The Magna Man by Frank Stronach

Author:Frank Stronach [Stronach, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443420716
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

THE SON OF A LABOUR ACTIVIST

Good businesses do not discriminate.

During the latter part of the Second World War, my father, Anton Adelman, a proud Austrian and lifelong labour leader, was conscripted by the German army and served as an infantryman on the Russian front. A communist at heart, he despised the Nazi regime and sympathized with the Russians. The bleak years of hunger and hardship during the Depression and the war caused many Europeans to turn toward the communists, with their promises of a classless society and fairness for workers. After the fighting ended, my dad told me many war stories—the atrocities he witnessed as well as his scrapes with death and capture on the battlefield.

He toiled in factories most of his life, and he fought on behalf of better working conditions and wages for workers. He was jailed and beaten for his beliefs. I didn’t see it so much at the time, as a young boy, but looking back now I believe he was a man of courage and conviction. He fought for human dignity, for the right of people to be treated fairly and with respect. One of the stories my dad told me—one that stuck with him all his life—was about the time he went knocking on doors offering to work for food. A farmer gave him some chores to do, and when my father finished the work he was given, the farmer said to his wife: “Don’t put the food on a plate. Put it in the dog bowl.”

Shortly before my father passed away, he visited me in Toronto. It was around 1965 and my business was growing. I took my father to some of our factories, showed him blueprints of new plants we were going to build. I think he was proud of what his son had accomplished, and I know my father, if he were alive today, would be proud of the Employee’s Charter of Rights and other employee programs I created. He was a communist hardliner, a Marxist through and through, but I think I was able to soften his stance.

I’ve always said that the original unions provided a great service to society. During the early part of the twentieth century, unions helped to bring about greater safety conditions and greater dignity in the workplace. The old-school union leaders who fought for those rights, who suffered beatings with baseball bats and tire irons, who were imprisoned and sometimes even killed, they were true heroes.

However, I strongly disagree with the philosophies and attitudes of most present-day unions, many of which I believe attempt to create and exploit adversarial conditions between management and employees. The way I see it, most of today’s unions are simply political organizations. Their shop-floor leaders are often rough-and-tumble characters, and the ones that shout the loudest, that say the owners and managers are just a bunch of no-good, sons-of-bitches, are the ones that usually get elected.

In their quest to get elected, they make a lot of sweeping promises regarding bread-and-butter issues such as higher wages and guaranteed job security.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.