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The Citizen, 1990-10-24, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1990. PAGE 5. Lottomania strikes again The lottery: a tax on fools. Henry Fielding Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. A few weeks ago the newspapers carried a photograph that said more about the idiocy of lotteries than a hundred-page manifesto from Gamblers Anonymous. The photo showed a guy lying on the hood of his car which was parked in front of a Florida convenience store. He was staying there all night so that he could be first in line when the store opened in the morning. He intended, the photo caption said, to spend his last $800 on lottery tickets. It was part of the latest outbreak of Lottomania which occurred in Florida last month. The top prize in the state lottery was worth over $100 million, and suddenly people were buying 10, 15 tickets at a time. Some hopefuls spent their rent money. Others arranged bank loans. Just think of the sub-human level of logic. Some of these folks wouldn’t have bothered to buy a ticket if the prize had Workers of the world - unite! BY RAYMOND CANON I’m not sure whether it is fashionable these days to start off an article with a Marxist slogan, since Karl and his theories seem to be in a state of disrepute but his old cry to the workers of the world to unite seems to have lost its lustre even before Communism started falling apart in East­ ern Europe. The fact remains, however, that over the past quarter of a century, the Labour unions in the western world have not been able to lay claim to being one of the success stories of the age. Nowhere has this been truer than in the United States. In 1970 the movement could count on about one worker in three as a member; by the end of the 1980’s, that figure had dropped to about half that or some 17 per cent. Admittedly that is the biggest decline in any industrialized coun­ try but others, such as Japan, Holland, Britain, Austria have either shown no gain whatsoever or even a decline. Since the situation in the United States affects us more than any other country, let’s spend a paragraph or two looking at the American experience. The 17 per cent membership, which is, as I mentioned above, the current figure in the U.S., is the lowest in the western world by a consider­ able margin. The next country in line, France, has a 25 per cent level while Canada is just over double that of our neighbours. While unionism in Canada seems to have levelled off, the American percentage has been dropping steadily since 1970. To give you some comparison, the two countries with the greatest union participation, Denmark and Sweden, have well over 90 per cent of the workers unionized. Canada’s 35 per cent puts in the lower half of more precisely 11th out of 16. What has caused the American decline? A recent study indicates that unions there have been more successful than any place else in raising their wages above non-union levels. The gap between the two rose from 15 per cent in the 1960’s to 22 per cent by the late 1970’s and this success has earned Arthur Black been, say, $100 thousand. But $100 million? Florida looked like a shark feeding frenzy. Despite the fact that every ticket sold increased the odds against winning, the lineups of hopefuls stretched for blocks. It’s a strange addiction, Lottomania. Some people live for their weekly fix. I know a lady who lays out 20 bucks every Thursday morning at the corner store. All Thursday afternoon she’s as high as gyrefalcon, humming Broadway tunes and chattering about faraway places. Then comes Friday morning. She’s lost again and she’s down in the dumps. Which is where she stays until another Thursday morning rolls around. I figure she’s happy for about six hours a week. Hell, most drugs give a better return than that. I’ve thought of telling her that I know an easy way she could save a thousand dollars a year, but a little voice tells me she doesn’t want to hear it. Lottomaniacs do love their vice. Even though it can kill them. Bill Curry, a 37-year-old Boston cafeteria worker won $4 million and change in the Massachu- settes lottery last month. He died of a heart attack two weeks later. His sister-in-law said Curry’s health began to go downhill the day he found out he’d won. He was hounded by old acquaintances who sud­ denly became best friends, by self-appoin­ ted financial advisors and strangers seek­ ing money for everything from major them the close attention of employers which have understandably a greater incentive in opposing the unions. At first glance this might appear to be a great incentive to join unions but the bottom line is that such a differential puts unionized firms in a bad position when competing against foreign producers or even non-unionized American firms. It is not surprising, then, that employers go to greater lengths to keep unions out of the workplace or attempt to reduce what powers they already have. What the current situation reveals it that unions are going to have to find some other goals besides high wages if they are to arrest this decline. You may have noticed that this is being done to a certain degree already; the United Auto Workers’ union has zeroed in on job guarantees as a major issue and this has spilled over understand­ ably in the negotiations being carried out by Bob White and the Canadian Auto Workers. The fact that both the United Letters Schools should buy Canadian THE EDITOR, Our public school children have just recently delivered the chocolate from their door-to-door sales to help them earn money towards a school trip. On reading the label I noticed that the chocolate were made at Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, U.S.A. When the economy of our country is in so Penny Sale says thanks THE EDITOR, Sincere thanks to all the donors from Clinton, Bayfield, Brucefield, Vanastra, Holmesville, Blyth, Londesboro and area for making the 36th annual Clinton Public Hospital Auxiliary Penny Sale a success. We raised $4,800. We also appreciated the cash donations and the many volunteers for their hours of help. As co-convenor of our sale, 1 thank all members of the public who purchased tickets! surgery to Madagascar tin mines. “It was the stress of it that killed him,’’ says the sister-in-law. That’s the