Similar problems

Jack Layton has already responded to the Cons' attempts to criticize him for telling a story about workers being told to pack up their equipment to be shipped overseas based on some similarities to an anecdote included in Barack Obama's acceptance speech. But it's worth pointing out another side of the story.

Namely, how out of touch with the problems facing the manufacturing sector would anybody have to be to think it's a matter of suspicion that more than one North American business might have shipped its equipment to China?

How anti-worker does one have to be to think it's a scandal if more than one employee who's gone through the anguish of packing up the equipment he's worked on to be sent halfway across the world (along with his job) manages to get that story told on the campaign trail?

And how clueless would one have to be not to notice that the similar problems facing workers in both Canada and the U.S. have come from the same kind of failed corporatist economic theory?

For the record, even a minute of Googling the core terms of the story would have turned up this passage from a Layton speech in July:

I’ve stood with proud Steelworkers who have worked for generations in factories that have outperformed all other plants in their class but whose owners are shutting down. They make these good people put moving stickers on the equipment they’ve worked on for years, so that it can be shipped to some low-wage, exploitative, unsafe workplace somewhere else in the world.

So even the slightest bit of research would have shown the attack on Layton to be completely unfounded.

But the more important message is that it's long past time for workers whose jobs have been outsourced to have their stories told and their concerns dealt with. And both Layton and Obama deserve credit for doing that - regardless of who mentioned it first.