Opposition to Privatization of Public Services
Stop and Reverse the Privatization of Calgary Transit Service Lane Workers
- Peggy Askin -
Calgary Transit announced on August 26 that 110 workers who clean and
refuel the city's transit fleet would be permanently laid off by
mid-October, and the work contracted out to the private contractor
Bee-Clean.
These workers have worked on the front lines, keeping transit buses
and C-trains clean, an essential service very important to containing
the pandemic. "Is this how we thank our transit workers?" asked
Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 583 President Mike Mahar. "The
City of Calgary is showing how ungrateful they are to the
hard-working people who went over and above putting themselves in
harm's way -- keeping our riders safe. It's a slap in the face to them."
Calgary Transit says contracting out has been in the works for two
years. It was temporarily halted due to the pandemic, but it is full
speed ahead despite increasing numbers of positive cases in Alberta.
The acting director of Calgary Transit stated that this was a "business
decision." "I think one of the advantages of contracted services is
that if
we find that we want to do a slightly different function or perform
more cleaning or even less, we can actually turn that dial up and down
far easier than we can with actual full time employees," he said.
 Who
does this "business decision" serve? Certainly not the workers or the
people of Calgary. There were 106.5 million trips taken on Calgary
Transit in 2019, an average of close to 300,000 trips a day, with 1,224
active vehicles in the fleet. With so many people taking public
transit, Calgary Transit is refusing to
uphold its social responsibility to keep transit safe under the guise of "business
decisions" which only serve private interests.
This "business decision" is not only irresponsible but a vicious
attack on the rights of the workers. The service and cleaning workers,
and their conditions of work are not a dial on an appliance that can be
turned to different settings. These are human beings who in these
conditions are protecting the health and safety of our population.
Transit
workers have fought for the conditions they have, for the wages and
benefits and quality of work life they deserve. Their work produces
value and workers who perform it have a right to security, to wages,
working conditions and benefits acceptable to themselves, not a
precarious
existence with wages below the poverty line.
The fact that the City of Calgary is guided by fictitious ideas
about cost cutting is highly irresponsible and unacceptable. Besides
considering the human factor 'a cost,' contracting out only enriches
the private owners who pay cheap wages and impose such harsh working
conditions that inadequately trained and underpaid and abused workers
come and go. It is a fiction coming out of the mouths of those who
have the power to make such self-serving decisions. Calgary City
Council is duty-bound to provide safe public transit. When it
endorses contracting out, the city is openly saying these arrangements
will make it easier to cut corners on proper cleaning and sanitizing of
buses and light rapid transit trains, when the need is greater than
ever. To do so when COVID-19 cases are increasing makes it all the
more opportunist and reprehensible.
Bee-Clean will be paying the fueler-cleaners the minimum wage of
$15.00 an hour, and $18.00 for the operators, Mahar said. He told Workers' Forum
that the city has "nothing but trouble" with
Bee-Clean which already has the contract for bus shelters and C-train
stations. Its shoddy record is already known. Mahar told CTV that Bee-Clean has "a terrible track
record with thousands of registered complaints about dirty,
contaminated bus shelters and stations." This is of concern to all
Calgarians.
It is particularly irresponsible and dangerous when tens of thousands
of students who ride the buses are already dealing with an unsafe
return to school.
Calgary Transit claims that it will "save" some $5 million, an
indication not only of unacceptable wages and working conditions, but
that staff will also be cut in order for the private owners to line
their pockets. Outsourcing the cleaning of public infrastructure to
private cleaning companies is increasingly common, and in many places
the
workers in these companies are fighting to organize themselves under
very difficult conditions. These companies are notorious for terrible
conditions of work.[1]
Will these workers even have proper personal protective equipment? How
will they travel home from work when their shift ends at 3:00 am and public
transit is not available?
 Workers
in the industry are mainly recent immigrants, often migrant workers
working under conditions of super-exploitation. In many cases the
companies call the workers "independent contractors" in order to flout
the law, pay workers less than minimum wage, make no EI or CPP
contributions on the workers' behalf and provide no sick time
or benefits. Bee-Clean for example was found to be in violation of
labour standards at the University of Alberta for failure to pay
overtime and other violations of employment standards. These workers succeeded in organizing a union.
Such decisions are made in the name of "lack of money." But this
"lack of money" for public services exists because the financial
oligarchy refuses to pay for the public infrastructure it uses that
benefits its business activities, including providing public transit for
workers to come to work and access their businesses. Building the
public transit and other infrastructure such as public highways,
bridges, public education and health care and mass transit, amongst
others, including research and development, is also a source of big
profits for the rich. The revenue which comes from the economic
activity which public transit generates must be returned to pay for
these services.
City Council must be held to account for this reprehensible decision and failure to uphold its social responsibility. Everyone,
and Calgarians in particular, should join Local 583's campaign to
demand that Calgary City Council reverse its decision.
Note 1. See "Why the 'invisible workers' cleaning up COVID-19 need better labour protection," CBC Radio, April 3, 2020.
This article was published in
Number 62 - September 17, 2020
Article Link:
Opposition to Privatization of Public Services: Stop and Reverse the Privatization of Calgary Transit Service Lane Workers - Peggy Askin
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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