And then the were… only hard feelings and recriminations.[briefbreak]
In case you haven’t heard, council has passed the deal the city signed with its unions, by a vote of 21-17.
What will the mayor’s critics do for an encore? Hmm. Retreat to the cottage, maybe?
The pundits in the media who were predicting the mayor’s handling of the strike is the beginning of the end for him politically, are already beating a subtle retreat.
Now the mayor may not have caved to unions, as some among the right wing cabal on council would have us believe. He just didn’t do a good job of communicating the deal he did get with city unions. The mayor said the sick bank had been eliminated, when it’s more accurate to say it’s being phased out. (Compare Star columnist Royson James’s front page hatchet job Thursday to the more measured piece by Jennifer Wells’s lead story this morning.)
So all of this for slip of the tongue, an exercise in semantics? Hey, if the biggest penny pincher on council and no friend of the mayor, Doug Holyday, saw fit to vote for the deal, then clearly, the mayor’s critics have some ‘splainin’ to do.
The Globe’s Marcus Gee has moved on to beating the drums for the privatization of city services, the single biggest issue that’s coloured all the paper’s coverage of the strike. Gee’s bosses at the Globe want to keep reminding us that, compared to private sector contracts, Toronto’s city unions have it rich. It’s a stretch of course. No city workers I know of live in Forest Hill.
Perhaps the Globe’s resentment towards the city’s deal with its unions shouldn’t come as a surprise. The paper’s management forced its own union to swallow a pay freeze in recent contract negotiations. Why should city unions get any raise, right? And those dental benefits. These are tough economic times, the Globe argues. Funny thing is, the paper has also been the first to trumpet the canard being pushed by business elites that the recession’s over.
Somewhere along the way the supposed villain in this scenario, Local 416 union head Mark Ferguson, ended up looking like the conquering hero. Funny. He seemed a beaten man when he took to the mic at that press conference early last Monday to announce a “framework” for a settlement.
Ferguson prolonged the agony later by delaying a vote on the contract, saying a few details needed to be ironed out. That sparked the media-fed public hysteria. Was there a deal or wasn’t there? It turned out later that those “details” had nothing to do with the contract itself, but whether city workers banking on cashing in on some lucrative overtime, or private contractors would be doing the clean up. The city and unions agreed to split the task.
There will always be those who think the mayor sold out to the unions. Most among them never liked the mayor anyway. To them, Miller owes his two mayoralty wins to CUPE.
But anyone who knows anything about how this city works understands that it’s the business communities that elects mayors, not the unions. The mayor has done them a few favours during his time in office.[rssbreak]
