Posts Tagged ‘Municipal Strike Toronto’
City of Toronto Strike Affects More Than Garbage Pick Up
The City’s 57 daycare centres with their 3011 child care spots will be closed. Parks and Rec Day Camps will not start. Community Centres, Toronto Island Ferry Service and other important aspects of recreation will be cancelled as well. City Museums, art galleries and cultural facilities will be closed. All special event permits will be cancelled for civic squares.
The City will not be monitoring water quality at City beaches. There will be no restaurant inspections. Healthy pregnancy and healthy baby appointments will be cancelled. Municipal sexual health clinics will be closed.
There is more, but these are the ones, I felt are probably most impactful to most people after a quick read through. Here is the City of Toronto’s Contingency Plan.
Garbage pick up is more complicated than the headlines would suggest. In Etobicoke for instance there is no impact as Etobicoke has contracted out garbage pick up. Curbside pick up will be cancelled in all other sections of the City. Apartment’s and other high density residential buildings will continue to have garbage service.
The City will be asking residents who usually have curbside pick up to hang on to their waste for the first week, and then bring garbage to transfer stations around the City, while keeping recyclables at home until the strike is over. For more on Garbage Collection click this link.
It’s pretty clear a strike of municipal workers will have a big impact on the quality of life in Toronto very quickly. It’s fair to say that neither the City nor the workers wants to see a strike happen, but unfortunate that the negotiations have gotten this polarized. The unions have a strong strike mandate and have been clear they will not accept the City’s proposal for sick leave. Considering wages and other matters aren’t on the table because the City has taken the position that until the union’s buckle on sick leave the rest isn’t worth discussing, a strike seems unavoidable.
The impact a strike will have on families and the vulnerable is great. It is important that the City recognize this as they push on an issue the unions have stated no intention of budging on, instead of discussing the issues where common ground and a collective agreement can be found. To me, Toronto’s priority should be avoiding a strike, and if the City were to pull this one issue off the table, an agreement could easily be reached that would see a continuation of services without any labour interruptions.
What has become clear is the issue of sick pay benefits is controversial and one that is better solved over the long term through a series of discussions between the workers and management and that pushing it right now will result in likely defeat for the City and an otherwise unnecessary strike.
21 Comments »Advice for City Hall – Bad Faith Negotiations Always End Badly
In just under a week Torontonians should expect a municipal workers strike. CUPE 416 and CUPE 79 – the two unions that represent Toronto’s municipal workers move into a legal strike position on June 22nd 2009. Based on the stand still and the City of Toronto’s approach to labour relations during this round of negotiations, it would be hard to anticipate workers not striking.
Currently CUPE 416 and 79 workers are negotiating an agreement to replace the collective agreement that expired on December 31st 2008. Even while aware that the City of Toronto as the employer would be at the table with it’s largest unions in the new year, in November of 2008 the City decided to rescind worker’s rights to Family Day, deciding that instead they would make the union negotiate for a day the City gave them the year before. I wrote about this on November 16th 2008 and said at the time:
‘Sometimes the City of Toronto acts with a collective stupidity that residents of our City just can’t understand. I think news that City Council is taking Family Day away from unionized employees just before entering a round of contract negoiations is one of those moments.’ Toronto Public Employees Deserve Family Day
So then, the contract expires, union members don’t get Family Day, the wages of the City’s non union workers are frozen and Council keeps its 2.5% pay increase.
The City of Toronto comes at the Unions with over 100 pages of concessions they would like the workers to make and no talk of wages at all. Not surprisingly the workers overwhelmingly rejected these with a margin of 89% for one of the unions. There are now six days until the legal strike position is met, the City still isn’t on to talking about wages and there is deadlock in negotiation over sick leave benefits.
I had a pretty good talk with a union member about the sick benefit issue because I didn’t really understand the issue very well myself. As the story goes, CUPE 416 and 79 members are entitled to paid sick leave and can pool their sick days over the course of many years to a total of six months. Should they not have to use these days, upon retiring workers are entitled to a payout of 50% of whatever sick time they have banked. This means someone with the maximum number of banked sick days would be entitled to three months pay, at the end of their employment with the City of Toronto.
The City would like to end this practice, and workers obviously would not like to. It took a while for me to wrap my head around this, and while I do recognize the City’s position which is essentially that most employers do not have to pay out for untaken sick leave at the time of an employee’s retirement, I can also see why workers would like to prolong their earnings and have a buffer as they transition from pay cheque to pension cheque. Considering workers who’ve banked six months of sick leave must have been both long standing employees and as their sick time would suggest, reliable – it seems to me that three months pay at the end of a long career is almost a fitting ‘thank you’ for a job well done.
Regardless of whether you believe workers are entitled to a payout of sick leave or not, this certainly isn’t the issue to force workers into a legal strike position over.
What seems certain to me though, is if wages haven’t even hit the table yet, and considering the Council’s position that they should maintain their increase, but not have to provide an increase to their workers, regardless of the sick leave issue, and considering the environment the City has created for negotiations, there will almost certainly be a strike for all municipal workers next Monday.
I personally would find it very difficult to lay blame for a strike on the unions, considering the City’s approach to labour negotiations this time around. I fail to see why the City would want to let the collective agreement expire before kicking off the new round of negotiations. It seems to me like this is something you would start well in advance of the expiration and a time when you’d do all that you can to not inflame a situation with things like taking back Family Day, or coming up with a massive number of concessions at a time when you’re best bet for a wage freeze would be asking the Union to help you not, not brow beating them.
The City should be negotiating in good faith, and may want to consider saving this particular issue for next time, in hopes of reaching an agreement now and creating a dialogue to discuss their position on sick pay and other more controversial issues later, like in the two to three year window they will have before the next agreement expires.
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