November 18, 2011 - No. 13

Behind the Standard Declarations About Job Creation

What Is the Ontario Government Up to?

- Jane Steeple -

Behind the Standard Declarations About Job Creation
• What Is the Ontario Government Up to? - Jane Steeple

Health Care Is a Right
• Crisis Mongering About the Aging Population - Jim Nugent

Defend Public Sector Workers and Public Services
• Toronto Municipal Administration Targets Workers' Job Security - David Greig
• Toronto Is Duty Bound to Negotiate in Good Faith with Its Workers - Pierre Chénier
• York Transit Workers Continue Strike Against Private Contractors

Letters to the Editor
• Privatization -- A Source of Corruption and Waste of Public Funds
• The "Reasonable" and "Impartial" Face of the Anti-Social Offensive

Behind the Standard Declarations About Job Creation

What Is the Ontario Government Up to?

- Jane Steeple -

This coming Monday, November 21, the 40th Ontario Legislature will be convened. On November 22, the Lieutenant Governor will deliver the Speech from the Throne which outlines the program of the new McGuinty minority government elected by just 18 per cent of eligible voters. The event is accompanied by all the standard declarations which have accompanied every Speech from the Throne since the Harris Common Sense Revolution was unleashed in 1995 -- that there is a plan to build a "secure and prosperous future" for Ontario and her children and "to see businesses that create new jobs and opportunities here at home while competing for markets around the world."

The day after the Throne Speech is delivered, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan will provide additional details about that plan when he delivers the "Fall Economic Statement." Premier Dalton McGuinty also promises that "in the months ahead, we'll be receiving the report from the Commission on the Reform of Public Services, chaired by economist, Don Drummond. That report will help inform our government's choices as we shape our spring budget."

All emphasis is said to be on "the economy" even though "the economy" and what ails it and how to resolve the economic crisis in favour of the people of Ontario are not even broached by either government, or its experts, or any other experts or the media whose take on life is purely capital-centred, not human-centred. Theirs is a massive PR campaign designed to disinform the polity and overwhelm any attempt at creating an organized opposition in the form of a political movement based on the independent politics of the working class. To reach first base, such a movement has to clearly oppose the disinformation promoting pay-the-rich schemes in the name of creating jobs and prosperity.

There will be plenty of opportunity for the workers and all sectors of society affected by the anti-social offensive to discuss this in the coming week. Besides the Throne Speech and Fall Economic Statement, an "Economic Summit" is to be held from November 21-23, while the 11th Biennial Convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour is taking place from November 21-25.

The McGuinty Liberals continue to deny part-time college workers the right to organize in defence of their working conditions.

The recent Ontario election was used to prepare us for what lies ahead, as is the fact that the McGuinty Government is standing on its record, claiming that its anti-social measures have strengthened education and health care.

By way of example, the March 2011 budget presented by Liberal Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan highlighted the need to "eliminate the deficit without threatening economic growth or the gains Ontarians have made in education and health care." In order to do so "the government must further reform the way it does business," the government said. This includes taking "several new measures that would make public services more affordable and effective for Ontario families" -- in other words to privatize public assets and services to Ontarians, attack workers and their working conditions and generally to defend monopoly right over public right.

To this end, it was announced in the March budget that an additional 1,500 positions in the public sector will be eliminated in 2012-14 in addition to the 3,400 jobs that have been cut since the 2009 budget. Government agencies have been asked to find $200 million in savings. The budget also claimed that "new partnerships with the private sector will create and retain nearly 10,000 jobs in Ontario."

Another indication of what lies ahead is who was nominated to Chair the Commission for the Reform of Ontario's Public Services. Don Drummond is an economist who worked for over two decades at the Ministry of Finance at the federal level and was chief economist for the TD Bank from 2000-2010. Mr. Drummond has pointed out that he "will consider almost anything to fix the province's finances." Health care and education are such huge components of the Ontario budget that he "absolutely" has to consider them. In other words, further privatization of these two systems is on the agenda.

