and hard working people have to stand proud as human beings equal to those exploiting them.

To be given the respect they deserve and a fair share of what their labour produces they must unite, and the best way to accomplish this is to unionize. The day might come when the super rich have the same revelation and unions won’t be necessary, but until then the workers must unite.

Stan Tataryn is a former member of the Winnipeg Police Service.