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Its agreement — which still must be ratified and will act as a model for talks with Ford and Chrysler — leaves public-service unions even more isolated as the privileged child of the Canadian workforce. Union membership has fallen dramatically throughout the industrialized world, to a quarter of the British workforce, barely 10 per cent in the U.S. and under one in five in Australia. In Canada, the rate is about 30 per cent, but that broad figure is profoundly misleading, as it mixes membership of less than 15 per cent in the private sector with one above 75 per cent in the public sector. To be a union member is close to synonymous with being paid by the public purse.

The gap in their treatment is growing, especially when it comes to pensions. It’s not just that six in every seven government employees get one, against just one in four in private employ. It’s that five of every six government employees receive a defined-benefit pension, against just one in seven elsewhere.

Unions still like to insist members can get more out of “the system” than they pay into it, if only they remain sufficiently united against “greed,” at least in other people. But it is a fantasy. If productive commercial enterprises engaged in creating value through skill and innovation cannot survive while paying guaranteed retirement incomes, there is no sensible argument for governments to do so, using levies on taxpayers who themselves receive lesser benefits.

I am not holding my breath hoping for governments to accept this reality, but everyone else needs to. The danger is not that Canadians will come to see teachers, police and bureaucrats as pampered parasites. It is that they will be right to do so, and increasingly angry about it.

Unifor has seen the light, dimly. It’s time governments and their employees saw it, too. There is no free lunch, and you can’t keep eating someone else’s.

National Post