Corporations – The "True" North

Those who hate all things “woke” are targeting the wrong enemy. They attack trans people, Justin Trudeau, Black Lives Matter and anything related to diversity, equality and inclusion but they rarely, if ever, mention the entities that have done way more to mess up their lives – and restrict their “freedom”: corporations.

Take truckers for example. In February 2022, a bunch of them angrily occupied downtown Ottawa demanding an end to government COVID19 vaccine mandates. Many had F*&% Trudeau! signs and some of their leaders sought to overthrow the federal government in the name of “freedom”. However, none of them said anything about how the trucking companies they work for restrict their freedom. Why haven’t truckers tried to occupy Ottawa, or any other city, to protest the electronic logging devices (ELDs) federal regulation that came into force in January 2023 with the support of the trucking companies?

ELDs track a driver’s hours of service — the amount of time they can be behind the wheel on any given day. The regulation came into effect in June 2021 but Transport Canada only began enforcing it for certain commercial vehicle drivers, such as long-haul truckers, on Jan. 1, 2023. , ELDs have been required in the United States since 2017.

ELDs are billed as a way to make roads safer by keeping truckers accountable to their allowed hours of service. However, Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance says that the most vigorous study on the American rollout of ELDs showed they didn’t lead to any improvement in the most important safety outcomes. In fact, truck crashes didn’t decrease after the mandate began to be enforced—and for small carriers, they actually increased.

Furthermore, ELDs could be a canary in the coal mine for workplace surveillance experts say as they raise questions about what information employers are collecting about their workers. Levy says that the proliferation of ELDs has opened the doors for other monitoring systems that can monitor driving behaviours, like hard braking or swerving, and may include driver-facing cameras that use artificial intelligence to track eye movements and check for signs of drowsiness.

That seems like a way bigger attack on freedom than wearing a mask…

The May 1, 2023 Smart-Trucking.com article The Truck Driver Shortage – The Dirty Truth No One Talks About said, “The shortage of truck drivers is not due to the lack of individuals interested in becoming drivers. There are lots of potential drivers interested in becoming career truck drivers, but once many of them discover: the low pay, the lack of respect, the often poor working conditions, and the demands of the job – they abandon the idea.” These conditions have existed a lot longer than mask mandates so why haven’t we seen massive trucker protests against them? One reason might be that almost all truckers are men…

A quick reminder before proceeding that not all truckers supported the Ottawa occupation. CTV reported in January 2022 that “several trucking groups have also condemned the protests. The Canadian Trucking Alliance says nearly 85 per cent of drivers are fully vaccinated. Just before the convoy was about to kick off, the group said it “strongly disapproves of any protests on public roadways, highways, and bridges.””

The truckers who took part in the occupation were almost all white and it’s white heterosexual men who are leading the attack on all equity groups. Some blame women for their problems and fuel the popularity of men like Andrew Tate. But, as with most movements driven partly by anger, the reasons behind it are much more complex than the reasons offered by the movement’s leaders.

In his January 2023 New Yorker article What’s the Matter with Men?, Idress Kahloon writes, “Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.”

Kahloon cites the work of British American scholar of inequality and social mobility Richard V. Reeves from his latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. In the book Reeves argues that “the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn [have negatively impacted men]… Reeves sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates.”

In response to these very real and complex issues, people like Andrew Tate simply say “it’s women’s fault”. An April 2023 NewsWeek article quoted Tate promising to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” It also said he has been banned from Twitter twice for arguing that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted by men. Expressing this and similar views has earned his videos billions of views.

On the gender wage gap, Tate’s view isn’t what you might first think: that it’s justified because men deserve to be paid more. It’s that there isn’t one. It appears (and wouldn’t be surprising) that Tate hasn’t read either Kahloon’s article or Reeves’ book as they say there’s a gender pay gap and provide one very clear reason why. Kahloon writes, “Within occupations, there’s often no wage gap until women have children and reduce their work hours. “For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite,” Reeves observes. “For most men, it barely makes a dent.”” Tate, and all those like him, ignore these inconvenient, complex realities…probably because they don’t make for good YouTube videos. Tate, of course, doesn’t critique ideas of how to get rid of the wage gap because he doesn’t think one exists.

Kahloon does provide one solution for the wage gap from Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin who says the gender gap, “…would vanish if long, inflexible work days and weeks weren’t profitable to employers.” As expected, Tate doesn’t critique corporations’ role in maintaining the “non-existent” gender wage gap.

People like Tate and Jordan Peterson don’t criticize corporations at all. In fact, Peterson indirectly frames corporations as the victims by implicitly including them in his defence of organizations being targeted by what he sees as EDI zealots. As I said in my post Jordan Peterson wants us to shut up about D.I.E., deliver his Amazon packages and DIE, Peterson mistakenly accuses “equity-pushers” of claiming “that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systemic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) is definitely at play, and that there are perpetrators who should be limited or punished that have or are currently producing that prejudice.”

The only example I could find of Peterson critiquing corporations was him chastising CEOs for “lining up to kowtow at the D.I.E. altar.” But, similar to his critique of employment equity, what he’s critiquing isn’t really that much of a thing. Evidence shows that, in Canada, corporate EDI efforts have been largely reactive and performative. For example, the Globe and Mail has reported each year on the lack of success of the Black North Initiative which was launched in summer 2020 with the mission to get corporate Canada to Blacken up their C-suites. Little has changed in the C-suites but much has changed in the Black North Initiative’s stated mandate which is now, “..to end anti-Black systemic racism throughout all aspects of our lives by utilizing a business-first mindset.”

