Now, the ILO does a lot of strange things. The organization has lately been debating, for example, whether to help oppressed workers in Third World nations by demanding that other countries refuse to buy the goods they make, which presumably would liberate them from employment. But on this one it has something of a point. Time and time again in recent years, as the federal government slowly turned to face the debt, it has dictated the terms of contracts it was supposedly negotiating with its employees.

In addition to the wage freeze, as Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz reminded us in these pages last week, there is the federal budget's revocation of the no-layoff guarantees the previous government had granted to the public-service union to settle the 1991 strike. And, of course, legislation forcing striking rail workers back to work, as has been invoked in every such event over the past 30 years. Unions complain that workers' freedom of association has been systematically violated, and the ILO's Freedom of Association Committee has agreed. "Statutory limitations on collective bargaining," it wrote, "now appear to be common practice by the government."

On the other hand, well, they're the government; legislation is what governments do. The whole notion of bargaining with the state is slightly surreal, as the would-be developers of Toronto's Pearson Airport can tell you. In most labour negotiations, both sides have something to lose from a strike: the union, wages; the company, customers. Neither is in a position to impose anything on the other, for the same reason neither wants to give in too easily.

But governments aren't in that position. If government workers go on strike, they don't lose customers, as a rule: The "customers" have nowhere to go. You can't pay your taxes to someone else if Revenue Canada's employees decide to down calculators. Asking a government to bargain in good faith (i.e. like a private-sector employer) is like asking a professional wrestler to fight with one hand tied behind her back. How would it even know if it was?

Of course, a captive market also means governments can just as easily give in to union demands; the difference can be passed on to the taxpayer. Which is why government workers over the years have tended to win such generous terms of employment, compared with their private-sector counterparts. It just wasn't worth governments' while, politically, to fight them. Now that taxpayers have become a little shirtier, it is. But rather than go through the charade of bargaining, the government cuts to the chase, and imposes the result it wants.

But it doesn't just use legislation to beat up on unions. It also supports organized labour in a number of ways. Most notable is the Rand formula, the typically Canadian - which is to say, two-faced - compromise that allows workers not to join unions, but forces them to pay union dues. Then there is legislation in Ontario and Quebec, and on the way federally, that prohibits other workers from replacing striking union members, even forbidding the strikers themselves to break ranks. Or legislation in several provinces that denies non-union workers the equal right to work on government contracts. And a long list besides.

All of these are just as surely violations of workers' freedom of association as the measures the unions complain of. If the right to join a union is part of freedom of association, so is the right not to join a union. It is enough that governments refrain from applying the usual anti- combines ban on restraint of competition with respect to organized labour. They do not have to actually promote union power, especially at the expense of individual workers' rights.

So for those truly concerned about freedom of association, how about a trade? No back-to-work legislation. No legislated wage freezes. No reneging on signed contracts. But in exchange, no compulsory dues, no bans on replacement workers, and no buy-union policies. If we're serious about freedom of association, let it work both ways.