Similarly, a joint study by KPMG and a University of Toronto policy centre noted the gap in compensation between public and private sector workers. The study argues for the lowering of wages and benefits in the public sector which are called "costs" "because it furthers equity objectives."[1] In other words, in the name of "equity," the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers are used as a benchmark to drive down the demands of unionized workers and to impose arbitrary working conditions.

Since the global economic crisis of 2008, which the Liberals claimed was "unexpected," McGuinty and his crew have gone on the attack against the public sector workers as the key strategy of the economic "recovery." As part of this strategy, they conducted a series of "Compensation Consultations" with many of the 79 unions representing some 844,796 public sector workers in Ontario between August 9 and October 3 last year. A Labour Relations Secretariat was struck to facilitate these consultations, but the agenda was to "encourage" these public sector unions to "curb" their "compensation packages" as key to addressing the economic crisis in Ontario. The bogus nature of the consultations was revealed when the government refused to even discuss proposals made by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union and others that the Liberals roll back plans to reduce corporate taxes from 14 to 10 per cent. The reason given to refuse to even discuss this proposal is the mantra that such a measure would diminish Ontario being a favourable place to invest and reduce the province's competitive edge.[2]

It is noteworthy that in a November 2, 2010 thank you letter to those who had participated in consultations, Dwight Duncan wrote, "The government has never said that the fiscal situation was the result of public sector workers. But we cannot ignore the simple fact that 55 per cent -- or more than $50 billion -- for all government program expenses go to compensation, either directly or through transfers. While the government has undertaken several expense management initiatives, we can only manage the deficit by also addressing the single biggest line in our budget -- public sector compensation."[3] In other words, attacking the workers, their working and living conditions is the key to solving Ontario's economic woes! It can be seen that in actual practice, the McGuinty Liberals have been the worthy heirs of the anti-social offensive begun by the Bob Rae NDP and the Mike Harris Conservatives in Ontario.

In the past, the McGuinty government was not held to account because the workers were told that their responsibility was to hold the McGuinty government's feet to the fire for their electoral promises. It is very important that this time around the workers seriously look into the Liberals' electoral promises, all of which will be plainly spelt out in the Speech from the Throne, the subsequent Economic Statement and during the Economic Summit. Far from accepting these promises and demanding their implementation, the workers and their allies must see these promises for what they are -- bankrupt self-serving nation-wrecking pay-the-rich schemes. Far from holding the Liberals' feet to the fire to make sure they implement these promises, the workers must take concrete measures to forge a workers' opposition on the basis of providing Ontario with a new direction, beginning with a new direction for the economy.

As the inaugural issue of Ontario Political Forum pointed out -- a new direction is needed for Ontario because the old direction has resulted in the large scale wrecking of Ontario and Canada. This new direction can only be led by the Ontario workers because it is they who have a vested interest in ending the anti-social offensive in Ontario and using the strength of their numbers, skills and organization to build a human-centred Ontario that upholds public right and ensures that all Ontarians can live with dignity and have a bright collective future.

Notes

1. Mowat Centre, School of Public Policy and Governance, KPMG, 2010
2. Evans, Brian. "The Politics of Public Sector Wages: Ontario's Social Dialogue for Austerity," presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. May 16-18, 2011, Wilfrid Laurier University.
3."Minister Duncan Thanks Compensation Consultations Participants," Ontario Ministry of Finance, http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/budget/ontariobudgets/2010/thank-you.html

Health Care Is a Right

Crisis Mongering About the Aging Population

- Jim Nugent -

Disinformation about the aging of the population, about the "baby boom generation" approaching retirement age, is presented by the rich and their government and media as a great crisis and is used as an excuse for every manner of attack on social programs. A picture is presented of a supposedly "unsustainable" situation where a handful of active workers is supporting pensions, health care and other services for vast legions of retired people. This disinformation is then used as an excuse for driving down the wages of workers in the public sector and opening investment space for the monopolies in this sector through privatization as a solution to sustainability.

