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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

The following email was sent from my computer to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Toronto location, in response to a protest letter sent by them to city hall regarding the 2009 garbage strike.

While the ideas contained will very obviously strike opposition within the breasts of both unions and management (pun intended), I believe the interests of the population at large will be served by having

• shorter strikes
  
• accompanied by less posturing and more cooperation between the sides.

Following the template I suggest, public and membership pressures to end a threatened strike quickly and equitably will ensure both these benefits.

During the 2009 garbage strike, the citizens suffered stink and inconvenience and the strikers lost a significant portion of their annual income; but the city's rat population fed well, and the city gained several millions of dollars saved by not having to pay the strikers their wages, which it promptly decided to spend on infrastructure over-runs. Hmmmmm. Just sayin'.......

Two small edits are shown with square brackets.

From: Mark State [EMail address withheld for this purpose]
Sent: June 25, 2009 2:32 PM
To: MS Ontario
Subject: Garbage & Other Strikes (this letter may be published to your membership)

I read with interest the news article about the CFIB’s protesting to the Ontario and Municipal Government of Toronto re outrage concerning the (upcoming) garbage strike.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the media articles on various bargaining positions sought by the two sides in the strike were your only source of information about how negotiations were proceeding, and whether or not a strike was likely to occur.

You read about various points of view made to the press by spokespersons for each side, and had to take what they were saying as being a factual account of what was transpiring around the bargaining table.

A better route for public information, as well as accurate media information, would be to legislate that all contract bargaining talks with all unions and businesses be open to the public and broadcasted on television and/or podcasted via the internet.

Openness in the bargaining process would allow citizenry to make up its mind as to who was asking for what, and who was balking at the request and why.

The Visibility thus afforded to the public about the bargaining sessions would ensure honesty and frugality on the part of the bargainers, because they would know they were being observed during the process; and that the public, their customers/patrons/citizens, and union members were doing the watching.

In most cases, I believe that the bargaining sessions would be shortened; and that because the public was observing [and commenting on the behaviour of the bargaining teams], the public’s requirements would also be taken into consideration during the process.

I have a great many friends in small business, and one or two in large business as well, whose enterprises are going to be negatively affected by this (referring to the garbage collector's strike of 2009) strike, just as they are whenever a public strike of any kind ensues. But I have even more friends who are residential home dwellers…in high rise, low rise, and single family dwellings, who are equally adversely affected by all public strikes. A public strike is a no-win situation for all sides, including business and the citizenry.

Both the Province and the city need to enact visibility legislation regarding the bargaining process in labour negotiations today, to prevent the kind of second-hand, opinionated information gathering that will continue to hide the actual process and the positions of the key players from the public, and to make strikes less prevalent going forward.


Mark M. State

Now, dear reader, it's time to point out that I was a Mayoralty candidate in the recent 2010 civic elections, and to invite you to search for solutions to the garbage strike offered by my then-opponents in the race. I'm sure that, like myself, somebody might have had a good suggestion about preventing such things as population-disrupting strikes of all kinds in the future. Or not.

And be especially careful about politicians being willing to legislate "essential services", because when a service is considered essential, its union becomes a service of a government; and neither it nor its members can be replaced with competing unions unless the government group it works for votes to put the service out for tender or to change unions. In other words, once declared essential, the number of groups that are likely to be considered for the job narrows --for better or worse-- down to one. Forever.

Recently, the Ontario government, sick and tired of a regular progression of transit worker strikes, declared the Toronto transit an essential service. This means that during contract negotiations, no matter what the stress, the transit service must run, and the union workers (who are NOT essential service, but must perforce continue to RUN the essential service because it is essential, and not running it is therefore unlawful) don't get a chance to strike.

The net result of this has been twofold. First, no more bothersome and inconvenience-causing transit strikes; but secondly, an attitude by some transit operators of invulnerability in the face of poor driving or a bad attitude towards passengers. Coincidentally, these are exactly the two main items that were under heated discussion in the transit passengers' protest meetings with the transit union boss and some representative drivers in 2010.

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