City Workers Strike 2009

[Whoaccio]

Paul Moist is pretty much an idiot.

In these pages and in other media, the issue of contracting out city services — most recently garbage collection — has been bandied about as a way to punish unionized public sector workers for everything from striking to costing too much to "monopolizing" the public sector. Some columnists, such as Lawrence Solomon, even contend that public sector workers weigh too much — or so he alleged in a National Post column last week when he claimed that private sector workers "tend to be fitter" than public sector workers.

Right off the bat, nobody is promoting privatization in order to "punish" anybody. Everyone has quite clearly stated why they think privatization would benefit the public (which is, after all, the focus here) and while you can disagree with their logic it is absurd to paint CUPE members as the victims of some kind of pogrom. More to the point, I'm not sure Moist even knows what a "monopoly" is. There was an article in the Star a week or so ago dismissing the very idea that monopolies existed within City services. Anyone can recognize what is self evidently a monopoly, both in the City as the sole supplier of various services (monopoly) and in CUPE's as the sole supplier of labor to the city (monopoly). Why Moist keeps trying to question this reasoning is beyond me.

What Solomon and other critics tend to forget is that Canadians have already tried a system wherein municipal services were delivered by private entities. It didn't work then, and it wouldn't work any better now.Solid waste collection and disposal, water, hydro and transportation were in private hands until the turn of the last century, when municipal governments assumed control of these services after years of poor quality, low accountability, a lack of universal access and an absence of regulation to protect the health and safety of citizens.

This is faulty reasoning. Advances in technology and policy have made many previously tenuous practices feasible now. It also blurs the line between what most people mean by "privatization" and what CUPE keeps portraying it as. It is not a dickensian private sector monopoly. Nobody is promoting that, anywhere. Most suggestions revolve around the contracting out of services to third parties, as has been shown to lower costs within Toronto itself as well as numerous other cities in Europe and Asia.

Canadians built our modern public sector in order to collectively invest in services for all residents. In the case of garbage collection, it became a mandated civic responsibility due to public health ordinances and the desire to rid growing urban centres of disease that flows from unattended solid waste.

Well, maybe if someone was proposing replacing toilets with buckets and eliminating all garbage services that would be relevant, but nobody is. People can go to Etobicoke or London, both of which have contracted portions of waste managent, and see quite clearly that this border's on hyperbole. Especially as my kitchen is overrun with fruit flies thanks to CUPE's bloody strike.

One hundred years and numerous privatization experiments later, Canadian communities are still finding that contracting out public services doesn't work. In some Canadian communities, the privatization of waste management is being reversed because it has been shown to cost more and deliver less in terms of quality.

God I love when people just make empty statements without any evidence to back it up. "Gravity has been shown to be a figment of our imagination. Working people deserve a fair shake from its' usurious grips, as has been shown to have work in Bhutan"

While some contracted out services may seem to cost less initially, their costs can rise much faster than publicly delivered services. For example, private operators often use younger crews who haven't yet suffered injuries, but when the injuries build up, so do their costs. The same goes with equipment — a private company's may be more efficient at first, but all equipment wears and requires replacing over time.

Wow, I didn't know the City has developed a way to avoid wear and tear on equipment. Who thinks this stuff up? As to the labor issues, private contractors tend to use younger crews because they are, as Paul Moist for some reason ignored earlier in the article, fitter and more able to perform physical labor and thus less likely to sustain injury. Anybody who thinks about it can see why using 40+ year olds to do a job which requires heavy lifting is absurd.

After a cost-benefit analysis, the City of Toronto recently chose to end a private contract in the York community, saving taxpayers $4 million annually by bringing waste collection work back in-house. Four months ago, the City of Windsor rejected the garbage privatization option, as did the City of Peterborough earlier this year. In Port Moody, B.C., residents spent ten years reporting repeated missed pickups, spillage, broken garbage bins and other problems caused by low-quality, contracted-out waste collection. Last spring, Port Moody residents took matters into their own hands and successfully petitioned to bring waste collection in-house and dump their private contractor. These situations are not isolated. Across Canada, the list of communities dissatisfied with privatized services continues to grow.