One of the areas where this disinformation campaign about demographics has been most hysterical is the area of health care. Former TD banker Don Drummond, who is heading the Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services, said these health care costs are like a "pac man" threatening to gobble up the entire Ontario government budget because of the aging population and other factors. These big-lie assertions are made even though Ontario's health care spending as a share of program spending has decreased from 48 per cent to 42 per cent over the last three years and has been stable as a percentage of the GDP for the past 10 years These assertions also misrepresent the issue of the aging of the population as it relates to health care costs.

A report on the factors driving health care costs was issued by the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) on November 3. CIHI operates a national health statistical information data base. The figures released show that other factors, especially increasing payments to pharmaceutical and medical technology companies, far outweigh health costs related to aging. The report concludes that, "The common belief is that an aging population will lead to greater demands for health care services and accelerated growth in health spending. Contrary to common perception, population aging has been a very modest cost driver overall. Population aging contributed an annual average growth of only 0.8%."

This modest effect of aging population on health care costs is a reflection of a very moderate and gradual growth of the senior population. Declarations about a "dependency crisis" are self-serving fear mongering of the rich. The ratio of the number of people of retirement age (65 and over) compared to the number of working age people (25-64) is increasing at a rate of less than 1 per cent a year. There are currently four people of working age for every senior and it will be another 10 years before the ratio is reduced to even three working age people for each senior, as the table below shows.

Rather than being an "extraordinary situation," the relative percentages of population not in the work force compared to the number of people working (dependency ratio) is extraordinarily low when compared to the historical equilibrium that existed up until the post-war period. As is shown in the graph below, the percentage of the population working even by 1960 was less than 35 per cent. This increased to over 51 per cent of the population employed by 2009 and is now stabilizing at about 50 per cent.

The current low dependency ratio is closely related to participation of women in the labour force. The labour participation rate of women 20-54 years old in 1953 was only 27 per cent but this increased steadily until by 2010, 81 per cent of women 25-54 were working. The benefit of this massive increase in labour force participation because of the influx of women workers and the wealth it created was almost entirely appropriated by the capitalists. Despite a huge increase in the number of families with two people working in the past 30 years, family incomes have stagnated and most families have trouble making ends meet.

Increased labour force participation by women and the immense wealth their participation created is the other side of the demographic coin that has resulted in a gradual aging of the work force. Fertility rates of Canadian women had been falling since the late 1800s. This trend accelerated in the post-war period, enabling fuller labour force participation. By 1970, the fertility rate had fallen below 2, which means that the population was not reproducing itself and that the overall age of the population began to increase. This trend began to level off and reverse only recently as women workers won demands for social programs such as maternity leave and child care support.

That the rich and their governments consider the survival of people past their working age and seniors using the health care system to be a "crisis" exposes their thoroughly anti-human character. This is the same anti-social outlook the monopolies display when they complain about "legacy costs" for retired workers and demand contract concessions and when they use bankruptcy frauds to loot pension and benefit plans. They claim all the wealth of labour as their due, and recognize no responsibility whatever to the men and women workers who produce this wealth or to the society. They do not recognize that health and health services are a right of all human beings which the government is duty bound to ensure. For the rich the health care system and the health needs of seniors and others are golden opportunities for extorting guaranteed profits from governments. Their crisis mongering about the aging population and unsustainability serves this end.

Defend Public Sector Workers and Public Services

Toronto Municipal Administration Targets
Workers' Job Security

- David Greig -

Toronto city workers on strike in defence of their working conditions and public services, June 2009.

In advance of the December 31 expiration of the collective agreements for some 20,000 Toronto city employees, members of CUPE Locals 79 and 416, the city and the latter local recently exchanged their positions concerning a new contract. On November 7 and 8 Local 416 President Mark Ferguson informed media that, as expected, Mayor Ford's regime intends to attack the workers' working conditions including removing the current job security provisions from the contract. Those provisions require the city to redeploy permanent employees displaced by privatization instead of laying them off. Ferguson indicated the workers will determinedly defend their job security.

