I ran into Frank Hasenfratz in the check-out line at Sobey's once. He picked up a couple pork chops on the way home, on instructions from the missus, no doubt. You have to like a billionaire who pops into the grocery and buys his own pork chops.
The wave of pollocks, dagos, krauts and other assorted dp's who washed into Canada from a broken Europe after the war became the niggers of southern Ontario's manufacturing economy. But not for long. The period from the 50's until the 70's saw a booming economy. The living standards of working people achieved a level not seen before or since. Many of the new arrivals found an environment full of opportunities they could never have imagined back home.
A lot of these men started businesses. Some of these businesses, over time, made their owners very wealthy. There are at least half a dozen major land-development and construction companies in the Toronto area alone started by guys who got off the boat carrying all their worldly goods under one arm, and over the course of a lifetime of hard work and good luck made enough money to keep their children and their children's children in cocaine and Porsches in perpetuity. Social mobility wasn't just hoary claptrap dreamed up by the apologists for industrial capitalism. It was a real possibility.
Frank started a little machine shop in his garage. He worked his ass off. The little business prospered. He built a little factory in the field beside his house. By the time I was old enough to drop out of high-school, Frank's little factory was already making a name for itself in a labour market dominated by General Electric and Imperial Tobacco. The name it was making wasn't necessarily all that great, but it was a place where a 16 year old could get a couple of years of work experience before getting on with one of the big and much better paying outfits.
By the end of the 70's it had become fashionable, among people who get paid to study work instead of doing any, to assume that the good times would continue forever. We were becoming a leisure society, don't you know! The coming computer revolution would lead to all sorts of innovations. More and more of our work was going to be done by robots. Happy days were here to stay!
The problem with labour-saving devices isn't so much the fact that they save labour, but what you do with the labour you save. Every back-hoe throws a hundred ditch-diggers out of work. As long as there's something else for them to do, that's not a problem.
Frank's factory had by now grown to a family of factories. Frank was considering going public. He gave his employees a chance to buy shares before the IPO. Quite a few of them went for it. Local lore has it that a number of those 16 year old dropouts became millionaires buying into Frank's business.
While Frank was going public Brian Mulroney was dazzling the nation with his jobs jobs jobs NAFTA NAFTA NAFTA campaign. If you shout complete shit long enough and loud enough it eventually has a hypnotizing effect. Jobs jobs jobs NAFTA NAFTA NAFTA. Part of the magic must have been Mulroney's voice, that smooth mellow baritone. When he crooned that jobs jobs NAFTA song the people swooned. Then they voted the old sleazebag into the prime minister's office.
The rest, as they say, is history. Mexico got the jobs, just as everybody who wasn't mesmerized by Mulroney's voice had predicted. Most of the high-end manufacturing jobs have left the city. Frank's non-union, low-wage factories have long since become the biggest industrial employer in Guelph. The General Electric plant changed hands a couple of times until ABB closed it, noting that it was consistently unprofitable. They haven't been closing their Mexican operations, so I guess those must still be profitable. When Imperial Tobacco closed its factory in 2005, throwing close to 600 workers into the street, their press release helpfully noted that the workers in their Mexican plant make one sixth the wage of their Canadian employees.
Frank's family of factories now employs about 12,000 people in five or six countries. They've recently added 800 jobs at one of their Mexican plants. Frank hasn't forgotten his roots. I saw a picture of him in the paper getting an award for creating jobs for new immigrants. They were being trained, with a generous government wage subsidy, to run computerized machining centres. Not mentioned in the article was the fact that each machining centre replaces four or five or more skilled machinists. So you get rid of a bunch of higher-wage high-skill guys, replace them with a handful of unskilled low-wage folks, and get a job creation award to boot!
The article didn't mention what happened to the skilled machinists, but I guess that's their problem.
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