Dear Editor
A tip of my hat to Martha Carleton for the fine letter ("Rental rates harming families" News-Optimist, Sept. 14). In that rather brief but cogent letter she managed to highlight two timely issues: namely, the value of unions and the worsening financial position of low income families today. Of course those two issues are closely related.
Carleton points out that, in the past, she was barely able to make ends meet until she got unionized employment. From that time on, she was able to live in a measure of dignity and was even able to buy a small home for herself and her children. She later goes on to imply that for someone of low income today, it would be much more difficult. Wages have not kept up with the rising cost of living, especially the cost of having a place to live.
Hey, I thought we were living in boom times here in Saskatchewan! I keep hearing about how much wealth is being created here, especially from our natural resources. Many of us in the median-income category still live reasonably well so far, and a few at the top are almost obscenely wealthy, even though times are a lot tougher in other places, as in most of the United States and even in other Canadian provinces.
The Wall government has been in power for only a few years, and has not yet had time to do the kind of fiscal mismanagement that right wing governments usually do. After all, the Grant Devine government didn't finish digging us into a financial hole until after it received a second mandate from the voters. As Murray Mandryk of the Leader Post pointed out, the Wall government has been able to coast along to a large extent on fiscal policies in place from the previous NDP government.
The four anti-labour bills passed by the Wall government so far may, however, be a harbinger of things to come. In the United States, those southern states that enacted "right-to-work" legislation to cripple the unions there have, for a long time been the states with the lowest wages and worst working conditions for workers. They still are, although now, even many of the formerly more progressive states have also been passing anti-union legislation. The decades long campaign by the corporate elite and the super rich to destroy the unions is beginning to succeed.
In the kind of economy that depends so much on consumer spending, it isn't surprising that, as low and middle incomes go down, so goes the economy. Weakened unions and worsening standards of living overall are related issues.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