Members of the two covered by these contracts Locals 79 and 416 -- "inside" and "outside" workers respectively -- collect garbage, clean and maintain streets, parks, and city buildings, provide the ambulance service, run and maintain the water and sewage systems, carry out office functions, run community and daycare centres, and retirement homes, among many other things.

The anti-social, anti-worker agenda of the regime in power envisages degradation, elimination and privatization of public services and programs and the jobs of the workers providing them on a scale far beyond that already implemented in 2011. As such, the existing job security constitutes an important obstacle to the regime's city wrecking plans. It is also fundamental to the rights of workers as the producers of wealth and providers of services.

Without some degree of job security, workers are left exposed to considerable hardship in the all too frequent event an employer, pursuing at will its narrow self-interest, decides to eliminate jobs. Since such "layoffs" or terminations most often occur right at times of economic crisis and high unemployment, the hardship is multiplied. In the case of the city, where many employees have dedicated a large part of their working lives to a particular service, job loss would often occur at an age where re-employment is more difficult if not impossible. And clearing the way for further job elimination is the immediate reason the Ford regime is targeting job security.

Workers for the City of Toronto (and the two-tiered municipal entities that preceded the 1998 amalgamation creating the present Toronto) have faced and resisted decades-long policies of contracting out to private businesses work that they had previously or normally would have performed. In some cases even long before the Ford regime, this included outright privatization like the Etobicoke garbage collection. In the course of negotiations, a strike struggle in 2002 and arbitrations, the workers never accepted these ongoing policies and were able to improve job security provisions providing them some protection against the consequences of job elimination.

Those provisions require that permanent employees covered by the collective agreements between the city and CUPE Locals 79 and 416 whose jobs eliminated by contracting out (including privatization) shall be redeployed rather than laid off. About one-third of the 5,500 CUPE Local 416 members whose contract expires on December 31 are temporary employees and not covered by this provision. Likewise, a similar portion of the larger Local 79 unit whose contract also ends December 31 are not permanent and not protected by this job security clause. The fact many of these and other workers have little or no job security protection points to the need to extend this defence to all workers.

Workers, who with their labour create the wealth and provide the services that make human society possible, by right have a primary claim to a standard livelihood, well-being and peace of mind. Job security guarantees wrung by workers from some private and public employers, in this case the city, have been steps toward making such rights effective. The anti-social offensive, spearheaded in Toronto by the Ford regime, aims instead to deprive workers of their rights to the maximum and strengthen the hegemony of the monopolies and their political representatives.

The Ford regime's drive to eliminate workers' job security fits closely with that of the monopolies and the other government bodies at their service attacking the fundamental rights of workers, as in the cases of the postal workers, Air Canada flight attendants and the Hamilton steelworkers. The narrow, self-serving logic of these interests in power, demands the trashing of the rights, well-being and peace of mind of workers and any sort of standard for their lives, in order to advance their profits and empire building and put the whole society at their service. It is the retrograde logic according to which workers are sub-human, akin to slaves, draft animals or machinery -- to be used or discarded at the discretion of those in power in government and business.

Workers and all the people need to stand with the city workers in the struggle ahead. The destruction of job security must not pass!

Toronto Is Duty Bound to Negotiate
in Good Faith with Its Workers

- Pierre Chénier -

Toronto Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday recently spoke to CTV News about the state of negotiations for new collective agreements with the inside and outside city workers. He was specifically responding to CUPE Local 416 President Mark Ferguson's comments. Ferguson criticized the city for presenting proposals that would gut the workers' collective agreement especially with respect to job security, since such retrogressive proposals cannot provide a framework for a settlement acceptable to the workers.

