Toronto's stinky residue

    If the longest civic strike in the history of Canada's largest city is any indication, everyone should be glancing over their shoulders when it comes to their jobs.
    It would be very tempting for some people to use the current financial crisis to justify full frontal assaults on employment, wages and benefits. It's already happened to some extent. People have lost jobs; those who have kept them have in some cases been forced into making concessions in what seems on the surface a reasonable argument under the circumstances: better to do that than lose your job either through cuts or having your company go out of business.
    But what happens when employers use the crisis as an excuse to downsize or roll back? You have to admit, it's a great opportunity.
    Unions are easy targets at times like this. That was amply demonstrated in the strike by Toronto civic employees. Cheerled by the media, the public got itself into paroxysms of anti-union vitriol. Fire them all, was a popular refrain, and hire new people. There are lots of folks out there who would be happy to have those jobs.
    I don't think so. Many of those on strike were garbage collectors. It's not a job people are exactly lining up for, and with good reason. It's a shitty job, but someone has to do it and those who do aren't paid enough.
    Really. Those are long hard days. The work, especially collecting compostable decomposing foodstuff, soiled diapers and pet feces, literally stinks. Even with the new mechanical arms in place to tip the garbage and recycling bins into the trucks, it's heavy work. Those people also have to collect sofas and other castoff furniture, appliances and numerous other items not part of the conventional garbage.
    We complain when they leave a bin or yard waste container uncollected because it's too heavy. The reason there are weight limits to what these employees will pick up or haul around is because muscle and back injuries are common in that job. And they can be career enders.
    This work has to be done regardless of the weather. It doesn't matter whether it's one of those punishing Toronto summer days when it's 95 Farenheit with 90 per cent humidity, or whether it's 20 below.
    The work is tough and the days are long. And on top of all that, even though these people are performing a vital service to our society, the public looks down on them.
    A shitty, tough, backbreaking and thankless job. And many people would be happy to have those jobs? Not likely.
    The garbage collectors became the focus of this strike simply because of the city employees on the picket line, they were the most visible in terms of both their work and their absence. Residents were reminded daily of them by the growing mounds of garbage and the increasing challenge of how to cope over a 35-day period making as few visits to authorized temproary city dumpsites as possible.
    But other workers were off the job as well, from lifeguards to park landscaping crews to people who issue permits to daycare workers.
    They were, curiously, the most invisible when it came to media coverage of this strike. Daycare workers. The people entrusted with looking after our children. Grossly underpaid considering they're charged with tending supposedly the most precious things in our lives, our kids. And ignored by the media. Even today, one of the city's papers referred to "the garbage strike", as if that was the only element involved.
    That's what it all came down to. That and 18 sick leave days the union employees are allowed to bank each year.
    The media made this the sole issue of the labour dispute, even though there were others. They were rabid over the fact that CUPE union members had this provision. After all, it was pointed out, no one in the private sector has bankable sick days. That cry was taken up by the public and applied to many of the other benefits the union members had, even to the fact that they had jobs at all.
    How dare they go on strike when people in the private sector had lost jobs!
    But the main rallying cry became: I dont have that benefit, so why should they?
    Surprising, really, how quickly Toronto was reduced to a level of self-interested pettiness.
    We in the private sector don't have banked sick days. Why should they?
    I don't have job security. Why should they?
    I don't make that much. Why should they?
    These people are asking the wrong question.
    The question should be: They have that benefit. Why don't I?
    Ask your private sector employer.
    It's not the unions' fault that they have these things. They were negotiated, and won fairly and squarely, with employers in legitimate contract talks. And to a large degree, people in the private sector can thank unions for the things they do have. Union contract agreements have pretty much forced private sector employers to at least approximate (the best employers match) those wages and benefits for their own employees in similar jobs.
    With no benchmark, the private sector would be free to do what it chose within the confines of government labour legislation. And if you think unions aren't necessary to set a benchmark - that the competitive market will do that - just look at what happens when the private sector doesn't like conditions in the current market: the employer lays off his workforce, closes his plant and moves the operation to a developing country where he can pay a pittance and provide no benefits.
    The union movement got going to protect flagrant violations of workers in the industrial revolution. A lot has been accomplished since then and most of us feel complacent, not just about workers' basic rights but many other areas. Don't be. If unions were to be disbanded we'd find out very quicly why they're necessary. Society must never turn its back on any gain, from civil rights to workers' rights to women's rights. There are always elements keen to roll those back.
    Times are tough. A lot of jobs have been lost and people in private-sector positions have had to make a lot of concessions. Many of them do not have the same benefits or compensatory wage provisions as unionized employees. That just illustrates why unions are needed.
    As for the sick day bank, it's an extra perk that union happened to negotiate. So what? Get over it. Now the new contract has been signed, that provision will cease to exist. New hires won't get it so it will disappear. As far as how much that provision costs the city, the figure presented in the media is exaggerated. First of all, just over half of the union members received it under the old contract, not all of them. Under the new deal, some will opt for the new short-term disability provision.
    In addition to that, not all of the eligible union members collect on those sick days (which they can save up and cash in when they retire). Some will go to other jobs well before they hit retirement. Others will die. Many of those days won't be cashed in. Even when an employee cashes in all the eligible sick days, they add up to six months' pay. Big deal. Amortize six months' pay over the next 30 years of your life. It's nothing compared to the grotesque bonuses and golden handshakes given out in the corporate world. People should be angrier that their governments are using their tax money to bail out companies that have done such a bad job they're in danger of going under. The theory is they're too big to be allowed to fail. So average working people - unionized and not - foot the bill.
    The Canadian commentator Naomi Klein calls the bailouts "the greatest heist in monetary history".
    Let's get our priorities straight. Banked sick leave for some people in backbreaking jobs is a pittance.
    And anyway, why didn't I have that benefit?
    Last night, I re-watched a 70-year-old movie from a 70-year-old book on television. The Grapes of Wrath. Very relevant to our current situation. Economic hard times. People losing jobs left, right and centre. Share croppers being forced off their farms not by the dust bowls so much as the start of large-scale industrialized agriculture. People forced to migrate in search of piece work.
    Like many, young Tom Joad's family goes to California and finds work picking fruit. Five cents a bucket. Joad (Henry Fonda) doesn't believe it when he's told by people who have been through the experience that soon they'll be chiselled down to two-and-a-half cents. One day a truck of new arrivals comes to the labour camp where the migrant workers live and Joad overhears the foreman telling them that the rate is now two-and-a-half cents. Arbitrary. Just like that.
    "Who are these reds anyway?", Joad asks at one point. "Seems everytime you turn around someone's calling somebody else a 'red'. Who are these 'reds' anyway?"
    They're the people trying to organize union representation for the workers so they can actually be paid what their work is worth. But the employers, with the help of sherriff's deputies, bust heads with ash clubs to stop it.
    Written in 1939, shot in 1940. A book and movie for our times.
    As for Toronto, the strike is over. Let's be glad our pools are re-opened, our kids can go back to daycare, where their overseers make slave wages, and our garbage can be collected again.
    Now we can all go back to debating plastic take-out coffee cup lids, another issue city hall has been vexed about of late. Apparently the city can't recycle the lids. One of its bright ideas? Ban take-out coffee cups.
    As if. But that's a rant for another time.