If the mayor is taking decisive action, it may well be because a sharp shift in attitudes toward the unions has given him little choice. Carlos Lay, a resident who has been hauling his trash to a dump site east of the downtown core, typified the prevailing mood when he spoke to Maclean’s earlier this week. “They’re lucky to have their jobs,” he said. “Hundreds of people would kill for those jobs.”
To Alan Levy, a labour relations expert at Brandon University, that viewpoint stands in sharp contrast to what prevailed during a similar strike in 2002, when more people seemed angry at the city than at the union. Back then, garbage bags piled up at illegal dump sites as temperatures soared (at one point, 30 tonnes of illegally dumped waste were removed from Trinity Bellwoods Park, a bucolic space located near some of the city’s trendiest café strips). Then-mayor Mel Lastman, meanwhile, stoked outrage with hyperbole, going so far as to call the union’s actions “evil.” Levy believes Miller, by contrast, has played it cool. “He’s more sophisticated. He understands the experts at the table have to do the work.”
That strike didn’t last nearly as long as the current stoppage—just 16 days—and its brevity arguably set the stage for the trench warfare occurring now. Mindful of an impending visit to Toronto by Pope John Paul II, Conservative premier Ernie Eves legislated an abrupt end to the labour action before the international media got a look at the trash piling up in the streets. The result was an arbitrated deal giving the workers three per cent wage hikes in all three years of the contract. More raises followed in 2005, when the two sides settled without a strike, while the sick-day bank remained untouched. Small wonder, then, that Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has been inclined to let the two sides sort this one out, aware perhaps that leaving the matter unresolved could cost the city dearly in the future.
And this time the city was much better prepared, having learned the lessons of 2002. Although services like daycare and ferries would be affected by the strike, officials knew that garbage would be the focal point for residents because it’s “in your face,” says Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson for Toronto Public Health. So managing waste became a priority. The city upped its number of temporary drop-off sites from 12 to 21, which has helped prevent the unsightly piles caused by illegal dumping. “Sites are being managed with pesticides and odour [control] much more effectively this time,” notes Aikins. Public Health, meanwhile, has been monitoring dump sites for maggots, rodent droppings, or other signs of infestation. Cooler temperatures have helped, making life more bearable for the management teams assigned to man the dump sites.
Certainly, council’s new-found resolve has found a receptive audience. One newspaper poll taken last week found that fully three quarters of respondents supported the city, saying striking staff should accept what they’ve been offered and go back to work. The slumping economy is clearly influencing people’s opinions. “[The strike] is a stupid idea,” says Alphonse Malley, a Toronto student walking past a dump site located in Moss Park, just east of the downtown core. “You’ve got hundreds of people, unemployed, who would do this job for half the price and not complain at all.” For others, the inconvenience and the stench are signs that the city is tackling a fiscal mess that long predates the recession; if wading through a bit of garbage will set the city on a path toward financial health, they appear willing to do so.
The question is whether Miller—who is clearly conflicted about making war with organized labour—will ensure that all the short-term pain produces long-term gain. Not only have 500,000 homeowners and 20,000 businesses been forced to move their own garbage, city-run daycares have closed, pools are shut down and permits for all manner of business and recreation are impossible to get because managers are quite literally taking out the trash. Yet after all the hassle and harsh rhetoric, last week the mayor publicly offered the employees a 7.2 per cent raise over four years, along with a short-term disability program to replace the sick-day bank. It was hardly Pinkerton-style union-busting, especially considering that workers who had already banked days would still be able to cash them in under the offer. Miller was soon hearing as much from Lastman, the mayor in office when the 2002 contract was signed. “Nobody’s standing up to [the unions]. It’s absolutely nuts,” he told Maclean’s. “The mayor doesn’t know whose side to be on. There should be no question; he was elected by the taxpayers of Toronto. But he’s not representing the taxpayers of Toronto. He’s trying to represent the unions.”
If that’s true, Miller has been an abject failure. CUPE leaders were outraged at the mayor for end-running the negotiations, refusing to put the offer to a vote. Their recalcitrance has, in turn, lent fodder to advocates of harsh measures, such as legislation declaring the employees an essential service and eliminating their right to strike. Some groups, like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, want the city to privatize all or part of its burgeoning waste management regime, pointing to innumerable municipalities in Canada who have contracted out garbage collection to large—often unionized—companies.
Slack, the U of T professor, agrees there is precedent for such a move, including in Miller’s backyard. Etobicoke had its private garbage collection contract “grandfathered” into place when the former city was absorbed by Toronto in 1998. “The argument is for competition,” she says. “When you have competition, you bring the costs down.” Winnipeg, for one, saved an estimated $5.7 million annually after making the move in 2006; Gatineau, Que., and Barrie, Ont., count among the cities that, like Toronto, do composting and recycling yet spend far less per dwelling on waste removal because they outsource some of the collection.
Whether such agreements would work on a megacity scale is an entirely different question, Slack says; after amalgamation, Toronto actually brought some garbage contracts in-house to ensure better control. Besides which, a social democrat like Miller is unlikely to lead such a frontal attack on organized labour—no matter how loudly the voters cheer. A better bet is that he will set his sights next on the sick-day banks enjoyed by police, firefighters and management-level staff, whose stored time represents a further $100-million liability. That could be a much bloodier battle: Miller won office in part because he has made peace with the city’s notoriously aggressive police association, which has campaigned in the past against candidates it didn’t like. But if his visions of a thriving “city-state” have any chance of coming to pass, the money will have to come from somewhere, and he appears to have stretched taxpayers as far as they can go. Without a long-term commitment to some form of spending sanity, Toronto seems a lot less likely to become a city-state than just a city in a state.
With Julien Russell Brunet and Tom Henheffer
Pages: 1 2