Holyday began the interview by chastising the workers for "going public" and accusing them of "negotiating through the media." He lectured CUPE Local 416 to "follow the process" and save its comments for the bargaining table.

Holyday's comments are not acceptable. For at least a year now, starting with the election of Rob Ford as Mayor of Toronto, the city administration has been very vocal that it wants to sell off or privatize "anything that's not nailed down" and stop what it calls the gravy train. As everyone expected, the campaign against the "gravy train" has turned into an assault on the city's public sector workers, and now the Deputy Mayor demands secret negotiations between the two parties!

To the contrary, the Ford regime's attack on these workers is a public matter pertaining to the kind of city and society the people are to have. For the city workers to go public about this and take a stand that such a broad attack cannot be dealt with in the confines of negotiations for a collective agreement is taking up their social responsibility. The city workers' living and working conditions are what guarantee the level of public services we depend on. To defend their working conditions is to defend these services. The measure of job security and stability the workers have attained is a necessary component of the job itself. They need it to provide the services with peace of mind and in a safe manner. They also need it as they grow older to prevent being thrown on the streets due to cuts and privatization, especially at a time when the economic crisis is deepening. For workers to retain well-paying jobs and job security will help to counteract this crisis and is a starting point to turn the situation around.

All signs are that the City of Toronto does not plan to negotiate in good faith with its workers. Through Holyday's comments and its ceaseless public slandering of workers, it is trying to extort concessions it could never obtain in good faith negotiations. Trying to gut collective agreements that took years to achieve, and doing so against the clear will of those providing the services, is not negotiation.

It is the city administration's duty to provide for the well-being of its citizens. This necessarily requires ensuring proper living and working conditions for those who provide the services to meet people's needs. If the city wanted to negotiate in good faith, it would show respect for the important and often difficult and unpleasant tasks the workers fulfil, recognizing that they have the right to terms and conditions of work commensurate with what they do. Far from denigrating them as being on a "gravy train," the city would unite with them to see how the public services can be defended and expanded within the current circumstances.

In his interview, Holyday was reluctant to provide details about the city's proposal and dwelt instead upon its aim. He said, it is to make sure city workers work in a more efficient manner because the City of Toronto must run its operations efficiently, which has not been the case. But the workers report that they have approached the city administration repeatedly to work out how the delivery of the services can be improved and made more rational, but it does not even want to listen to them.

For Holyday, "efficiency" is a euphemism for a race to the bottom between city workers and private contractors. According to his logic, city workers are efficient if they can prove they can compete with the private contractors the regime is bringing in for jobs formerly done by city employees. Therefore, anything in the collective agreement making the workers uncompetitive with the private contractors has to be removed. If workers agree to do that, they might save their positions; otherwise these jobs will go to the private sector, says the Deputy Mayor.

What kind of twisted, self-serving and circular logic is this? It is the regime which has set as its aim selling everything it can to private monopolies. How can it then blame the workers for privatization? By telling city workers they must become efficient, Holyday means they have to accept inferior working and living conditions. When Ford became Mayor of Toronto a year ago, monopoly media columnists stated the planned privatization and contracting out would not make sense if the workforce employed by the private monopolies keeps the current terms and conditions of work. In this round of "negotiations", as the regime in power is embarking on its agenda of all out privatization, it is clearly indicating now is the time to create a workforce with severely reduced terms and conditions, including being shifted around or terminated at will. The efficiency Holyday and his regime advocate is the lowering of all living and working standards so the private monopolies can reap higher profits. In the process, they would also undermine the workers' defence organizations, the unions and reduce their membership.

This is not acceptable for the city workers or the public. The city must negotiate in good faith with its workers and halt the attempt to lower their working and living standards.

