"Garbage Strike" Could Mean The Return Of Right Hand Turns

Striking workers' sick day perks touch a nerve TheStar.com - Opinion - Striking workers' sick day perks touch a nerve

June 26, 2009

Richard Gwyn

Toronto's garbage strike could turn out to be Canada's equivalent of Britain's strike by gravediggers in 1978-79.

Back then, Britons endured a winter of discontent as just about every trade union in the country went on strike, including the gravediggers. The consequence was the election of Margaret Thatcher and the transformation of the country, for better or worse.

Uncollected garbage isn't quite the same as unburied bodies.

Yet there are similarities. In Britain then, there was a widespread feeling – and fear – that trade unions were out of control.

Here, the same sense exists and is growing, but in a more particular way: the concern is that public sector unions and quite possibly public sector workers of all kinds are out of control.

More exactly, there is rising concern that public sector workers have too much control. They can take advantage of their monopoly position to blackmail ordinary citizens, especially those who are vulnerable such as hospital patients, students, officer workers who rely on public transportation, and householders with piles of rotting garbage.

Just as the unburied bodies touched a nerve in Britain, so has the discovery that all Toronto municipal workers get 18 sick days a year, even when not sick, which they can accumulate and exchange for cash when they retire.

This kind of perk doesn't exist in the private sector. Neither do pensions indexed to inflation nor, increasingly, defined benefit pensions, that's to say, guaranteed ones. And most substantively of all, what amounts to virtual job security for life doesn't exist in the private sector either.

Almost all comparisons of public and private salaries for equivalent jobs put public workers well ahead when account is taken of all these perks.

Once, all of this was shrugged off or was unknown. Anyway, until recently, private sector workers from CEOs to autoworkers have scarcely been suffering.

Job security for life didn't work well in the Soviet Union, and it doesn't work well here.

Universities, where professors are doubly barricaded against reality by both tenure and unions, may be the best example, producing ever shorter teaching loads and ever less time spent with students, but, demonstrably, not much else.

Criticism from the inside is always the most persuasive. Last week, Michael Bliss, the distinguished and now retired historian, received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto.

In his convocation speech, Bliss took potshots at almost all of academe's sacred cows:

At grants, "without demonstrating that the money is being productively used."

At tenure, "(it) needs to be seriously re-examined."

At sabbaticals, "as privileges to be earned, not as matters of right."

Justifications for job security most certainly exist. New, though, is that those who enjoy it are constantly increasing in number while those who pay for it by way of their taxes are increasingly insecure.

During the current recession, unemployment has inevitably risen sharply. But the layoffs have been exclusively a phenomenon of the private sector.

We've become a society that experiences not so much recessions as, all but exclusively, private sector recessions.

Moreover, this recession is very likely to be a long one. Fear of being laid off and fear of more stock market declines will erode personal pension funds and will make people wary of going back quickly to their old free-spending ways.

So the gap between the public and private sectors is going to get wider and wider. More and more attention will be paid to the disparities between them. And a lot of people are going to get angrier.

Consider just this fact. Once the current strike does end in Toronto, the garbage workers will get overtime pay to pick up all the piled up garbage. That's the benefit for being a monopoly. It's hard not to feel – angrily – that something is wrong.