city hall bureau
You could call it a perfect storm for turbulent labour negotiations: Every one of Toronto's major union contracts will expire in the next 14 months, just as the megacity faces the toughest financial challenge in its 10-year existence.
With an annual wage bill of $3.7 billion, a difference of one percentage point in wages and benefits can make a difference to city spending in the tens of millions of dollars.
With so much at stake, union leaders and politicians from Mayor David Miller on down are already manoeuvring for the best position to weather the coming gales.
What's on their minds isn't just wages. All the players are wondering how big the issue of contracting-out or privatizing city services may become in the approaching negotiations. It's a question likely to deepen the split between left- and right-wing councillors.
Case Ootes (Ward 29, Toronto-Danforth) gives a foretaste: "Some of us have been trying to change the environment for a number of years, and the obstacle in large part has been certainly Miller and others that feel beholden to the unions."
Miller shoots back that Ootes and his allies had their chance under former mayor Mel Lastman. "They had a six-year program of reviewing privatization and contracting out," scoffs Miller. "They came up with one thing – which was take the lowest-paid workers in the city, the cleaners, and pay them less. When they say that, frankly it shouldn't be given five seconds' thought."
As contract talks loom, budget chief Shelley Carroll is already warning unions that the city's pockets are not deep. "They'd better come to the table recognizing that one of the criteria you set for negotiations – whether you're the management or the arbitrator or the mediator – one of the criteria always has to be ability to pay.
"Our citizens know what our ability to pay is right now, the province knows what our ability to pay is, and the people who work here know what our ability to pay is."
It's not a position that gets much sympathy from union leaders, who say their members gave the city a break during the deep recession of the 1990s.
"Back in 1996 we made tens of millions of dollars in concessions," says Bob Kinnear, who heads the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 113, at the TTC. That was the year the province stopped funding transit.
Brian Cochrane, who leads Toronto Civic Employees Union, CUPE Local 416, agrees his members have already done their part. "In the 1990s, many of our members didn't receive any wage increase for six to eight years," Cochrane says.
Looking ahead to negotiations with the police and transit workers, the first contracts to expire, Miller acknowledges it won't be easy.
"We don't have much room to manoeuvre," he says.
Looming over the talks is the settlement the city made with the firefighters. Earlier this year, they won annual wage increases of 3 to 3.25 per cent over the next three years.
Says Cochrane: "We reject any notion that our members are any less worthy of a wage increase than was negotiated with fire and will be negotiated with the police."
If inflation is a guideline for settlements, Miller may have already given the unions some leverage by setting a generous measure in another context – next year's projected property tax hike. "It's in the range of inflation, around 3 to 4 per cent," he said last month. In fact, inflation is about 2.5 per cent.
And there's the even tougher question of contracting out.
Miller says it's no magic solution. In any case, the city already contracts out a substantial volume of work. He points to a string of figures: 46 per cent of the garbage operating budget is contracted out ($104 million); so is 38 per cent of the transportation department's operating budget ($94 million) and 83 per cent of the capital budget ($166 million). There's $157 million in child-care services; $44 million in hostel services, and on and on.
And he hits back at critics who say he's indebted to labour.
"Are they beholden to the lobbyists for the contractors?" he asks.
"Let's remember my job as mayor was to clean the city government up because of the MFP scandal, which was all about influence peddlers making money on contracts."
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