York Transit Workers Continue Strike
Against Private Contractors

Striking York Region Transit workers in Vaughn, November 16, 2011. (CityNews)

York Region Transit (YRT) workers are continuing their strike, which began October 24, against the three international monopolies contracted by the municipality to provide transit service. The monopolies involved -- Miller Group, Veolia and First Canada -- are big players in the privatization of public services in the Toronto area. Veolia and First Canada are among the biggest international monopolies, engaging in privatization all over the world. Workers are demanding increased wages and benefits to bring them closer to the going rate for transit workers in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). YRT workers receive fewer benefits and $7 per hour less than other transit workers in the GTA even though York transit fares and subsidies are the highest. It is reported that York Region pays about $120 million annually to the three private transit monopolies to provide bus services to some 73,000 riders every weekday. Clearly these private monopolies are profiteering at the expense of their workers' wages and benefits.

Siding with the monopoly contractors and the irresponsible municipal politicians, the Ontario Conservative Party is calling on the provincial government to criminalize the struggle of YRT workers. On November 10, the three Progressive Conservative MPPs from York Region held a press conference at Queen's Park. They demanded that the legislation used by the McGuinty government in April to declare strikes by Toronto Transit Commission workers illegal be extended to cover all transit workers in the GTA. The Minister of Labour said that she would not intervene in the strike and offered to appoint a mediator.

YRT workers and their union have demanded that the York Region politicians take responsibility for the situation of workers and transit users by ordering their contractors to make serious bargaining proposals. But until now they have refused, declaring that the strike is none of their business since the service is contracted out. On November 10, however, York Region Chairman Bill Fisch issued a statement egging on the stubborn refusal of the contractors to bargain in good faith. "York Region wants a timely restoration of transit services," he said, "But not at any price."

Citing the big gap between the companies and the workers in the contract negotiations, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Locals 113 and 1587 have called on York Region and the contractors to submit the remaining issues to binding arbitration. This proposal for ending the strike has the support among people in the municipality according to a poll conducted by the ATU.

The strike by YRT workers has wide support among other transit workers, public sector workers and other workers in the region and throughout the GTA. The YRT workers' strike is a front of resistance of the Canadian working class to the marauding and dictate of the international monopolies.

Letters to the Editor

Privatization -- A Source of Corruption
and Waste of Public Funds

Ontario Political Forum contains a great exposure of privatization of public services as corrupt and a waste of public funds. My own thinking is that private control of any public service makes it ripe for corruption. It invites the stealing of public funds and puts fabulous wealth in the hands of certain individuals who then use their money, connections and power to put people who are loyal to them into positions of trust in politics and as heads of public boards. Those people then channel contracts to the same private corporate interests and on and on it goes becoming bigger and more sophisticated all the time.

Public services are different from making a commodity and then having to go out and sell it. Privatized public services such as building, maintaining and running infrastructure are usually done under contract with guaranteed returns. A portion of the money is siphoned off into the hands of those who control and own those private firms. This creates a material base for corruption such as we are seeing openly exposed in Quebec and which exists in Ontario as well except it has not been revealed to the same extent or simply is better hidden. My view is that creating any material basis for private corporate gain from the public treasury inevitably leads to corruption both on the economic and political front.

We need to stamp out corruption from our public services and offices by removing private corporate interests from public service altogether, even as suppliers of such things as asphalt, cement and pharmaceuticals. We need to reverse the privatization of public services and make it a criminal offense to profit from public services in any way, shape or form.

When I was in high school in Toronto in the 1960s, I had direct experience with this corruption, which I believe becomes integral to the economy when you have private corporate interests trying to make money from public services. I worked several summers for Miller Paving, which must have been one of the companies in the Miller Group that now controls various public transit systems, although they probably changed their name or distanced themselves from the company because it became caught up in a big scandal at the time. Four or five of the companies doing paving and other infrastructure work for Toronto apparently divided the city into zones and fixed their bids for public work according to a prearranged scheme. One company would be given the "right" to a certain contract and all the others would bid above the already- decided winning bid giving the winner a lucrative contract. This affected us workers, as the winning contract would usually contain a clause saying that the contractor would receive a set amount of money for every hour worked by those employed, which of course was far above what we were paid. Once or twice a week when I would show up at the assigned job, which was usually paving a stretch of old road or preparing a new one, the supervisor on site would come up to a group of us, mark us as "at work" and then tell us to "get lost" for the day, as he didn't want a bunch of workers hanging around watching others do the work because people might complain.

