This "but they didn't even go to university!" argument is ridiculous. Getting a post-secondary education does not guarantee you a better wage than someone who didn't - it never has and never will. And that's applicable to both the public and private sectors. Some people, for many many reasons, never had the chance to pursue a post-secondary education and I for one don't think they should be condemned to a life of poverty, which is exactly what would happen if we eliminated well-paying jobs for high school graduates. What you're suggesting isn't democracy but pure elitism.
Note that I am not speaking particularly about the city workers here, but responding to this argument that gets repeated all to often.
That's not to say there aren't any problems with the idea of the living wage, notably that it isn't the same for everybody. The living wage for a single parent with two kids with health problems will be different from that of an unattached healthy bachelor, for example.
Fallacy. We're not talking about paying every high school grad $50k per year--we're talking about taxing people earning $20k per year to pay a small fraction of people who earn over $50k, who are overpaid and underproductive.
What we need to competitive bidding on garbage collection.
From the Globe:
Set the garbage hostages free
Private collection is often, but not always, best; the monopoly factor is what needs to be trashed
BEN DACHIS
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Last updated on Thursday, Jul. 23, 2009 09:01AM EDT
Policy analyst, C.D. Howe Institute
For most of us, garbage is best out of sight and out of mind. But seeing and smelling garbage piled up in homes and on the streets because of municipal strikes in Windsor, Ont., and Toronto reminds us that trash removal is an essential part of modern city life - which raises the question why modern city life should be paralyzed by strikes.
This summer has seen a mini-revival of labour unrest, with continuing strikes by Windsor and Toronto municipal staff, of whom garbage workers are only one part, by paramedics in British Columbia, as well as a narrowly averted walkout by Ontario liquor-store workers. This follows on the heels of lengthy strikes by Ottawa public transit and York University. This rash of strikes is notable partly because work stoppages have become so rare. The late 1970s saw more than 1,000 strikes a year across Canada; this decade the average is less than 200 a year, with even fewer major strikes. But they are also notable because they affect key services that - at least in the short run - are hard to replace. Unionized city workers off the job mean closed pools, cancelled programs and garbage stinking in the summer heat.
Municipal strikes halted garbage collection in Regina in 2005, Vancouver in 2007 and Toronto twice in the last decade. Almost always in summer (who wants to picket in winter?), the average municipal strike is more than two months long. It will be no surprise if residents of Toronto suffer as long as their fellow Canadians in Vancouver did for almost three months; in Windsor, the strike has now lasted even longer than that.
What makes these service stoppages all the more irritating is that they are unnecessary. Elected politicians can - if they have the nerve - remove the conditions that foster them. Only where cities operate a unionized public monopoly on garbage pickup are city residents potential hostages to a strike vote. And there is no good reason for these monopolies to exist.
Canadians do not like monopolies in the private sector - indeed, governments have myriad laws and regulations to prevent them from forming, and to break them up if they do. Applying the same thinking to municipal garbage pickup, with a few simple changes to how our cities work, would help prevent lengthy garbage strikes and lower costs for taxpayers.
Until a few months ago, Calgary was the only major Canadian city without municipal curbside recycling pickup. Small, private companies filled that gap by picking up recycling from their customers' homes. Now, almost all of these small enterprises are facing bankruptcy, after the City of Calgary's heavy-footed entry into the recycling business.
When the City of Calgary decided to start its own recycling program for single-family homes this spring, it gave outside contractors a chance to bid. But both large and small recycling companies claimed that the request for proposals had problems, ranging from excessive insurance and bonding requirements to terms that gave the city the right to arbitrarily cancel the contract. In the end, only one company put in a bid, and Calgary eventually awarded itself the contract to serve the entire city.
Calgary will now have both single-family residential garbage and recycling pickup done exclusively by public employees, going farther down the road to public monopoly than even Toronto, which still contracts out segments of its residential garbage and recycling pickup; soon before Toronto was amalgamated, Etobicoke contracted out residential collection in 1995, after a strike, and is still benefiting now.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CAN COMPETE
Researchers from the Local Government Institute at the University of Victoria found that most Canadian cities, over the whole range of sizes, contract out municipal recycling pickup to private companies: around 80 per cent. As for solid waste, between 67 and 80 per cent of medium-sized cities (under 50,000 people) contract out pickup.
Larger cities are slightly less likely to use private garbage collection: only about 50 to 60 per cent have contracted out their residential solid waste pickup. Cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto have public employees hauling most residential garbage. On the other hand, multiresidential and commercial waste pickup - often paid for by fees for service, rather than taxes - is almost always private.
Half of Edmonton's garbage is picked up by contractors, Winnipeg contracted out garbage pickup in 2005 and Ottawa contracted out most pickup in 1999.
Overall, Canadian cities with privatized garbage service have a per-household cost that is about 20 per cent less than publicly operated services. When public crews work in the same city as contracted crews, the contractors cost less and serve many more households per worker.
The small recycling firms in Calgary are suing the city for taking their business away. The city's "fairness adviser," however, has declared that the contract was awarded properly. But whether the recyclers are compensated or not, the people of Calgary are likely to be the real losers as a result of a public monopoly that will likely lead to higher costs and possibly leave city services at the mercy of a union strike vote.
