Who's Runnin The Show Anyway?

Who’s Runnin’ The Show Anyway?

According to press releases, P.M. Harper is peeved at the government for their inability to train skilled workers to fill thousands of vacancies that companies are begging to fill in Canada, and that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well what? Did he and his whole gang fall asleep again, or were they just not listening (again)? How many times do I gotta tell them for crimeny sakes?

Remember last fall when the tuition protests came up in Quebec? I told them then in no uncertain terms what should be done – that the companies hiring these post secondary students should pay the tuition, making it free to the students they would then hire. That would put them in the power seat of directing the labor force to their needs. Pretty simple, right? Obviously not. I don’t know who’s pushing that wheelbarrow full of rusty hammers. Ain’t nobody who knows how to steer the damn thing because the students are out there picketing again.

If you talk to the unions, you’d think that they’re the ones who run things in this town. Well obviously they do, otherwise you wouldn’t have so many vacancies in the labor trades market. Talk about shootin’ yerself in the foot. I don’t know who they were tryin’ to serve when they managed to change the ratio of apprentice to journeyman from four to one, to one to one. It was good for the tradesmen at the time, securing their employment, but now that they’re all retiring, there’s only a quarter of the skilled workers to take their places. The unions and management should’a had the spider webs removed from their brains a little earlier in the game.

Well you can’t really blame the workers. All they want is to be able to work and earn a decent living. But did you ever notice how they manage to have their union meetings on a Thursday or Friday evening – about 8:00p.m. after the members have had a chance to swallow down a few beers. That’s no accident. By the time the meeting gets started, the workers all think they own the company(s). So it’s quite easy for the union bosses to get a mandate to ask for the moon on behalf of their members. That’s how they keep their high payin’ jobs.

There ain’t no point in goin’ into the pile o’ meadow muffins that constitutes “labor negotiations”. That’s a whole new stack o’ manure.  But what I’m gettin’ at is that we have to import workers from overseas to do our work for us. Just the other day I saw a bunch of Irishmen at a pub in Saskatchewan, beltin’ back a few Guinness’s. They were brought over by the Saskatchewan government to fill some skilled labor jobs that couldn’t otherwise be filled. They were happy as could be, makin’ more money than back home, an’ Saskatchewan is a nice friendly place. Their employer even gave them the day off after St. Patrick’s Day. What more could they want? The Rough Riders wear green jerseys, and there’s even that tree somewhere near Regina or Saskatoon somewheres. But we can’t fill those jobs with Canadians. What the H E Double hockey sticks!

Well, it’s a little bit like the animals steerin’ the ark, while Noah has a good long nap. They ain’t never gonna find Mount Ararrat that way. They couldn’t even find Mount Arafat if there was one. If the Feds an’ the provincial governments got together an’ put the boots to management, the education system, and labor unions, they could easily get the job done. But you try tellin’ them that. What in the world would they do without their public enquiries or due diligence studies and all that political stuff? At least, that’s how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin’.