Organised Labours’ Last Gasp
One can’t but feel sorry for the legions of unionised workers who are out on strike or are being urged to picket lines by militant leaders. The challenge facing the unions today is far greater than trying to retain pre-recession job perks during the worst economic slump in a generation. As I write in my book Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto the social forces threatening the existence of unions are on an order of magnitude many times larger than the outsourcing of goods and services in a globalised world.
What the union brass have not told their rank and file members is that Canada is on the verge of a demographic revolution that will transform the nature of work in our society and do so to the lasting detriment of unionised labour.
The opening salvo in the demographic blitzkrieg that will sweep away trade unions as we currently know them will occur on January 1st, 2012, when the first baby boomer born in Canada retires. In subsequent years, the exodus of boomers from the work force will accelerate, and rapidly, given that we experienced one of the largest postwar baby booms of any developed nation.
The economic impact of the mass retirement of the boomers is further compounded by our historically flaccid birth rates. Since the late 1960s families have been having less children than is required for population replacement. And, as a slew of studies have shown, immigration has had a negligible impact on the increasingly decrepit age structure of our society as a whole.
These two relentless trends – surging numbers of retires and stagnant population growth – will shrink an already unhealthy ratio of four workers for every retiree today to three workers per each retiree by 2025.
It is the loss of this fourth worker over the course of the next fifteen years that will usher in a revolution in the Canadian workplace.
For employers, especially in the public sector, the pressure to increase workforce efficiency will soon be overwhelming. The reality is that by having ever more retirees claiming benefits as compared to workers contributing to pension and healthcare costs there will be little, if any, financial leeway for the kind of tomfoolery that has seen the City of Toronto provide its workers with 18 sick days a year along with countless other perks.
In short, we are fast moving into an era where the various kinds of organised underemployment that riddles union agreements today will be a financial impossibility as the ratio of workers to retirees remorselessly tightens.
In a Canada economically stressed by sweeping demographic change the position of the worker vis-à-vis their employer will also be transformed in ways that undermine the traditional roles of organised labour.
For starters, work will be abundant and workers in short supply. As a result the marketplace will become a far more powerful vehicle for workers to extract concessions from employers than collective bargaining. In the decade to come if you don’t like the terms of your employment there will be a plethora of business competing for the economic output you can generate.
The coming era of labour scarcity will impact public service unions hardest of all. Governments are already starting to realise that their only hope in coping with the costs of a rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce is to drive up productivity, and to do so significantly. Employing, as we do, ever larger numbers workers in the public sector has the obvious opposite effect.
For reasons of fiscal survival all levels of government will have to shrink the size of their public service unions to ensure what workers are available are employed by a necessarily more productive and dynamic private sector.
This summer we are witnessing the last gasps of a trade union movement born of the demographics that defined Canada’s past: rapid population growth, pervasive underemployment, surfeits of tax paying workers and a comparative lack of benefit consuming retirees. As the old saying goes demographics is destiny and the trade union movement is just surely part of our country’s past as rapid demographic change is our future.
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