Why Benefits Matter

When you listen to the Conservative's government hate campaign against the Canadian public service, who want to cut out benefits and sick days, undermine the ability of workers to refuse potentially dangerous or hazardous work, think of this:

Hate and dissent is like butter. It's very easy to spread and once it does spread, it's really hard to un-spread. It's a lot easier to spread the misery to the masses, feed them the image of fat, bloated, lazy civil servants, than it is for the government to attack your neighbours, the real people who work in the public service. The hardworking, tax-paying families who go out for a beer on Thursday are the real people who work in the public service, just people trying to make a living and do a little better than the rest. But instead of thinking of it that way, it's just easier to paint them all with the same lazy brush- as if sick days were a luxury and refusing dangerous work was a sign of 'lack of initiative'.

This hate-mongering is a tool used by the elites. Anyone who knows anything about history knows this for a fact. The top 1% always manages to keep more of their wealth by not sharing with the masses, seeding discord amongst them and letting them fight each other for the scraps like snarling dogs under the dinner table. As long as we fight each other under the table, we're never going to be the people who sit at it.

The thing that elites fear the most is seeing the underpriviledged gather together and fight for a greater or equal share of the wealth.

They know this, so their hate campaign is relentless. Where is all this hate going to lead? The Dark Ages. The more it spreads, the more it affects all other sectors of employment. Stripping workers of their rights at the highest level of the mid-income people is going to lead to a situation where there are going to be less and less for the lower level people as well. The only people who will benefit are the people who already benefit the most and they will steamroll everyone else as long as they can. There is no limit to how deep in the mud they will push our faces in with their boots.

Benefits are hard won and they need to be protected for the sake of all workers. We should be working harder to keep benefits and to spread them around to others. Because we all know that there's more than enough misery to go around.