Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon, ordered workers back to work after it was determined that Canada Post and CUPW were unlikely to reach a deal by the end of the year. Of course, we are all happy to have mail delivery begin again. But criminalizing legal strikes by workers perfectly underscores the neoliberal ruling elite’s turn to authoritarianism whenever it feels threatened by unions that represent worker rights or fight for mail delivery as a public service rather than a for-profit Amazon venture that enriches the few at the expense of the many. This strike happened not because postal workers are lazy or greedy but because the postal system is overcrowded with stupid profligate managers schooled in modern neoliberal economics who believe that public utilities should be run like Amazon.
According to their financial reports, from 2017 to 2023, non-labour spending increased by over one billion dollars per year, a 56.5% jump. During the same period, workers' wages only grew by 14.1%. and for the last few years, Canada Post has not contributed to pensions. The post office is not in debt because of worker wages or benefits but because of the mismanagement and overspending by Canada Post management. CUPW suggested several initiatives to enhance Canada Post’s services, including expanding services to include postal banking and check-in services, developing an efficient e-commerce platform for small and medium-sized Canadian businesses, and introducing new delivery services. All of these were rejected. Instead, Canada Post maintains they want a more ‘flexible’ workforce—or in real language a more exploitable workforce. This is the reality under neoliberalism—starve public utilities until they become unable to provide reasonable service and then argue that the private sector can do it all more cheaply and efficiently.
What the neoliberal governments want to do is hire more gig part-time workers—‘Amazonify’ the workforce. What is disheartening though perhaps not surprising is that CUPW and the CLC did not resist this anti-union move, even though widespread support existed among the rank and file to defy the order. It was a complete surrender. Had postal workers been encouraged to defy the strike ban, it might have encouraged a broader working-class revolt against austerity. Why? Why is this not surprising? I would argue that it is not surprising for the same reason it is not surprising to see what were once left or socialist political parties move gradually towards conservative, even neoliberal thinking.
Here’s the reality: The idea that the problem with the economy is just too much government spending completely ignores the fact that for 50 fucking years, politicians have been doing exactly what businesses, the Chamber of Commerce, banks, and conservative voters have been telling them to do.
They have cut taxes.
They have cut social spending.
They have reduced investments in infrastructure.
They have eliminated regulations and laws that get in the way of corporate profit.
They have privatized and sold off government-owned businesses and services.
They have enacted austerity, laid off government workers and criminalized labour strikes
Put simply, economic decisions have been handed off to the private sector at the request of the private sector. This is not something ordinary citizens opted into or voted for. It is something that has been gradually imposed through successive governments beginning in the mid-seventies.
None of this neoliberal enshittification is based on reason or evidence of any kind. The complete abandonment of Keynesian economics instead has meant that elected governments are no longer allowed to run the sort of deficits needed to stimulate the economy. Instead, the management of the economy is left to central banks, who orient their policies around the monetary aggrandizement of an elite corporate class.
Indeed, we now have laws punishing politicians who don't balance budgets. We all know how this asinine libertarian scheme has worked out--and it was certainly not in the interest of ordinary working people. The Friedmanites promised us that giving over the economy to private enterprise and the greedy would result in greater freedom and prosperity for all. Instead, we have the worst inequality and greatest concentration of wealth in history.
But since the power of propaganda lies exclusively with the elite class any challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy ends in shrill cries of socialism, Marxism, or communism. Indeed, the neoliberal class is steeped in a kind of religious zealotry that calls out anyone who disagrees with them as a heretic to be excommunicated or made a pariah. Higher prices and inflation aren’t blamed on corporate monopolies or cartels that collude to jack up prices: they’re blamed on the idea that the government somehow gave people so much money that customers are in bidding wars over the price of groceries.
The reality is that neoliberal economists are charlatans, but their ridiculous, evidence-free irrational ideas are believed by lots of people with the result that no matter who gets elected, we are, as that bloated fathead Larry Summers once said “Any honest Democrat will admit that we are all now Friedmanites."
One is reminded of something Carl Sagan once said:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
But that, folks, is where we are today with enshittified global neoliberal economics.
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