By Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
The great thing about socialists is their eagerness to save the world and make everyone's life better by using other people's money to pay for it. So it is with their most recent attempt at harvesting votes from the vast sea of oppressed Canadian workers that a plan to give all workers in this country four weeks of paid holidays is being floated.
It's not enough that Canadian jobs are emigrating to China and India because of the average Canadian worker's poor productivity; now the Green Party wants to accelerate that process by making the country even more unproductive.
Never to look too closely at what's happening in other countries that have similar labor policies, the Greens are ready to jump onto the poverty bandwagon with a vengeance. So if their ideas regarding paid holidays see the light of day, then we can count on our unemployment rate doubling or tripling in the very near future. But then, while they say it's about common people, it's more about luring common people into subscribing to a policy, if enacted, will result in the loss of many jobs. And the reason behind it is simply the attainment of power, the ability to become players in the national field.
If we want to know how the Greens' plan would affect our economy, all we need to do is look at Europe, where unemployment is currently hovering at some 12%. On the surface Europe appears to be the workers' paradise as cradle to grave care is provided by the nanny state. Yet the lot of individual Europeans is far from the ideal. Job satisfaction among European workers is substantially lower than among American workers despite the former's shorter workweek and longer vacation times. Psychosocial work-related factors such as low social support and low job satisfaction are among the major causes of low back pain among European workers, according to a European Occupational Safety and Health report, which claims upward of 90% of European workers take time off work due to low back pain.
So, if European workers work shorter hours and get longer vacation times why is their satisfaction level so much lower than North American workers? And why is it that there are 18 million unemployed workers in Europe, five million of which are under the age of 25? Unemployment has come to be known as "the European disease" as since the 1970s there have been 45 million new jobs created in the U.S., while only eight million new jobs were created in Europe during the same period. What's worse, most of those eight million new jobs are in the public sector. Europe is dying a social and economic death in large part because of failed social and economic policies. The Green Party's siren song about emulating Europe's labour climate can only result in a similar fate for Canada.
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