12 June 2, 2012 - ObserverXtra

10 | COMMENT
COMMENT
Our VIEW / EDITOrIaL
A cautionary tale
of wages out of
sync with reality
If, lIke many CanadIans, you stopped
somewhere for coffee this morning, chances
are the person who served you isn’t earning a
healthy stipend for his or her troubles. That is
unless you stopped by the Tim Hortons at Newfoundland’s
Health Sciences Centre, which has
been staffed by public-sector workers making
$28 an hour.
“How is that possible?” you ask. Because it made sense
to bureaucrats in the public sector. Until this week, that
is, when hospital announced it was turning the operation
over to the private sector. Why? Because the coffee shop lost
$260,000 last year. Why? Because employees were making
$28 an hour.
A nice wage, but hardly the way to run an operation that
was intended to provide the hospital with some $300,000
in annual profits when it was installed in the facility back in
1995. Instead, there’s been mounting losses.
“Let me tell you why [the hospital franchise loses money],”
Vickie Kaminski, the authority’s president and CEO, told
reporters on Tuesday. “We charge you a $1.94 for that large
coffee, but we insist that the staff who are pouring the coffee
are Eastern Health staff, and they get paid $28 an hour. No
Tim Hortons pays that.”
True. And the average Tim Hortons restaurant reportedly
generates $265,000 in profits. It does so typically by paying
its employees minimum wage.
Critics this week jumped on the revelation as an indication
of wasteful spending in the public sector, asking what other
inefficiencies await discovery. If something as idiot proof as
a Tim Hortons franchise loses money, what’s happening in
the much more complicated parts of the health-care system?
This is surely a cautionary tale. A reminder of what happens
when bureaucracies expand, and ever-increasing pay
scales continue to grow, regardless of job type, skills, inflation,
the tax burden or any other rationale measure that
should be taken into consideration.
There’s a parallel here with the recent hire at Woolwich
Township, where an administrative assistant’s position is
paying in the neighbourhood of $50,000 a year – less, officials
might point out, than the $56,000 doled out on an
annualized basis for those lucky coffee servers at the Health
Sciences Centre in St. John’s. As with the Tim Hortons employees,
the job is paying well above comparable jobs in the
private sector.
Statistics indicate a growing gap between civil service
wages and the average earning of private sector employees.
The discrepancy is likely to increase, as average industry
wages will remain stagnant or decline dramatically in some
industries as layoffs take hold – look at what’s happening
with RIM, to name just one.
Yet, as we’ve seen in this area, government employees continued
to receive multi-year deals worth, on average, three to
four per cent a year. With no bottom line – politicians seem
to have few qualms about dipping deeper on their repeated
trips to the well – governments simply pass the increases
along to a public forced to pay taxes, a far cry from the situation
faced in the private sector.
This is not simply a tirade against government workers.
We want services, so we need people to provide them. Those
people should be paid a decent living wage. The trick will
be to decide what services we really need – hint, fewer than
we’re spending money on right now – and what constitutes
“decent.”
ThE VIEW frOM hErE
WOrLD VIEW / GWYNNE DYEr
WORLD
AFFAIRS
“There is no doubt that
the (Syrian) government
used artillery and tanks (in
Houla),” said Russia’s foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov
on Monday. But then he
added: “There is also no
doubt that many bodies
have been found with injuries
from firearms received
at point-blank range. We
are dealing with a situation
where both sides participated
in the killings of innocent
civilians.”
Russia is at last admitting
that Syria is using
heavy weapons against its
own civilian population. It
could hardly do less, given
the scale of Saturday’s
massacre in the village of
Taldou in the Houla region:
at least 108 civilians killed,
including 49 children. But
while other countries are
expelling Syrian ambassadors,
Lavrov is still trying
to spread the blame
in order to protect Bashir
al-Assad’s regime from foreign
intervention.
While some of the victims
in Houla were killed
THE OBSERVER | SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 2012
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With hiring practices and wage levels in need of scrutiny, Woolwich council has thus far refused to ask questions, let alone demand answers.
Assad opts for murder rather than lose power
by shellfire, others had
been shot at close range
or knifed to death. Assad’s
propagandists insist that
the fighters of the Syrian
opposition (the “armed terrorist
gangs,” as the regime
calls them) massacred their
own people with rifles and
knives in order to put the
blame on the government,
and Russia is actively promoting
the same story. But
it is nonsense, and Lavrov
must know it.
The testimony of eyewitnesses
is consistent: after
two hours of shelling by
the Syrian army, armed
men belonging to the
pro-government Shabiha
militia entered the village
and went door to door killing
suspected activists and
their families. The government
in Damascus doesn’t
care that everybody knows
it’s lying: the whole point
of the massacre is to terrify
Syrians into submission,
and it knows that NATO
will not intervene.
The victims murdered
in Houla last weekend
are only one per cent of
the Syrian citizens killed
by their own government
since the anti-regime protests
began in March of last
year, but some people hope
that this will be a turning
point in foreign attitudes
to Assad. They even talk
about it as a “mini-Srebrenica.”
That was the slaughter
of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian
forces in 1995 that finally
persuaded the NATO
countries to use force
against Slobodan Milosevic,
the dictator of Serbia,
but it’s not going to happen
here. The brazen effrontery
of the Assad regime in perpetrating
such a massacre
even after United Nations/
Arab League monitors have
entered the country shows
how confident it is that the
Western alliance will not
use force against him.
NATO will not go beyond
empty threats because it
cannot get the support of
the United Nations Security
Council for using force
against Assad’s regime (the
Russians and the Chinese
would veto it), and because
the Syrian armed forces are
so big and powerful that
it would suffer significant
losses if it attacked.
If there is no foreign
military intervention, then
Syria is heading into a prolonged
civil war like Lebanon’s
in 1975-1990: the ethnic
and religious divisions
in Syria are quite similar
to those in Lebanon. If the
Syrian regime understands
that, then why does it persist
in killing the protesters?
Because it reckons that
fighting a prolonged civil
war is better than losing
power now.
The pro-democracy
protests in Syria began
soon after the triumph of
the Egyptian revolution in
February 2011, and for six
months they remained entirely
non-violent despite
savage repression by the
regime. (By last September,
Assad’s forces had already
murdered about 3,000
Syrian civilians.) And so
long as the demonstrations
stayed non-violent, the vision
of a Syrian democracy
embracing all sects and
ethnic groups remained
viable.
Assad’s strategy for
survival had two main
thrusts. One was to divide
the opposition. At the
start the protests included
Christians, Druze, and
even some people from
Assad’s own community,
the Alawites. He needed
to separate those minority
groups from the majority
DYER | 12