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PAGE 4, WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 3, 1982, WHITBY FREE PRESS whitby w mm Voice of the County Town Pub s Michael lan Burgess, Publisher - Managing Editor The only Whitby newspaper independently owned and operated by Whitby residents for Whitby residents. L blished every Wednesday by M.B.M. Publishing and Photography Inc. Phone 668-6111 The Free Press Building, 131 Brock Street North, P.O. Box 206, Whitby, Ont. LESLIE BUTLER Community Editor ELIZABETH NOZDRYN Advertising Manager Second Class Mail Registration No. 5351 Media hype turns Hallow's Eve into Hollow Eve in recent years, a new kind of monster has stalked the streets on Halloween nlght. It's not a ghost, or a goblin. It's the growing and unreason- able fear that increasing numbers of sadists are offering poisonous treats to young children. The fear is growing because the media has done more than its fair share of creating and main- taining this most gripping of fears. It is unreason- able because this year, as in past, Halloween has produced no serious injuries and no deaths. In Durham Region this Halloween, there were three or four reports of candy being tampered with. No child has been injured. In all of the United States, there were, and we quote the Associated Press, "No deaths or serious injuries reported among kids trick or treating." In the very next sentence of the article, how- ever, the Associated Press still calls Halloween night "a bizarre week" of "Halloween horror." This type of irresonsible sensationalism ac- counts, in part, for many parents and communities across the continent cancelling the shell-out this year. Realizing the shock value of stories such as the - Tylenol murders in Chicago, every major news outlet scoured the continent for similar crimes. They came up with an unsubstantiated case of acid-laced visine drops and a bag of candy corn with traces of insecticide. Tylenol was real. Visions of crazed child- murders are not, at least not as real as the media would have us believe. Durham Regional police report a quiet Halloween weekend, as do Metropolitan Toronto police. Halloween used to be a time when children could have a little adventure, meet the neighbors and cash in on goodies. We submit that Hallow- een can still be just that. Precautions such as parents accompanying children and instructing children to check for opened candy makes sense. What does not make sense is cancelling this fine tradition. One would surely have to remove all automo- biles from the roads (a known and proven.killer) and ban children from crossing the street if the logic were taken to its natural extremlty. We can't protect our children from the world. And even if we could, there would be better places to start than soothing our own neurosis by can- celling a child's fun. Organization is non-partisan Dear Si r: It has come to our notice that the name of Whit- by Community Care has been used in election literature-published by one of the candidates for Whitby Town Council in the November 8th Muni- cipal Election. We, the Board of Directors of Whitby Communi- ty Care, would like to stress that our Organization is non-political and non-partisan. We neither support nor oppose any candidate in this election. We hope, however, that any request from us for funds or assistance will be favourably received by the successful candidates. Yours truly, S. Clayton, Chairman. M.J. Davis, Secretary. 6ae2i7&/a-r e ce ~ci~5 w/~e ,4e~ PROVINCIAL GO\JT i2I 6~7Qd/4M9 éi'~~ / One of the issues being brought to a head by the cur- rent recession and its accompanying layoffs is simply that most employees don't trust their bosses and the people who own companies. There isn't much doubt that greed is a factor on both sides of the traditional labor- management argument. Employees want too much pay for not enough work, and companies want too large a profit margin for not enough risk and investment. When times are tough, the argument gets sharper and nastier. In Vancouver, the Newspaper Guild recently demanded a look at the books of Pacific Press to, see whether 74 of its members really need to be laid off. Pacific Press refused to open its books but I suspect that really didn't change anything. Unless the Guild membership knows a lot more about.finance than it did the last time I was one of the brotherhood, management would have been able to make the financial statistics say anything they wanted them to. The Guild leadership's point was that if the need for layoffs was established, then they'd like a chance to suggest some alternatives - job-sharing on one hand, or retraining on the other. I have a lot of sympathy with what the Guild wanted. Unions will probably never com- pletely agree with employers about how large a profit margin is justified, but as individual workers they know enough about incentives to know that even a corpora- tion cannot operate without the lure of dollars. So the main issue is not whether a company should have pro- fits, or even what size, but whether a company can be believed when it says it's in trouble. In Japan, they've gone a long way towards resolving that problem, and eliminating its most disastrous by-product, the strike. Company and union accountants are trained in the same schools and have the same access, so that the union can be certain that the books can't be cooked without their knowing about it. There are permanent labor-management meeting places, where the two sides keep each other up to date on their problems. This avoids precipitous clashes, and ensures that the negociating process begins in earnest long before it comes dow;n to a fight. I don't know that the Japanese have ever let the economy shrink to the point that it's been necessary to talk about job-sharing instead of layoffs, but retraining is part of the country's permanent labor-management vcabulary. The Japanese unions do not oppose automation, because that means higher productivity, and higher productivity means an ex- panding economy. An expanding economy means new companies and new jobs, and retraining is an obvious part of that process. I'm not suggesting that we swallow Japanese examples holus bolus, but ; eems to me that Pacific Press and the Vancouver Gu might have done worse than talk about them. That's not news but that too is reality. Ï61ýjlf