Why don’t Tate and Peterson critique those in corporate Canada who helped make men more insecure by causing unionization among men to fall by 16 per cent over the last 40 years according to Statistics Canada? (StatsCan says the percentage of employees who were union members in their main job fell from 38% in 1981 to 29% in 2022.)

But the more disturbing question is why do so many men uncritically consume Tate and Peterson’s content, much of which is so flawed? Could it be that what Tate and Peterson say allows them to blame anyone but them for their problems? If so, we gotta get far more effective at educating these guys on who to hate.

The non-stop simplistic “good vs evil ” coverage of the war in Ukraine has continued with some people, including Canada’s former foreign affairs minister Peter McKay, calling Vladimir Putin a psychopath and almost all media outlets framing the U.S. and its allies as the all round good guys. The media continues to ignore the role of multinational corporations in the events leading up to the war in Ukraine, some of which I covered in my post The U.S. has treated Ukraine – and Putin – kinda like it treats Black people.

This is a real change from 2003 when the movie The Corporation examined the behaviour of American corporations and found that they were the ones behaving like psychopaths. The film provided a definition from psychology’s Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The DSM-IV (it’s now on the 5th edition) said the symptoms of psychopathy included: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. The film explained that, due to an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. corporations were legally considered “persons” having the same rights as human beings. The film then examined corporate behaviour and showed that, if the corporations were actually people, they’d meet the definition of psychopaths.

Whether or not some, or many, multinational corporations are acting like full fledged psychos today, what is clear is that many are acting in ways that lead to people being harmed and killed – and that the mainstream media spends very little time covering it.

For example, as I said in one of my previous posts, the war in Ukraine was partly caused by the 2014, U.S.-backed removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych following his rejection of U.S. attempts to open Ukraine markets to giant multinational companies and his restarting negotiations with Russia. The negotiations included the International Monetary Fund pushing Ukraine to implement reforms that were friendly to corporations but very unfriendly to the Ukraine people, including cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), reforming and reducing health and education sectors…and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. (Bryce Green outlined this in his article What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.)

Corporations were also barely, if ever, mentioned by the protesters, governments or media during the wave of anti COVID measures protests that swept across Canada in February 2022. Despite declaring the protests were about “freedom”, the protesters focused their critique – and anger – exclusively on governments, mentioning almost nothing about the role corporations played in exacerbating the effects of the pandemic on many of the most vulnerable workers. They didn’t critique the companies caught red handed giving the pandemic money they got from the government out to their shareholders like long term care home giant Extendicare. They didn’t critique Amazon for imposing on the “freedom” (and right) of its workers to safe working conditions by firing employees who spoke up about unsafe conditions. (The mainstream media did cover one major story that grew out of this: the successful formation of Amazon’s first union at its Staten Island warehouse by former Amazon worker Christian Smalls.)

The convoy protesters also said nothing about the big Canadian banks.

However, unlike the protesters and the mainstream media, the Government of Canada addressed corporations, including the big banks, directly in its recently released 2022 Budget. The government took some of the strongest action in recent years to make corporations – including Big Tech – pay their fair share of taxes by taxing excess pandemic profits, increasing the corporate tax rate (although only on banking and life insurance companies) and closing several corporate tax loop holes. This is probably partly because the deal between the governing Liberals, who have a minority, and the New Democratic Party, included tax measures, but they’re good steps whatever the reason.

The government went after the big Canadian banks in particular because it said the banks’ made huge pandemic profits partly because of measures the government took that benefited the banks. Budget 2022 said, “While many sectors continue to recover, Canada’s major financial institutions made significant profits during the pandemic and have recovered faster than other parts of our economy—in part due to the federal pandemic supports for people and businesses that helped de-risk the balance sheets of some of Canada’s largest financial institutions.” The government also wanted to curb outright tax avoidance by the banks. On that, Budget 2022 “proposes to examine potential changes to the financial transaction approval process to limit the ability of federally regulated financial institutions to use corporate structures in tax havens to engage in aggressive tax avoidance.”

In my post It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture, I pointed out that the ones actually doing the cancelling are the big media corporations that cancel people’s shows or their hosting opportunities – not people calling out celebrities on Twitter. But it’s the corporations’ bad behaviour that needs to be called out and cancelled, and it’s good to see the Canadian government taking strong first steps to cancel corporations’ ability to avoid paying their taxes.

The other bad corporate behaviour is using things like the war in Ukraine and the pandemic to raise prices more than actually needed. Do you notice that all the media stories about prices are framed like prices just go up on their own – and don’t say who’s actually raising them? This line from an April 20, 2022 CTV story is typical, “With Canada’s annual inflation at its highest point in over 30 years, experts say Canadians can anticipate their cost of living to increase significantly, warning that prices will likely not decrease for some time.”

Canadians need to ask companies to justify their price increases. And workers need to follow the lead of Ontario carpenters and strike if their employers aren’t willing to raise wages to meet the high cost of living. On Monday, May 9, CityNews reported that 15,000 workers went on strike at 12:01 a.m after they overwhelmingly rejected the latest offer from their employers in the industrial, commercial and institutional (ICI) sector.

Power to the people.