The most maddening thing about the strike by Toronto municipal workers that began Monday morning is not the patent absurdity of the workers’ claims that they are treated “unfairly” by the city.
Make no mistake, though, such claims are absurd: employees of the city of Toronto typically earn much, much more than the market value of their work. According to government statistics, the average security guard in Toronto earns $12 per hour, while a “Security Reception Officer” with the city earns $23.90 per hour. “Light Duty Cleaners” out in the private sector have an average wage of $11.90 per hour while their counterparts on the city payroll make $21.30 per hour. Cooks for the city make more than double their market value at $25.02 per hour. One could go on all day.
But wages are just the start of what makes the city a tremendously good employer. One hundred per cent of the employees’ contribution to the dental plan is paid by the city, for instance. They have a wickedly good pension plan. They get between three and seven weeks’ paid vacation, depending on seniority, in addition to the 11 paid holidays each year. And then there’s that much-debated clause that currently exists that lets them accumulate 18 sick days a year and take the cash equivalent of them when they retire.
Those things might inspire jealousy — and in light of them, the way in which striking municipal employees refer to the “contempt” with which they are treated by their employer might be frustrating — but they are not the most maddening thing about the strike.
Nor is the union’s near-callous disregard for the economic environment the most enraging element of the work action. Sure, as the unemployment rate in Toronto hits 9.1 per cent, most of us have friends and relatives who have been laid off. After all, in a survey released this week by Toronto law firm Rubin Thomlinson, 56 per cent of companies reported having recently laid off staff. Most of us worry that our jobs might disappear overnight, leaving us scrambling to pay rent and buy food — in the same survey, more than half of companies anticipated further staff cuts in the near future. So yeah, during a worldwide economic crisis with the worst prospects since the Great Depression, it’s kind of annoying to hear union representatives casually dismiss the city’s budget problems as some kind of drummed-up excuse. But that isn’t the worst thing.
What is most maddening is that the strike is entirely pointless — a kamikaze action in which everyone gets hurt except the striking workers’ employer. Citizens of Toronto will be without services, including garbage collection, pools, daycare, access to marriage licences (during Pride, no less) — we will be hurt, in some cases badly so. The workers will be without pay and will suffer the enduring hostility of the citizenry long after the strike is over. The union subjects itself to the most idiotic public relations campaign imaginable, doing the work of the Toronto Sun editorial board by making the case that unionized city workers are spoiled brats who don’t know how good they have it.
And the city, as a corporation? Every day that the strike lasts, the city saves money. And, uh… that’s it. Economically, the best thing that could happen to the Corporation of the City of Toronto is a long, drawn-out strike.
If the Mike Harris years and the misadventures of the TTC union have taught us anything, it is that work stoppages are a completely ineffective — in fact self-destructive — bargaining tool for public sector unions.
As Harris might have said, it’s common sense: when a private sector union goes on strike, it keeps its employer from doing business, thereby costing it money and giving it an incentive to settle. No such incentive exists in government. The cost of the labour dispute is borne by citizens, who are the very people the unions need sympathy from if they are to have any leverage at all with their politician employers.
Union leaders might say that all the single parents who now have to stay home from their minimum wage jobs because their city-run daycare is closed — and so on — will be enraged enough by the strike that they will put pressure on politicians to settle. But city politicians can just point to the $25-per-hour cooks who are unwilling to reconsider the six months’ pay they expected as a reward for staying healthy under the absurd sick-day collection plan the union refuses to negotiate concessions on. Rather than shouting “settle,” citizens start shouting “break the union.”
The truth is, we all know where this ends. The workers will be legislated back to work and a settlement will be imposed by an arbitrator. That’s maddening. Couldn’t we just skip the pointless, ineffective, painful strike part?
No comments:
Post a Comment