Unions and their Righteous Leftlean

It is passing strange that unions, once devised as a united strategem to support workers in a worker-adverse business environment have evolved as self-proclaimed champions of the underdog. It does, in a way, fit, that vision of assisting those who are the weakest, the most vulnerable, the unacknowledged, the overlooked - since that is precisely what unions were set up to do, but in a working environment. They've simply extended their mandate, improbable as the fit may be, to include a geographical/political/social/cultural outlook.

And certainly there are instances when the might of a collective like a union can be useful when it registers its concern at the plight of people who cannot by matters beyond their control, enable themselves to improve their inadequate circumstances. Unions can be mighty useful tools, they can exert moral pressure by the sheer strength of their numbers, they can use the collective funds they amass for investment in areas where the beneficiaries are those whom they seek to assist.

Leadership, needless to say, is everything in this context. With a clear vision, an objectively keen appreciation of circumstances of unfairness and a determination to liberate others from particular miseries visited upon them, a union's collective can accomplish what other groups cannot. When a personal agenda overtakes objectivity and the ability to see matters in the round of intelligent introspection, however, things can go badly awry. Then the group begins championing a skewed, one-sided and unfair vision with an unsavoury agenda.

There will always be social and political situations where one side of an argument will be supported by some as genuinely legitimate, and rejected by others as being simplistically shallow. Here was a motion put forward by two members of a local union of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation which would have the union pass a formal and critical condemnation of the State of Israel over its perceived mistreatment of the Palestinians. As though that was the story in and of itself; that the leadership of a State saw fit to treat a population outside its borders with contempt leading to brutal maltreatment.

This same motion might have been extended by its movers to include teaching a one-sided curriculum in a public school system structured by its self-interested and biased leaders to inform young people in one country of the brutal apartheid regime of another country. That this kind of incendiary and egregiously ill-informed point of view could even be entertained as a possible outcome through a free vote of this union is beyond understanding.

Two teachers with a private agenda targeting a country far from their own, presuming to know all the vital details involved in a decades-old, intractible social and political problem between two disparate cultures, traditions, religions and societies each claiming ownership of a geographical placement. Wiser heads and fairness, in the end, prevailed, but left behind a decidedly bad taste, a frightening spectre of personal manipulation of an institution whose mandate is to teach young people about their place in the world around us.

Had these two teachers been successful the result would unquestionably have been a separating in our society, a distrust and abhorrence of its Jewish population. Both Canadian students and its Jewish population deserve better than to be made pawns in this socially-divisive and obviously corrupted manner.