Toronto on strike: They want to work, but their union won't let them
A dozen unionized City of Toronto employees lay on beach blankets and sat in folding chairs outside a welfare office in Scarborough yesterday, working on their tans.
These workers (pictured above), most of them young women, want to cross the picket line and return to their jobs helping Toronto’s least fortunate, but striking workers with Local 79 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees will not let them in.
They are being paid, but they cannot enter their workplace, and the city is letting it happen.
“We have 17 scabs that are trying to enter the building,” said Leroy Miller, a picket captain, who was blocking the rear staff entrance of the Toronto Employment and Social Services office for Scarborough West, at 1225 Kennedy Rd. “It’s our choice whether we let them in or not. There is no way I’m going to let them in.”
The city press office did not return my call asking whether pickets do have the power to restrict anyone’s access to a city office. A City of Toronto security guard standing by the office door refused comment. The workers lying in the grass, reading novels, listening to their iPods and eating sandwiches, also would not talk to me.
Joe Pennachetti, the city manager, said yesterday that 615 striking employees have applied to cross the picket line. “It’s all in flux. We are reviewing in excess of a hundred at this time. I don’t have an exact number as to how many are back to work.
It’s fair to say most [are being used].”
As the strike drags through its fourth week, the inability of these employees to resume their jobs is clearly making worse a tough situation for thousands of people who rely on social assistance.
Toronto has 14 social service offices. When employees walked off the job June 22, the city locked 11 offices and moved management staff into three locations: 220 Atwell Drive in Etobicoke, 111 Wellesley St. E., and this one in Scarborough.
The strikers here let management staff and social assistance recipients enter and leave at will. Inside the office, one client was reading the help wanted ads in a newspaper while waiting for a meeting with a case worker. I told her about the pickets preventing staff from coming in to work.
“That makes no sense,” she said. “It’s crazy. What about all of us who don’t have a job? If I had their job, at least I’d have an income other than social assistance.” And she added, “Unions suck.”
Most of the pickets at this Scarborough strip mall do not work here. Pat Carito is a surveyor with engineering services who works on Upjohn Road in North York. But since the strike began he has joined a “flying squad,” who go to picket line trouble spots. He arrived here Monday with other pickets to stop unionized workers crossing the line.
“They’re scabs,” Mr. Carito said. “That’s disgusting to see them try to take away our jobs. We’ve fought for our benefits, we can’t let them get away with it. What bugs me is they’re getting paid just to sit here.”
But one worker who has crossed the picket line at another social service office is unrepentant.
“I am a scab,” the worker said, meeting me yesterday at the end of the work day. The worker was terrified of being followed, and insisted on speaking only on a secluded park bench. “I have returned to work. With a staff of 100 or 150 people we are taking care of the work of 700 people.
“The people who are hardest hit by the strike are the people who are already hard hit by the recession,” the worker added. “They’re waiting hours on end to see a case worker. It’s unacceptable.”
This worker went to Metro Hall on the first week of the walkout and asked to cross the picket line. The worker has no sympathy for the strikers.
“Even the lowest-paid unionized employee at the city makes $20 an hour,” the worker noted. “It’s a ridiculous amount of money. I don’t know any admin assistants who make more than $12 or $14 an hour in the private sector.”
Several daycare workers on another picket line told me it would be dangerous to cross the line. A bulletin on the web site of Local 416, the 6,000 outside city workers who are also on strike, defines a scab as any union member who crosses a picket line. The bulletin warns, “Those members choosing to ride on the coat-tails of fellow Brothers and Sisters and choosing to be a scab will have their names published on our blacklist and/or brought to trial under B6.1 of the CUPE constitution.”
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