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Newsstand: August 14, 2009

By André Bovee-Begun

As Toronto continues to recover from its really, really gross thirty-nine-day strike, some city councillors want to hold a formal review of how well the city dealt with picket lines, dump placement, and odour. Sandra Bussin, whose Beaches-East York ward includes Ted Reeve arena, named Toronto’s most disgusting-smelling temporary dump during the municipal workers’ strike, wants the hockey rink, surrounded by houses, taken off the list of potential dump sites.
Still, when all the bookkeeping is finally finished next month, the city expects to find it actually saved money because of the strike, despite having to hire contractors and pay massive overtime to non-union workers and management staff. If they want to save even more money, they should look into ways to make Toronto Centre-Rosedale Councillor Kyle Rae’s endless summer vacation permanent. Not one to let a strike ruin his summer fun, he’s been out of town since the middle of July. Ward 27 residents, your move.
The strike’s aftermath has certain people pushing the city to make private companies responsible for Toronto’s water supply, public housing, and garbage collection, accusing public workers of being inefficient and—apparently—too fat. No worries, CUPE fans: The union was quick to express its views on these weighty matters.
Sixty of Toronto’s 548 city-run day camp programs have been extended by two weeks or more to partially make up for time lost due to the strike. The families of the roughly ten thousand kids in Toronto who were left tragically camp-less this summer have been refunded for missed weeks.
Canadian taxes are being paid to Bill Clinton? The situation isn’t as wacky as some newspapers are making it out to be: It seems the CNE is getting about three million dollars from Canada’s federal stimulus package, and it’s using some of the money to help foot the bill for a speech by the former U.S. president, set for August 29 at BMO Field. A crowd of up to twenty-five thousand will pay twenty to fifty bucks per ticket, which, reportedly, does not cover admission to the President’s Choice SuperDogs Show afterwards.

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  • http://undefined friend68

    When it comes to the garbage workers, CUPE is more than happy to throw them under the bus. Of the how many thousands that were on strike, only about 600 collect trash. The union is more than happy to have them take the brunt of the public’s anger, since if that small division is privatized, it won’t hurt the majority and their pay and benefits at all.

  • http://undefined Green Sulfur

    You’re right that CUPE uses its garbage workers but the garbage workers are an important strategic asset to the union. Losing the garbage collectors would, in fact, negatively impact pay and benefits.
    As history shows, Toronto will not have a civic workers strike any time but the summer. This is (obviously) because stinky garbage is CUPE’s greatest lever in negotiations with city hall. Thus, without garbage workers in the bargaining unit, city hall would feel precious little in the way of pressure to settle. Then heat would be on CUPE as its members struggle to get by on strike pay, requiring the union to make concessions.
    Effectively, garbage collectors are to CUPE what a big muscled friend is to a scrawny nerd.

  • http://undefined Caligula Jones

    I loved the reasoning the City used: they couldn’t put the trash in industrial areas because they needed a concrete “floor”, and the locations had to be close to neighbourhoods.
    This ignored the facts that:
    1) I’ve seen the clean up operation whereby workers were hosing down the concrete “floor”…into the non-concrete grass and dirt
    2) anyone notice someone with a bag of garbage try to get across Lakeshore? Didn’t think so. If they were so worried about localizing the temp dumps…why were there so many cars?
    3) the garbage workers as muscled friend to nerd analogy is precisely the same thing as jail guards were to OPSEU during the strikes. Nobody cares if desk bound clerks don’t do their jobs. Different story for those working with hardened criminals every day…