Who do you think has the best interests of society in mind through the work they do: public servants like teachers OR those who make the big decisions for private industry?
This would make for an interesting poll.
We live in an era where much of the effort done by people who work on behalf of the public good is denigrated. A focus on accountability has arisen mainly because public servants are paid from public monies, and we are living during a long tax-cut craze. (Indeed, it is sadly ironic that the politicians who put down public servants are also paid from our taxes.)
This would make for an interesting poll.
We live in an era where much of the effort done by people who work on behalf of the public good is denigrated. A focus on accountability has arisen mainly because public servants are paid from public monies, and we are living during a long tax-cut craze. (Indeed, it is sadly ironic that the politicians who put down public servants are also paid from our taxes.)
The end result is that public sector employees are
now held accountable for all that they do. The work of healthcare workers,
social workers, government employees and especially teachers have all been put
under public scrutiny.
If regulating the public sector is what the public
truly wants, I accept it. (I can certainly agree with regulating the spending
habits of Harper’s Senate appointees!)
I want to make the case, however, that regardless
of the extent to which we regulate the public sector, we must
reverse the trend of deregulating the private sector.
This trend began about 30 years ago with the onset
of an economic paradigm that began to replace the social welfare policies of
Keynesian economics. What used to be called the corporate agenda, academics and
some journalists now refer to as neoliberalism. (Neoliberalism, by contrast,
is very similar to the laissez faire economics prevalent during the Industrial
Revolution.)
On the domestic front, neoliberalism has four main
tenets: corporate tax cuts, union-busting, privatizing the commons, and
deregulating industry. All four are the antithesis of what constitutes a civil
society, but it is the last point I want to discuss.
Let’s look at a few examples of what deregulation
of the private sector, or its spin-off, self-regulation, has brought us.
In the 1980s, British Prime Minister and neoliberal
cheerleader Maggie Thatcher pushed for the British meat industry to regulate
itself. Not long afterward, self-regulation of the meat industry led to Mad
Cow Disease, several deaths, and a near collapse of the British meat
industry.
Getting rid of public meat inspectors has also
caused much suffering in Canada in recent years. In 2008, the Listeriosis
Outbreak at Maple Leaf Foods in Toronto led to the deaths of 20
people. Four years later, a serious E. Coli Outbreak occurred at XL Foods
in Alberta.
In 1996, the Ontario Progressive Conservative
government privatized the regulation of water quality. A few years later, an E.
Coli outbreak caused the Walkerton Catastrophe – seven people died and
approximately 5000 people became seriously ill. The subsequent inquiry blamed
the Ontario government for abdicating the regulation of water quality.
Who would disagree that food-and-water safety is
important enough for government regulations?
In April 2010, deregulation led to the deaths of 11
workers on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The Gulf of Mexico has still
not recovered from the more than 200 million gallons of crude oil that leaked
into it for 87 straight days.
This past July, 42 deaths resulted from a Train
Derailment in Lac Megantic, Quebec. Half of the downtown was completely
destroyed. Deregulation allowed the rail company MMA to employ only one worker
to oversee the maneuvering and parking of a 74-car freight train carrying
fracked crude oil from North Dakota. Rather than pay to help the townspeople,
the US-based MMA declared bankruptcy.
The most egregious example of corporate greed,
however, resulted from the decision of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan to
deregulate the American financial industry. This led to the Sub-Prime
Mortgage Crisis of 2007-08, which, lest we forget, brought the world’s
economy perilously close to complete collapse.
These are only a few of the many many examples of
the chaos caused by deregulation of the private sector.
It does not make any sense to regulate the public
sector while the private sector is deregulated. For the sake of public health
and safety, it is at least as important to regulate the private sector.