The Globe and Mail

So it has come to this: Even union leaders are losing faith in the power of their unions.

“There used to be a time when we had great respect from the public,” says Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress. “But we’ve lost that. There’s this notion that unions are just out for themselves and not for society. You get that label hung on you, and you have to work to get rid of it.”

Or as Mark Ferguson, president of a Toronto branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees put it more bluntly in a recent e-mail to a fellow CUPE member who had complained about a failure to win concessions: “The public hates unions right now.”