Brothers & Sisters Let's Gather Defiantly At The Trough

And stick it to the taxpayers and small business......

Business makes a point
The mayor should ensure city contracts are tendered to all -- not just unions
By SUE-ANN LEVY

Catherine Swift, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), hopes to meet with Mayor David Miller as early as possible in the New Year.

She wants to discuss a number of pressing issues affecting business in this city.

Uppermost in Swift's mind is the entrenched City Hall practice of allowing only unionized shops to bid for the huge number of city contracts tendered each year -- everything from carpentry and plumbing to painting and sheet metal working jobs.

The CFIB head, who represents 105,000 small and medium-businesses across Canada, 13,000 of them in the GTA, is so disturbed by the preferential treatment of organized labour, she dashed off a pointed Dec. 19 letter to Miller spelling out the many reasons why it's so unfair.

Businesses in Toronto pay a hugely disproportionate share of property taxes, Swift noted.

For that reason alone, it's wrong to exclude a "majority of them" from performing city work, just because they're not unionized. "If these firms are good enough ... to subsidize services to residents, surely they are good enough to provide those services when the occasion presents itself," she wrote.

Allowing more firms to bid would ensure a process that is "open and transparent."

It stands to reason, Swift added, that including both union AND non-union shops in the procurement process will lead to better quality services and value for residents.

It would also strengthen Toronto's case to the senior levels of government for "a new financial deal."

Swift was no less critical of the practice when I spoke to her late last week. She said the city has deemed itself a "construction employer" -- a term written into the last collective agreement with CUPE and other unions. It's a "weasel way" of giving the unions preferential treatment, not just on construction jobs but on all types of contracts involving the trades, Swift argues.

'A BIG LAUGH'

"The notion of City Hall being a construction employer is a big laugh," she told me, noting the city can easily apply to the Ontario Labour Relations Board to have that term removed from its next collective agreement.

It goes well beyond being required to pay union rates as stipulated by the phalanx of bureaucrats in the city's Fair Wage Office. Even if a shop is prepared to pay its workers the inflated salaries being handed to the city's unions, the edict lately appears to be that regardless of that, these businesses must also be unionized.

Swift figures 13,000 Toronto non-union businesses are being automatically excluded from bidding for city jobs.

"What all taxpayers should be aware of is that this jacks up costs," she said, adding city officials waste money "right, left and centre."

Good for Swift and the CFIB for making an issue of this practice. Not that I have much hope of things changing under the Millerites.

It's been Christmas virtually every day for Brother Brian Cochrane, Sister Ann Dembinksi, and the powerful municipal CUPE unions they lead, (Locals 416 and 79) ever since Miller came to power three years ago.

The mayor virtually guaranteed his union pals jobs for life when he took any consideration of Alternative Service Delivery (contracting out) off the table in June, 2004.

I can't wait to see whether Miller and Co. have the nerve to "insource" two garbage collection contracts now handled by private firms in York and Etobicoke. That would cost more than $21.5-million -- an issue debated but not dealt with before the November election.

The new "continuous improvement" process the mayor initiated three years ago to exact efficiencies from city workers has achieved little.

All city manager Shirley Hoy appears to be able to claim as an accomplishment are some attempts at reducing the number of work-related injuries. We've seen no hard numbers and no targets.

The only thing that keeps improving is employee salaries and head counts.

Like me, Swift has little hope things will change, even though the CFIB will make a strong case. As she put it: "Nope, nope, no, it won't happen under (David) Miller."