For the first month I worried about getting paid but as my pay checks were for full weeks and even some overtime that part of the worry left me. But some of us began to question the practice as it happened so often. We were told to shut up and enjoy the experience or we would soon be without work for the summer.

When you're a high school kid working for the summer you sort of take things as they are but this really bothered me. Later, it did not surprise me when I learned that Miller Paving was one of the companies accused of corruption. This led me to wonder why the city did not just use its own engineering department to do infrastructure work and cut out all this corruption and stealing of public money. I would have been glad to have worked the summer for the city doing consistently useful work instead of becoming embroiled in the corruption of private companies soaking our public coffers and making certain characters incredibly rich, which then puts them in a position where they can use their wealth and power to bribe and corrupt other individuals in positions of trust in the city and province.

I am with you and the public service workers in demanding that we clean up this corruption by removing its material basis, which is found in private companies contracting to do public services.

Keep up the good work! We need this discussion.

The "Reasonable" and "Impartial" Face of the Anti-Social Offensive

Over the past year the Toronto Star has positioned itself as an adversary or at least a critic of the city's retrograde regime. In turn, Mayor Ford and his associates have bolstered the Star's posturing by refusing contact with the paper. But as the crucial issues and struggles come to the fore, the reality behind this illusion is being revealed for all to see. As the collective agreements for thousands of outside and inside city employees come to an end (December 31), the city administration has stepped up its attack with the aim of trashing the existing terms and conditions of their work, paving the way to the mass elimination of workers and their jobs, and cutting and privatizing public social programmes and services. On November 14, the Star had its editorial say on the matter.

The editorial writer adopted the stance of the supposedly wise and impartial arbiter, lecturing both sides for their own and the common good, to be "flexible, imaginative and willing to make some sacrifice."

Be reasonable, the editor counsels, and a deal fair to everyone can be worked out. But of what do fairness and reasonableness consist on the part of the Ford regime and the workers, according to the editor?

With respect to the Ford regime, the editor in fact comes to its defence, sustaining the spectre of budgetary crisis as the pretext for city wrecking and workers' remuneration as the scapegoat. Cuts and devastation are characterized as needed "efficiencies" and the workers' benefits as "plush," "indefensible," "plum," and "jobs for life," within the false "taxpayers" versus "municipal workers" formula. In fact, the item's title "Stop ranting, start talking" is the Star's support for the Ford regime's position that the unions should not go public about the issue. And the only specific sacrifices or flexibility the editor requests of the regime is that it "disclose the exact dimensions of the city's financial shortfall" and that, even though the editor acknowledges Ford's anti-union agenda, the regime needs to pretend it "is not out to break city hall unions but is ready to work with them."

The editor's approach to the workers and their unions is very different: relentless and insistent demands that they make concessions and sacrifices along with implied threats about what will happen in the case of a lockout or strike. Their modest benefits and job security are the targets, nothing less than the degradation or destruction of which will suffice. Their defence organizations must "get down to the business of helping to identify savings and -- yes -- proposing some sacrifice." According to the editor, refusing concessions is "not good enough" and "just won't work" and "labour can't just keep insisting on business-as-usual."

The workers and people of Toronto must reject the pressures and admonishments of the Star editor with the contempt they deserve. It is their own experience and sober assessment of the situation that will guide them in the developing struggle to uphold their rights and interests and defeat the anti-social regime in power. Whatever the differences in language and emphasis, the monopoly media, of which the Toronto Star is but one face, is an integral part of neoliberal retrogression and its assault on the working class and society.

A Retired City Worker

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