So... how many people who've posted here have actually been working on a road in Toronto (or any of the GTA for that matter), focusing on what they are doing, and completely vulnerable to traffic?? Has anyone actually experienced how assinine and oblivious many drivers are when going around construction sites?
There are different levels of traffic control available, and yes - there are contracting companies. Their hourly wages may be far less, but the people trained to do the job are also FAR less qualified than a cop - they have taken a multi-day course in order to get their certification for pyloning and traffic control only. A cop has far more extensive training... They are prepared to deal with a number of situations, and have the option of TICKETING drivers who blatantly disregard your site.
Furthermore, similar to the cop, you don't hire an individual to come and stand at your site - you usually hire a company to do the pylons (which yes, also requires training to do properly!), the safety equipment itself (pylons, road signs, flashing lights, a truck with signs to park in the way, etc. - there are road bylaws governing which must be used in different circumstances, right down to the number of pylons, spacing between, and patterns for achieving different detours), you pay for all of the above.
In my field, even for simple jobs in parking lots you always send out two-men crews so that there's one person to work, and one to watch for traffic. In fact, most of our clients require it. I've been in a near-empty parking lot, entirely in the open, surrounded by a ring of pylons, with a co-worker holding a large CAUTION! sign, and had a car back out on top of the pylons and crush our $10,000 equipment. Only being aware and jumping out of the way prevented us from injury or worse. In a parking lot, not even a road with plenty of other distractions for drivers not to mention greater speed!
It's easy to sit by, look at a site, and seeing someone standing around consider that they are of little value. However, when you have 2-3 workers who are exposed to traffic, that $67 divided amongst them, and each of their lives potentially made a little safer.. Well, I always consider that it's worth it. And for companies that don't... while there are cases where it is excessive, perhaps you should be asking about the quality standards that make a company unwilling to shell out a bit of extra cash to maintain a high safety standard for their workers??
As for the comment about OT (or pay-duty) being a perk for cops.. Are you saying that we should all work OT for the same hourly wage, because it's basically a perk that we have the option to collect on extra hours?? Yeah, it's a lot more, but the standard for overtime in many firms is time-and-a-half over 40 hours and double time on Sundays/Holidays. They work stressful jobs that do have a higher risk potential than say, teachers, real estate agents, what-have-you. There need to be some perks to keep people signing up for an otherwise rather thankless job. And if it's a lot more in Toronto... Well, duh! It's the country's biggest city, with the highest crime rates. Cops here have to regularly face the worst aspects of the job, not just giving parking tickets on Main St of Smalltown, ON. Yeah, lots of people would volunteer for standing around doing road duty for $67 - but not a lot of people will deliberately walk into dangerous and frequently horrifying situations for $100, much less $30-something.
And really, if you're going to get into the cops on-site being a gouge for taxpayers.. Why not go after any one of a million other things first? What about the safety meetings every single day that workers are charging for? The fact that PPE is often worked into billing costs to help companies save on overhead? The hours of total time spent clipping in and out of fall arrest on that slim, slim chance that you might actually fall?
Fact is, safety precautions are there to make people's jobs... safer. They can be a pain, time-consuming, and costly. But lost lives, injuries, etc. come at a far higher cost. I'd happily dish out my tax money for 100,000 cops to stand useless if it meant that ONE accident was averted.