The York example was due to economies of scale and not underlying efficiency. Larger jurisdiction, such as Etobicoke, have shown undeniable savings and productivity improvements. As for Cities rejecting privatization, that proves nothing. Toronto would probably reject such a change on purely idealogical grounds. I'm sure Windsorites are real happy about CUPE too.

The private sector will always contribute to parts of public infrastructure work, and benefit from public sector procurement. But it is a fatal leap of logic to decide that Toronto or any other city should be pursuing a contracting-out agenda.

Fatal to CUPE, that is.

If proponents of privatization are really asking for "non-unionization," they are drastically underestimating the tenacity of the Canadian labour movement. About one-third of our Canadian workforce remains unionized, and for good reason — unions enable millions of citizens to enjoy some measure of dignity in retirement and quality social benefits. These benefits extend beyond actual union memberships, since the level of unionization in a society is a direct reflection of the average person's quality of life. Whether it's a livable minimum wage or a 40-hour work week, unions raise the bar in terms of wages and working conditions for everyone.

That may be the case, but I don't think anyone would expect beneficiaries of a given policy would ever support ending it. That doesn't somehow make it right. White slave owners weren't the first to jump on the abolitionist bandwagon. These constituencies which exert political influence to redirect otherwise unearned resources from larger societies are parasites and parasites never voluntarily leave the host.

Working people built Canada. They deserve a better shake than they have received in recent weeks.

What hypocrisy! A union representing a group that extracts above average wages by threat of force from a poorer public has the gall to say it is standing up for the "working people"? Are those the "working people" who are denied day care services or garbage collection, are victims obscene rental tax rates and have their businesses leached by prohibitave commercial taxes, or the ones who earn twice the median wage living off their backs in sine cure government positions? What the hell is wrong with society that this kind of blatant abuse of power and logic can be tolerated?

 

[kEiThZ]

Hope you can put all that in a letter to the editor.

 

[Hank]

I agree...great post.

 

[Jonny5]

Interesting note about the dangers of arbitration:

New York MTA workers went to arbitration in their latest contract. The result, wage hikes of 4%, 4% and 3%. Plus plans to cut staff to one per train from two were nixed. This in a city and transit agency that are very cash strapped. MTA raised fares recently and this contract will probably eat up the revenue from that entirely.

So my question is: who are these arbitrators (here in Ontario) and how do they come to their decisions. What factors do they take into account? It seems arbitrated settlements are getting outrageous everywhere. Who is actually pulling the strings of the arbitrators?

http://ny1.com/content/top_stories/103910/contract-ruling-leaves-mayor--twu-at-odds/Default.aspx

 

[Therion]

One of my acquaintances (who owns a medium-sized business) maintains that both arbitrators and labour board are staffed with former union members and tend to heavily favour unions in their settlements. I don't have any personal experience with this, but there you have it.

 

[cdr108]

One of my acquaintances (who owns a medium-sized business) maintains that both arbitrators and labour board are staffed with former union members and tend to heavily favour unions in their settlements. I don't have any personal experience with this, but there you have it.

which was what i think Miller was alluding to when he had the public council debates, stating those on council that opposed the deal didn't know the full cost of not getting a mutually agreed upon contract.

what i don't know is under what circumstances in a strike would both parties be compelled into arbitration?

can a union request it, or does the provincial gov't have to legislate back to work; then it's off to arbitration?

it seemed like TO residents were doing okay with 30+ days into it, although i think the mood might have changed with the warmer weather the past 2 weeks.

 

[salvius]

can a union request it, or does the provincial gov't have to legislate back to work; then it's off to arbitration?

The latter.

 

[SimonP]

So my question is: who are these arbitrators (here in Ontario) and how do they come to their decisions. What factors do they take into account? It seems arbitrated settlements are getting outrageous everywhere. Who is actually pulling the strings of the arbitrators?

My understanding is that the arbitrators decide by comparing how much city of Toronto employees in other departments make.

This was one of the big problems with Lastman's legacy. As part of his law and order platform he gave the police a big raise, something like 5% a year. As an essential service the fire department gets their salaries arbitrated. The arbitrators looked at the police contract and gave the firefighters a similar amount.

When the province ended the 2002 garbage strike they sent it to arbitration, and the arbitrators looked at what the city had given police and fire and decided it is only fair that the rest of the staff get a similar deal.

 

[GenerationW]

"Gravity has been shown to be a figment of our imagination. Working people deserve a fair shake from its' usurious grips, as has been shown to have work in Bhutan"

Nice line.

Reminds me of the Rhinoceros Party when they promised to repeal the Law of Gravity.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Unions are always right... Wrong.

To those people, for example the mayor, who think that unions are a positive influence for the public, look at this article on the 1944 Philadelphia Transit Strike:

President Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Commission during World War II, forcing employers to treat their black workers equally. The Philadelphia transit authority responding by upgrading several black employees to motormen, and demanded that their white peers train them. White workers responded by getting “sick” and shutting down the system for five days. Soon after, soldiers under U.S. command forced the system to re-open, with black motormen.

Monday, Aug. 14, 1944
Trouble in Philadelphia

The great city of Philadelphia, the nation's No. 2 center of war production, lay half-paralyzed last week, its transit-nerves cut by the worst U.S. transportation strike in World War II. Its 900,000 war workers (who make everything from hub caps to vital radar equipment) hitch hiked, trudged miles on 'sweltering side walks—or stayed home. At least 500,000 man-hours of war production were lost, Army & Navy officials estimated. Philadelphia's taverns and liquor stores were shut by police; department stores lost thousands of dollars of trade. All this was bad enough. But there was something worse: the City of Brotherly Love had been split open by its first serious out break of race trouble.

Mock Sickness. In predawn darkness, hundreds of Philadelphia's streetcar, subway and bus operators clumped into the sprawling, grimy carbarns as usual at 4 a.m. one morning last week. But as they checked in, one after another of them begged off work. They had an agreed excuse: "I'm sick — sick to my stomach." The cause of their mock sickness: eight Negro employes, who had been upgraded to motormen, were scheduled to make their first trial run that morning.

Hardly a street car or subway train left the barn. Flying squads in automobiles chased after the few that were already in operation. By noon every one of the city's 1,900 street cars, 632 buses and 541 subway and elevated cars were idle.

Strikers set up headquarters in the city's largest carbarn (without audible protest from the company). Up on a toolbox jumped burly, bull-voiced James Henry McMenamin, 43, to take command. He shouted: "It's white against black!" He well knew that the company's 600 Negro employes had hitherto worked peacefully (in menial jobs) beside other workers. But now, he pointed out, as motormen, they could sit on the same benches as whites. Cried McMenamin: "The colored people have bedbugs!"

Husky James McMenamin was no union official. He belonged to a union which is the smallest of four among the Transit Workers. But he was shrewdly assisted by tobacco-chewing, 200-lb. Frank Carney, president of a potent independent union. And the militant young C.I.O Transport Workers Union, which has a plant majority and endorses the promotion of Negroes, was unable to keep its members at work. Together McMenamin and Carney were powerful enough to tie up Philadelphia's entire transportation system, keep 6,000 transit employes idle and defy for five days the U.S. Government, including two generals and 8,000 troops.

Placid Surface. Philadelphians general ly accepted the discomforts and irritations of the tie-up with Quakerlike placidity—and even with some good humor. Ration boards stayed open until late at night, issuing emergency gasoline rations to any A-card holder who promised to carry a earful with him. The Army & Navy pressed hundreds of jeeps and trucks into service to keep production going at the Army Ordnance Depot and the Navy Yard. But the Philadelphia transit system regularly carries 1,150,000 persons a day. Thousands had to walk, on days when the thermometer shot to 97 degrees. At the huge General Electric, Westinghouse and Budd plants, production slumped more than 10%.

Beneath "the surface placidity Philadelphians knew that the possibility of real race trouble was present as never before. Philadelphia has 270,000 Negroes, but it has no Harlem: the Negro sections are small, scattered pockets throughout the city. On the first night of the strike, in half-a-dozen sections of Philadelphia, teen-age Negro hoodlums hurled milk bottles through windshields, smashed win dows in stores. Policemen, carrying night sticks for the first time in 18 years and aided by hundreds of civilian-defense volunteers, arrested 300 persons, most of them Negroes.

Next day a Negro war worker, whose brother is in the Army, walked into Philadelphia's famed Independence Hall and hurled a one-pound paper weight at the Liberty Bell. As the deep note resounded he yelled: "Liberty Bell, oh Liberty Bell —liberty, that's a lot of bunk!" Police led him off to a hospital to have his head examined.

