Unscientific Gibberish from the Ontario
Government and Mass Media
The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) has released a report on Bill 124 which can only be described as an attempt to turn a pig's ear into a silk purse. Bill 124 was decreed as law by the cartel party government of Doug Ford in 2019. The decree directly attacks the wages of Ontario public workers. It imposes a cap on compensation of one per cent per year for three years, with the three-year period starting after the expiry of the collective agreement covering the affected workers.
The direct government assault on the wages of the working
class is
also an attack on social services, including health care and education.
Social services are labour intensive, meaning an attack on the workers
who provide the services is an attack on the services themselves. This
truth is clearly
evident in the Ontario health care system, which is in crisis.
The government launched its Bill 124 attack on the working class using an unscientific thesis. It asserts that the wages of public sector workers are a negative cost to the government and a drain on the provincial treasury. The thesis is based on the absurd notion that public sector workers do not produce value for the province and people.
In fact, the vast majority of public sector workers through their work-time produce enormous value in ways such as producing educated and healthy workers.
The value workers in the health care and education sectors produce becomes embedded in the capacity to work of educated and healthy people. Through their subsequent work-time, working people transfer this embedded value into the goods and services they produce.
Employers of the big imperialist enterprises refuse to acknowledge this social value within the capacity to work of the workers they employ. They refuse to pay for it even though the social value forms part of the price of production of the capacity to work they are buying. Both theoretically and practically they deny the existence of this social value. Their refusal means the public institutions responsible for producing the social value have to look elsewhere for payment, mainly from government revenue.
By refusing to realize (pay for) the social value of the capacity to work yet accepting payment for this value when they sell the finished product their workers produce, the employers seize the social value as profit beyond the added-value workers produce.
The government and FAO justify this scam and sweep it under the carpet by declaring the wages of public sector workers a so-called cost. The scam allows enterprises to profit from social reproduced-value they do not realize (pay for), and for employers to broaden their attack on the working class using the lie of wages as a cost of production.
The wages and benefits of public sector workers are the price they receive in return for selling their capacity to work to their employer. Workers then reproduce this payment as part of the new value they produce. The value they produce through their work includes the social value from social programs embedded in them and reproduced in the goods and services they create.
The FAO through its report declares in the most self-serving
manner that it estimates that Bill 124 and its restriction of public
sector wages "will save the Province a cumulative total of $9.7 billion
in salaries and wages costs for both unionized and non-unionized
Ontario Public Sector employees from the introduction of Bill 124 in
2019 through to 2026-27." The FAO's report was released one week after
hearings at the Supreme Court in which unions are challenging the
legislation's constitutionality.
The report can only be seen as an attempt to influence the court proceedings with projections about how much the legislation "saved" and if overturned how much will need to be repaid. The FAO, if it had any integrity at all, would say this money was stolen from the unpaid wages of public sector workers. They are producing the $9.7 billion in value and far more, which in turn is becoming part of the embedded social value in healthy and educated workers and is subsequently being reproduced in the goods and services they create through their work using the productive forces.
The enterprises employing the workers unjustly profit from this value in the same manner as if they were to refuse to pay for goods and services other businesses supply during the production process yet sell their social product at full value with the stolen transferred-value in the selling price.
Through the police powers of Bill 124, the government does not have to pay the $9.7 billion being stolen in wages and could use it in other ways, for example giving it to the global auto or battery monopolies in pay-the-rich schemes. At any rate, monopoly media are gloating about yet another successful attack on the working class and ran disgusting headlines in their newspapers. The Globe and Mail bleated, "Ontario wage cap bill could save province $9.7 billion, new report shows."
Ontario Bill 124 directly attacks the rights and well-being of almost 1 million public sector workers. It also denigrates the public services and social programs the people and society rely on for their existence. Workers cannot tolerate this attack on their rights and the social fabric of their society. Their action demanding wage increases agreeable to the workers who do the work directly challenges Bill 124. Higher wages and better working conditions ensure social services are constantly improved and receive the positive attention they deserve.
In addition to directly challenging the government attack on their right to wages and working conditions agreeable to themselves, public sector workers must question the refusal to realize the value public sector workers produce and why the big enterprises do not pay for the social value they consume. This value is then manipulated and used to promote the big lie that their wages are a cost to the province.
Workers should also bring under scrutiny an outmoded cartel party political system that allows workers' rights to be violated through police powers and social programs to be neglected. The police powers of Bill 124 have been unleashed against the working class with lies and a legislative veneer of respectability. The disinformation and veneer should be torn asunder and denounced.
By tearing off the smiling mask of police powers and demanding their rights be upheld, including wages agreeable to themselves, public sector workers prepare themselves and encourage others to participate in bringing into being the necessary historic political changes required. These are changes whereby working people themselves govern their sectors and society directly with new economic and political forms and exercise control over all affairs that affect their lives.
Let us together fight for wages agreeable to ourselves not those dictated by government!
This article was published in
Volume 52 Number 35 - October 26, 2022
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmld2022/Articles/D520353.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca