February 25, 2011 - No. 27
Attacks on Toronto Public Sector
Workers
Attempt to Give Free Rein to the
Wrecking of Public Services
Attacks on Toronto Public Sector Workers
• Attempt to Give Free Rein to the Wrecking of
Public Services - Pierre
Chénier
Letters to Toronto Newspapers
• Ideology Offers Simplistic Solutions on Waste
Pickup
• An Attack on One Is an Attack on All
• Privatizing Garbage Pickup Won't Save Money
Study
• Inside the Labour Market Downturn:
October 2008 to October 2010 - Statistics Canada
Greece
• Continued Mass Actions to Oppose Anti-Social
Austerity Measures
Attacks on Toronto Public Sector Workers
Attempt to Give Free Rein to the
Wrecking of Public Services
- Pierre Chénier -
The City of Toronto under recently elected Mayor Rob
Ford and his
brother in crime City Councillor Doug Ford, is spearheading an
anti-worker, anti-social campaign to crush the Toronto city workers and
their unions in order to give monopoly right free rein. A massive
transfer of social wealth from the public
sector to private interests is being engineered. No secret is being
made that the key to achieving this aim is to crush the Toronto city
workers' struggle for working conditions that are commensurate with the
services they provide. The monopoly media, the C.D. Howe Institute,
various city councillors, professors and
so-called political consultants have jumped on the bandwagon to promote
total war against Toronto city workers whose only crime is to want
security and peace of mind to provide public services which are
critical for the functioning of a modern city like Toronto. The war-cry
of the anti-worker, anti-social warriors
is to end the "privileged life" of city workers. Two contingents of
city workers are being attacked with particular venom: the outside
workers who do trash collection and the workers of the Toronto Transit
Commission (TTC).
Proposal to Privatize
Garbage Pickup
The proposal to
privatize garbage pickup is an attempt to destroy public services. Let
us recall first that on February 7, the City of Toronto provided notice
to the Toronto Civic Employees' Union (TCEU), who are part of Local 416
of the Canadian Union of
Public Employees (CUPE), of its intention to recommend a competitive
bid process for three areas of work currently carried out by these
workers. These are the residential curb-side collection west of Yonge
Street to the Etobicoke border, and an increase in privatized city-wide
litter vacuum operations and parks
litter/recycling collection within city parks throughout the city. In
addition, the city notified the union of its intention to issue a
request for quotes for contingency collection services to be provided
anywhere across the city, as required (i.e., to act as scabs during a
strike). The city's plan is to present a report
on the contracting out of these service operations to the municipal
government's Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting on April
26 and to have the report adopted at the May 17-18 City Council
meeting.
It must be remembered that CUPE Local 416's
collective agreement
expires December 31 of this year and the city is hurrying to put facts
on the ground to undermine the collective bargaining process. Under the
current collective agreement, any permanent city
worker who loses his job to
subcontracting has to be redeployed elsewhere in the system with no
loss of wages, benefits or seniority for at least 30 months. However,
the first round of this latest drive to privatize will layoff 300
part-time outside workers involved in trash collection in the area west
of Yonge Street to the border of Etobicoke,
where curb-side garbage collection is already privatized.
Proposal to Declare the TTC
an Essential Service
As
concerns the TTC workers, Mayor Ford is advocating that the TTC be
declared an essential service so as to deprive the transit workers of
their right to strike. Mayor Ford is fully supported by the McGuinty
provincial government, which on February
22, tabled a bill to ban strikes and lockouts by TTC workers as he
requested. Premier Dalton McGuinty stated to reporters, "We have
received a proposal from Toronto city council. We have listened to
them. We have talked to representatives of the workers as well and of
course we've heard from many Torontonians.
Whatever we do, it's all about helping the people of Toronto." It
therefore comes as no surprise that the tabling of Bill 150, the Toronto
Transit
Commission
Labour
Disputes
Resolution Act, 2011 comes at
the same time that the monopoly media are reporting that Toronto Mayor
Rob Ford, with the backing
of the Ontario government, wants to move faster to privatize the TTC.
Main Ideological Components
of this Anti-Worker, Anti-Social Offensive
To
justify the imposition of this latest round of privatization and of all
future privatizations as well, the proponents of these anti-worker,
anti-social measures make no bones about the fact that they want to
privatize "anything
that isn't nailed down."
Their nonsense includes the following:
- That the Mayor received a clear mandate to
privatize. Ford claims
that he openly ran on the theme of privatization of garbage collection
in the October 2010 Toronto municipal election and the electors gave
him a landslide majority.
- The Toronto city workers have only
themselves to blame for the
election of Ford and what is going to happen to them now because they
held the city hostage with their garbage strike in the summer of 2009.
It is the workers who paved the way for Ford's election to the position
of Mayor.
In this way, the most
self-serving arguments are put
forward to
divert from the substantive issue of the destruction of public services
through privatization, where the motive is profit for private
interests, not to provide public sanitation with a guarantee or uphold
the public right to modern public services on the
basis of a publicly controlled and adjudicated system. Thus the
anti-worker, anti-social warriors seek to divide the people of Toronto
into two camps, namely that you are either "for your city" or you are
"against your city." If you support the Mayor you are
"for your city"; if you are against the Mayor you are an enemy of your
city and if not of "your city" then of everyone
else's city. Either way, you don't count. Nay more, if you stand in the
Mayor's way, you deserve to be squashed.
To shore up this self-serving nonsense, claptrap
interpretations of
the "clear mandate" that Ford allegedly received to privatize are used
to raise the question of whose side city councillors are on. The view
is presented that when Ford's predecessor Mayor David Miller was in
office the Mayor and "left-wing councillors"
were not on "the side of the city" but "on the side of the unions."
Now, with Ford's election, the Mayor and the city councillors who agree
with Ford are "on the side of the city" and the "left wing councillors"
must not prevent Mayor Ford from implementing his mandate by siding
with the unions. Proof of inimical
activity is that "left-wing councillors" are attending the meetings of
CUPE Local 416 which is preparing to fight the privatization.
From this it is supposed to follow that besides other
things, labour
and the "left-wing" are waging a losing battle because most Canadian
cities contract out their trash collection and in Toronto itself the
city is privatizing about 50 per cent of its solid waste management.
This anti-social, anti-worker offensive is based on the
big lie that
privatization will produce savings for the city because contracting out
trash collection services is cheaper for the city than if it provides
the service itself. A pseudo-scientific study by the C.D. Howe
Institute is used to corroborate this lie. The study
says that by contracting out garbage collection, the city will save $48
million a year. Given the enormity of the lie, during the municipal
election Ford had to back-track from this and said the savings would be
in the $20 million range. This equally wild estimate has now been
reduced to about $8 million.
Undermined by their own self-serving use of fabricated
figures these
forces also resort to saying that in any case, the figures do not
matter very much. According to them, the issue is to go all out to
privatize waste disposal, from the collection to the landfill
operations, either because this is what people want or
because it is the right thing to do. The lie then takes the form of
saying that only when the whole operation is privatized will the city
realize the "savings."
Another stated aim of privatization of trash collection
is to
prevent a city-wide disruption of the service by a strike. Thus, not
only must the unions' ability to deploy the strength of their numbers
and organization to bargain effectively be smashed, but the contracts
with private contractors must allow for the maximum
initiative of the private sector to "be flexible" in collecting and
disposing of the waste. The contracts should merely "establish
parameters," for example, how many times a week the garbage is to be
collected. Within this parameter private companies awarded the
contracts must be allowed maximum flexibility in
how and when they collect and dispose of the garbage.
Self-Serving Logic of the
Anti-Worker, Anti-Social Forces
The
anti-worker, anti-social warriors are exuberant that privatization of
garbage collection in Toronto is a step towards the privatization of
all garbage collection services in all the cities of Canada, and, in
fact, towards the privatization of
all municipal services. The main point in their enthusiasm is that
privatization is integrally linked with an overhaul of all the labour
relations governing city workers across the country.
To show how bankrupt these
anti-worker, anti-social
warriors are,
they actually claim their campaign is "anti-monopoly." They argue that
what stands in the way of the all-out privatization of garbage
collection and city services is the monopoly that the Toronto city
unions have on the jobs that are provided by
the city. It is this monopoly that has to be broken, they say.
The main instrument of this "monopoly," they say, is the
job
security provision of the outside workers according to which any
permanent worker who loses his position to subcontracting must be
redeployed somewhere else in the system at comparative wages and
working conditions. The self-serving anti-worker,
anti-social warriors have dubbed this "jobs for life." The suggestion
is that it is totally ridiculous to even think that workers should have
"jobs for life." The problem with their derision is that is what
workers
are precisely fighting for -- job security so that they can live and
raise
their families in peace and be productive
members of a productive society. Nobody wants anarchy and chaos in lieu
of economic security, and the anti-worker, anti-social warriors are
totally ridiculous to suggest that privatization provides prosperity or
security for anyone except the monopolies providing the cheap labour
and cutting back services to the maximum
to keep more money for their sorry selves. Of course, they accuse
others of being "ideological" while they are just "practical."
Self-serving arguments include:
- The entire world opposes monopolies. Why would
Toronto city workers still enjoy their monopoly on jobs?
- The conception of "jobs for life" is no longer
applicable because
of the need to overcome the economic crisis. It is absurd to think that
while nobody else enjoys "jobs for life," Toronto city workers should
have such a "privilege."
- Privatization does not mean that
Toronto city workers will
necessarily lose their jobs. On the contrary, from now on, they are
going to have to "prove that they are good at what they do" and
"deserve the job" and are not loafing around on the tax-payers' dime.
And this is going to be decided by their new private employers. Workers
can also keep some of these jobs by becoming contractors themselves.
They can submit tenders and bid for the contracts like anybody else (by
undercutting everyone else's price). Then it is up to them as
contractors to decide what wages and working conditions they can afford
to give themselves and their employees.
- For this to function, they say that
besides the "jobs for
life," the Toronto city policy called Fair Wage Policy also must go.
This policy requires that employees of firms doing contract work for
the City receive prevailing union wages and benefits. The self-serving
logic is that
unless "jobs for life" and the "Fair Wage Policy" are eliminated,
privatization will not bring the desired results.
- With privatization, wages and working
conditions are set by the
markets and are therefore "good." If wages cannot be set by "the
market" then it makes no sense to privatize. Therefore the unions must
agree that the wages be set by "the market."
- The city must be "transparent" about
its intention to remove
"jobs for life" and the "Fair Wage Policy," which means it must openly
hire strike breaking garbage collection contractors in advance, force a
strike if need be to crush the city workers and make an example of them
for the
other city workers in Toronto and for city workers across the country.
Previous negotiations under Mayors Lastman and Miller
were lost
opportunities in terms of crushing the workers and going for all-out
privatization. They either caved in to the power of the unions
(Lastman) or were on the side of the unions and not of the city
(Miller). Now, with the Ford team, there is an "opportunity
to get the job done."
Ford's dream for Toronto is not of a city taking
responsibility for
taxpayers' money as he pretends, but of a magnet for competing private
empires grabbing the city's resources and lowering all working and
living conditions for their own narrow interests. Most importantly, the
attempt to generate hysteria with
the claim that it is the workers who are driving the city to financial
collapse is also to cover up that both the federal and provincial
governments are reneging on their responsibilities to finance Canadian
cities thereby putting them into an untenable position. Because of his
anti-worker, anti-social stand which lets the
federal governments off the hook, Mayor Ford's electoral campaign was
fully backed by the Harper Conservatives while the campaign of his
opponent Smitherman was fully backed by the Ontario Liberals who are
now nonetheless supporting Ford.
The attacks on the Toronto
city workers are tangled in
the web of
privatization and wrecking of public services at both the provincial
and federal levels of government and show that this is not a local
Toronto affair but concerns Canadians and their public services
nation-wide. It is a fundamental matter of whether
Canadians will force
governments to uphold public right and a civil
society based on the recognition that this is what governments are
presumably mandated to do, or whether the very conception of a civil
society is ended and mafia governments which carry out the behest of
the monopolies will be permitted to rule
the roost, cause anarchy and chaos and then blame the people for the
result.
More than ever the time to stand up for public right
against monopoly right is now.
Letters to Toronto Newspapers
Ideology Offers Simplistic Solutions on Waste Pickup
- Mark Ferguson, President, Toronto Civic
Employees' Union,
Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 416 -
Simple answers rarely, if ever, satisfy complex
questions. The idea
of contracting out Toronto's solid waste collection presents complex
questions.
Mayor Rob Ford's announcement that he intends to begin
selling off
our city's solid waste collection to private, for-profit operators
clearly demonstrates his preference for sloganeering and crass attacks
over real solutions for the real problems Toronto faces.
Garbage and recycling are two critical public services,
two of the
most effective examples of the tremendous benefit and advantages of
delivering services under direct community control.
Under public delivery of the collection service, Toronto
has one of
the highest diversion rates in the country. Torontonians enjoy many
green initiatives and our high diversion rates because this is a public
service.
This vital public service is far less expensive in
Toronto than in
neighbouring communities that use private collection. In 2009, the City
of Toronto spent an average of $72.22 per tonne for solid waste
collected. Durham Region, with mostly private collection, paid $85.74,
while in Halton Region, where all collection is private, residents paid
$86.79. Peel Region paid $106.79 per tonne and Vaughan paid a whopping
$168.40 per tonne -- both use private collectors.
If Toronto goes the route of our neighbours with private
waste
collection, the costs of waste pickup may increase here by 20 per cent,
48 per cent or 133 per cent -- or by an additional $6 million to $42
million per year.
Unsurprisingly, right-wing ideologues and the business
lobby seize
on garbage and recycling as an opportunity for cash-strapped
communities to realize "big savings."
Picking up the trash is more than just a dirty,
dangerous and
labour-intensive task. Waste disposal is also vital to the community's
well-being, protecting us from hazardous materials, vermin and the
communicable diseases they can carry.
This is difficult, dangerous and often back-breaking
work. As
municipal employees, the men and women who perform this work do so with
a clear mandate and commitment to the residents of the communities they
serve. The same cannot be said of the owners of private waste
management companies whose sole mandate and commitment is to
make a profit.
The most recent Ontario Municipal Benchmarking
Initiative report
shows that for 2009 residents of Toronto paid 30 per cent less than the
provincial average for waste collection.
Advocates of contracting out garbage and recycling
continually fail to back their claims up with valid data.
Ford began contracting out discussions using a C.D. Howe
Institute
report that claims the city would save $49 million. Even he dropped
that to $20 million during his campaign and now the city is claiming $8
millions in savings but isn't able to tell us where that figure came
from. Nor has anyone yet seen the city's business case.
According to a city report, the effect of bringing York
collections
back in-house saved Toronto contract costs of $4 million annually.
These savings were realized beginning in 2008. Why would we want to
reverse that trend?
In Port Moody, B.C., solid waste collection came back
in-house in
2008, following a failed 10-year experiment with private collection.
The promised savings from contracting out never materialized, and the
community had to dispatch crews to follow behind the private operator
and fix its mistakes.
We can't stop vested interests from using questionable
statistics to
justify schemes designed to line their pockets. We can only hope
Toronto City Council will make informed decisions about the services
residents receive, and the manner in which they are delivered.
According to Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, Toronto
taxes will not
go down if garbage is privatized. He also said in a recent interview
that Etobicoke's private collection is equal to, not better than, the
publicly delivered service in the rest of the city.
Sadly, residents are going to be treated to politicking,
empty
promises and "facts" so watered down by ideological filters as to be
meaningless.
That's not leadership. It is following an ideology that
respects few, least of all Torontonians, who deserve far better.
An Attack on One Is an Attack on All
- David Greig, Retired City of Toronto
Employee -
Re: Ideology offers simplistic solutions on waste
pickup, Opinion Feb. 14
As CUPE 416 President Mark Ferguson maintains, further
privatization
of Toronto's garbage does not benefit the people. It will be one more
step to handing over everything public attractive to the corporations
salivating at the prospect.
The Ford regime's concern for generic "taxpayers" is an
obvious
fraud to cover up the assault on rights and interests of municipal
employees and the other workers and poor forming the majority. It is
typical "divide and rule" strategy mendaciously positing general
benefit from depriving municipal workers of the modest security and
benefits
they now have, eliminating jobs with conditions of some dignity.
On the contrary, ravaging
the livelihood of one group of
workers
exerts pressure on all the rest. The issue is not that those workers
with modest levels of security thanks to past struggles should lose
this to be in line with the insecurity of so many others. Rather, all,
and in particular workers, who create the wealth and services of
society, must
acquire at least the modest security workers threatened by Ford's
privatization have had.
Benefits of neo-liberal privatization in Toronto and
elsewhere
accrue to the very rich and their corporations. Governments and
politicians at their service are handing to them the resources of
society, wealth of state and what remains public, and degrading
workers' livelihoods, the flip side of wealth concentration. The times
call for our
opposition to this disastrous course.
Privatizing Garbage Pickup Won't Save Money
- Paul Moist, National President,
Canadian
Union of Public Employees -
There can be no mistake; the privatization of Toronto's
waste
collection is an ideological decision, plain and simple. The C.D. Howe
study claiming savings through contracting-out is flawed and biased.
The data used in its study has been engineered, stretched, massaged and
bent through the complexities of econometrics, to reach preconceived
results which neatly fit the anti-union point-of-view.
An unbiased look at the numbers shows Toronto's waste
collection
service is one of the most effective in Ontario. Ontario Municipal
CAO's Benchmark Initiative shows the city of Toronto cost per tonne has
consistently been below the provincial average, and below many cities
which have already contracted-out their garbage collection.
There is no solid proof contracting out will lead to any
long-term
savings. In fact the privatization ideology will allow a private
company to low-ball their way in only to hike their fees once
entrenched.
Study
Inside the Labour Market Downturn:
October 2008 to
October 2010
- Statistics Canada (Excerpts) -
In October 2008, employment peaked in Canada. During the
following 12 months, employment declined by more than 400,000, but
began to recover quickly in the subsequent year. January 2011 Labour
Force Survey data indicate that employment took 27 months to fully
recover its October 2008 level.
While employment has recovered, more people remain out
of work than before the downturn. Between October 2008 and October
2010, the number of individuals without a job increased by 800,000.
These include people who were classified as unemployed, as well as
those who were not looking for a job and
consequently were not considered participants in the labour force.
[Total officially unemployed January, 2011 numbered at 1,449,600 --
Statscan.]
Several indicators of slack labour market demand (for
example, the number of unemployed, long-term unemployment and
involuntary part-time work) were still above their pre-downturn levels.
Unemployment
Between October 2008 and October 2010, the number of
people classified as unemployed rose by 341,000 (+31%).
Between October 2008 and October 2010, the number of
permanent layoffs rose by about 86,000 (+30%).
Other categories of unemployed workers also increased at
a slower rate. For example, the number of "new entrants" (those with no
previous work experience) and "re-entrants" (those who returned to the
labour force after a period of non-participation) rose 33% during the
most recent downturn.
Permanent layoffs accounted for [around] 30% of the
increase in the unemployed population during the most recent downturn.
Long-Term Unemployment
Long-term unemployment is an indicator both of slack
labour demand and its consequences for individuals. Just before the
recent downturn, more than 80% of unemployed individuals had been
without a job for 25 weeks or less, while less than 8% had been
unemployed
for at least one year.
Between October 2008 and October 2010, the number of
unemployed people who had been without a job for at least one year
almost doubled. Together with those who had been without a job for 26
to 51 weeks, these workers represented 23% of unemployed people in
October 2010 compared with 15% in
October 2008.
Non-Participants in the
Labour Force
Between October 2008 and October 2010, the number of
individuals aged 15 and over who were neither employed nor actively
looking for work (the non-participants) increased by 458,000 (+5%).
Discouraged job seekers (those who give up looking for a
job because they believe none is available) are frequently cited as a
source of growth among non-participants in labour market downturns.
However, the proportion of non-participants (less than 1%) is so
small that it has little effect on the total.
Rather, the number of non-participants during the recent
two-year period grew mainly as a result of an increase in the number of
students. The number of students grew by nearly 250,000 (+17%) over the
period. An increase in the student population is not necessarily
indicative of a back-to-school movement
among workers. It could also mean that current students did not
participate in the labour market due to the slowdown in hiring.
The number of seniors aged at least 65 also contributed
to the overall increase in the number of non-participants, a natural
consequence of the aging population.
Involuntary Part-Time
There were 113,000 fewer full-time jobs in October 2010
than in October 2008.
In contrast, the number of part-time workers rose by
more than 50,000, but that increase was not uniform across all
categories of part timers.
Individuals who worked part time but would have liked to
work full time (also called involuntary part timers) increased by
140,000 (+20%) over the period. Meanwhile, the number of individuals
working part time on a voluntary basis declined by about 87,000.
The article "Inside the labour market downturn" is now
available in the February 2011 online edition of Perspectives on Labour
and Income, Vol. 23, no. 1 (75-001-X, free).
Greece
Continued Mass Actions to Oppose Anti-Social Austerity
Measures
On February 24, a 24 hour general strike in Greece shut
down much of
the country's infrastructure to oppose the so-called austerity measures
being
imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
There were protest marches nation-wide, with an estimated 100,000
people
participating in Athens, while
15,000 to 20,000 took part in the northern port city of Thessaloniki.
Mass actions across Greece to oppose these anti-social measures have
been taking place since last year.
Athens
Piraeus; Igoumenitsa
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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