trouble with easy money: in the long run, it’s not that easy. Pauline Glassman knew that. She’s a Toronto woman who, ten years ago, was a bag lady sleeping in parks and eating out of restaurant dumpsters, wandering through the alleys and laneways of downtown Toronto. In 1982 she disappeared and was given up for dead. Then, just a few weeks ago a private detective found her alive and married, on welfare, in a tiny apartment in a subsidized housing project in Toronto. At first she denied being Pauline Glassman, but the detective had done his homework. As well he might. The detective was being well paid by a large trust company that urgently wanted to find Pauline Glassman. To tell her that, due to an inheritance, she was now a millionaire. But the best part is - Pauline Glassman didn’t want the money! She said that the past five years with her new husband had been “the best years of my life” - so wonderful that not only did the prospect of wealth not tempt her, she feared it might ruin all the joy she’d found. Smart lady. Alas, smooth talkers in charge of the estate convinced her other­ wise. Pauline Glassman gave in and is now a rich woman. I guess all we can do is wish her “Good luck.” States and Canada are flirting with an economic recession is giong to make this goal somewhat harder to attain but that is not going to stop the unions from tryipg. In some countries such as those in Scandanavia, unionism is more or less a way of life with a vast majority of workers in either a private or public sector union. Negotiations in such countries tend more towards centralized bargaining where a national union will take into account such things as job prospects and their negotia­ tions influence wages for the entire industry not just for their members. The differential between union and non-union wage levels also tends to be smaller in such countries than in the United States where sectoral bargaining is much more the norm. Since union activity in the United States tends to spill over into Canada, what organized labour does south of the border during the 1990’s will bear watching. much trouble, wouldn’t you think it would be far better to encourage our Canadian children to sell Canadian made chocolates? Especially so, since there is so much emphasis on Free Trade these days. Mildred Jacklin Brussels. Our thanks to all at St. Paul’s Anglican Church for allowing us to hold our sale there each year. This year, our Auxiliary is contributing to the newly installed X-ray equipment, which is a benefit to our area. We look forward to next year’s sale - the last Saturday in September. Sincerely, Margaret Caldwell Clinton Public Hospital Penny Sale Co-convenor Letter from the editor It all began 5 years ago BY KEITH ROULSTON Believe it or not, it’s five years this week since the first issue of The Citizen hit the streets. As in a lot of things, it feels like only yesterday, and yet it feels like forever. It has been five years of accomplish­ ments and disappointments, of satisfaction and frustration. Most of all it’s been five years of hard work by the staff members and the volunteer board members of The Citizen. It’s probably forgotten now by most people that The Citizen isn’t an ordinary small town paper. Besides being one of the few independent newspapers in the coun­ try it's also the only community-owned newspaper we’ve come across. That com­ munity-owned aspect came about because of the enthusiasm and energy of Sheila Richards who I’d met through work at the Blyth Festival. Sheila was concerned that her town of Brussels had no newspaper of its own. She asked me what could be done and I told her that the only way I could see Blyth and Brussels having an economi- cally-viable newspaper today would be to have one newspaper for both communities and for it to be community-owned so people felt they had a stake in it. Within days Sheila had the first substantial investor lined up and we decided to give it a shot. The response of the community was one of the most heart-warming memories of the hard days of organizing the paper. When people you’ve known for years have the faith to invest in your ideas it brings a great feeling that you must have been doing something right with your life. Sheila, a fundraiser without match, quickly rounded up dozens of investors in the Brussels area. In fact our biggest problem in the long run turned out that we ended up with too many supporters. We had 80 people who invested when we found out we were allowed to have only 50 under Ontario Securities Commission rules. The Securi­ ties Commission might never have known about us but we became minor celebrities because of being community owned with stories published in all the major news­ papers. Shortly before Christmas that first year the Securities Commission called, threatening to put us out of business and seize our funds because we hadn’t organiz­ ed our company the way they thought it should be. It was the beginning of two years negotiations and thousands of dollars in legal fees. I’ll never forget the nightmare of getting our first issue out. We’d been really lucky to get a tremendous employee from the past back in Dianne Josling, our type­ setter. Still, although the three of us all had plenty of experience putting our news­ papers in the past, we were rusty. Then too we’d just set up the office the week before and didn’t know where anything was. Some of our equipment hadn’t arrived. And then we had our advertising manager Bev Brown who did such a fantastic job that first week we ended up with a 32-page paper. We were supposed to be at the printing plant in Goderich by 3 p.m. We had planned our first sharehold­ ers meeting that evening at which we would proudly hand out the first issues of The Citizen. As the first shareholders arrived, we were still finishing the paper. Jill rushed to Goderich with the pasted-up pages while I tried to get ready for the meeting. By the time the printing plant could find a spot in its schedule to print the paper it was the middle of the night. I arrived next morning at 6 a.m. to get the paper and deliver it to local post offices. Success was our biggest problem in the early weeks. We had not counted on much when we started, preparing for the least with a skeleton staff. Things went so well we ended up working incredible hours. We