Union penetration in BC is still about 35% of the workforce even under the withering attack of Gordon Campbell's BC "Liberal" government. It seems every public service and public corporation in this province is for sale in a really ham-handed attempt at union busting. BCHydro, (or whatever it is called now) the electric utility, had its billing function sold off to Accenture, the ex Arthur Andersen, Bermuda based company.
Canadians of my acquaintance generally tolerate Americans, despise the US government but have a strange fascination with their southern neighbor, a kind of Disneyland with greenbacks thing. Even though the rising Canadian dollar is hurting manufacturing /export business (and costing jobs), a lot of the folks I know here dream of the day when they can tour the US with the CDN$ at par.
Steve
Penticton, BC
Message: 15 From: JBrown72073 at cs.com Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 09:48:03 EST Subject: [lbo-talk] Re:What should prospective Canadian Managers know... To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>>If I were describing American world views to an alien from another planet,
>>your suggestions would be perfect, but given that Canadians have an almost
>>smug sense of moral superiority - I fear that this would only be setting
>>them up for an ass-kicking when they are older. Now I can solve this
>>problem myself, to tell the Canadian Students to get over
>>themselves. However, now I fear that I might be encouraging them to sell
>>out their moral standards in the pursuit of material wealth, i.e. They
>>can be poor and feel morally superior or they can be rich and try to
>>accommodate their American peers.
>
>
Alrighty then. How 'bout assigning them excerpts of Robert Justin Goldstein's Political Repression in Modern America from 1870 to 1976 to show that while everyone thinks U.S. workers are a bunch of wimps and sycophants (cause we live in such a "free" society, see? so we should be able to organize, right?) we're really not. If we had Canadian labor law we'd have Canadian unionization rates.
Jenny Brown