There were no more outbreaks. The citizens of Philadelphia, white & black alike, held their tempers well. (Negro preachers from other cities, who hurried to Philadelphia to beg their people to be calm, found their advice unneeded.)

First a Plea. On the strike's third day the Army moved in. Under a Presidential order, Major General Philip Hayes took control of the city's transit system. He broadcast instructions to the strikers to return to work at the next 5:30 a.m. shift and sent two soldiers to raise an American flag over the carbarn where the strikers made their headquarters. As the flag flapped up to the top of the pole one of the strikers began to sing the Star Spangled Banner. About 2,000 shirt-sleeved, sweaty strikers joined in. Even James McMenamin seemed affected. He jumped up, shouting in a voice hoarsened by three days of strike exhortations:

"I urge you all to go to work at 5:30."

A striker called out: "But what if the Army takes back the Negroes?"

The men turned on McMenamin, drowning out his answer with their jeers. Next morning McMenamin had changed his mind again: he would not go back to work if the Negroes stayed on.

Then Action. General Hayes let the strike continue two more days before he cracked down. Then McMenamin, Carney and two others were arrested for violation of the Smith-Connally Act. A Federal grand jury convened to question 35 strikers. Eight thousand Army troops, equipped with rifles, machine guns and small cannon rolled into the city. General Hayes gave the strikers their choice: go back to work or lose their right to certificates of availability for any other job for the duration. And all who were 18 to 37 would have their draft deferments canceled. General Hayes also made it plain that the Negroes would keep their jobs.

Long before General Hayes's deadline, motormen—flanked by two soldier guards to each car—began traveling their routes once more. As the first car swung down one street, smiling passengers climbed aboard. Some handed out cigars and dollar bills to the soldiers.

The strike was over. The production hours that had been lost were lost forever. And though Philadelphia had providentially survived its first major crisis in racial relations without the loss of a single life, dangerous seeds had been planted.

 

[Riverdale Rink Rat]

Ridiculous.

^^

Comparing unions in Canada today to unions in Philly in the '40s is like comparing apples and Neptune, much less apples and oranges.

 

[Dilla]

I think he was going after was the sentiment that unions are and always have been a positive force.

The argument "if you like weekends, then you should thank a union" (or similar) is oft dragged out as a defence of contemporary unionism, and has been brought up in this thread; in a manner, the comparison has already been made.

 

[AnnetteMeetsJane]

arbitration

which was what i think Miller was alluding to when he had the public council debates, stating those on council that opposed the deal didn't know the full cost of not getting a mutually agreed upon contract.

what i don't know is under what circumstances in a strike would both parties be compelled into arbitration?

can a union request it, or does the provincial gov't have to legislate back to work; then it's off to arbitration?

The administration at York University were similarly worried about the prospect of arbitration last spring, which occurred as a result of back to work legislation returning CUPE3903 to gainful employment. When the university administration gambled on a forced ratification vote and lost it (after a couple of months of the strike), there wasn't really anything other than legislation to get CUPE3903 back to work.
As it turns out though (by reliable hearsay), apparently the arbitrator sat both parties down and went through the list of outstanding issues and said what his "ruling" would be on each issue. Both parties "voluntarily" mutually agreed to the arbitrator's position within hours and normality returned after a bitter and miserable 82 days for our undergraduates and non-CUPE3903 staff.
The fact is that the "agreed" package, "brokered" by the arbitrator, was almost identical to the university's proposal 82 days earlier, so in this case the arbitrator didn't seem to be biased in favour of the union. I am not privy to the ins-and-outs of the negotiation though - although I can't tell you how euphoric I was when the back-to-work legislation eventually went through.

 

[kEiThZ]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...ave-bill-grows-by-200-million/article1297963/

So it turns out the apparently great deal Miller got us is not so great after all..... Imagine how things would have played out if they had known the real tab of all that banked sick leave.

 

[afransen]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...ave-bill-grows-by-200-million/article1297963/

So it turns out the apparently great deal Miller got us is not so great after all..... Imagine how things would have played out if they had known the real tab of all that banked sick leave.

"the city's unfunded sick-leave liability for all employees is actually $450-million – pegged earlier at $250-million thanks to an error by the city's outside actuarial consultant."

Wow. That is some serious malpactice.