INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
Members of Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, local 113 joined the annual march, Saturday, March 12. The theme this year was guarding public services. See a slide show of the event here.
FRONTLINES
Michael Hollett: Stop the war on public service
Forget the imaginary war on cars. We are currently engaged in a very real war on the public service.
And this battle is not being waged only in Wisconsin. It’s in full swing in Toronto, led by a creature almost mythical in its heartlessness and ignorance, the two-headed, 600-pound beast that is Doug and Rob Ford.
From frontline public sector employees to the managers who lead them, the unions that defend them and even the politicians who supposedly police them, the Fords and their simple-minded supporters would have us believe that anyone entering the public realm is doing so to fleece us rather than serve us by working in often thankless, high-pressure and even dangerous jobs.
An early casualty in this battle was George Robitaille, the unfortunate TTC fare collector who dozed off on the job while taking meds for a heart condition. He subsequently died of a stroke. Still laughing, folks?
And when the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) operates like the very sacred private sector the Fords hold dear, by giving employees morale-building holiday parties and modest gifts, and by investing available cash in the stock market, they are vilified like sex offenders.
Despite inevitable mistakes, the TCHC has done a miraculous job with the ongoing reinvention of Regent Park, a public-private partnership, the kind the Fords claim to love, that has dazzled the world as it transforms our downtown. Similar caterpillar-to-butterfly transformations are on the books for Alexandra Park and Lawrence Heights, and the perpetrators should be being celebrated, not run out of town.
From teachers to soldiers, from garbage collectors to transit workers, postal employees and the rest, public servants keep our society running and civilized, including the private sector that pockets profits in part generated by public employees’ hard work.
Take a look at the faces and uniforms of the people conducting the rescue and rehabilitation in quake-and tsunami-ravaged Japan right now. They are public workers in the army, the police, the health sector and more. Don’t see a lot of suits digging through the rubble of that ravaged country, do we?
Sadly, this war will only get uglier as the effects of the Fordistas’ cuts put us in a stranglehold and public workers are inevitably ordered to sacrifice their incomes and families so our anti-government governors can continue to worship at their altar of deconstruction.
Spare us, puh-leeze. Records of councillor spending released this week have sent the dailies into a binge of recrimination. Among the dissed items: a $42 Barbie doll (so the councillor could set an example at a police auxiliary toy drive), a $7,000 office reno (so staff could share a room with the councillor), $1,175 for constituency office landscaping. We’re drowning in minutiae. Isn’t this all just a way of calling anyone in the public realm a thief?
TIME FLIES
Call it one pricey four minutes. The draft of a city-commissioned report concludes that passengers on flights leaving from the city’s Island Airport will, if the proposed pedestrian tunnel proceeds, save a measly four minutes in waiting time. That saving grace comes with a $50 million sticker to be paid for by airport fees. Community activists worry a fixed link to the islands will invite an increase in flights, despite the current cap. Yup, could be.
ROOTING OUT THE REFORMERS
How heroes get punished in this city. Derek Ballantyne, CEO of Build Toronto, was forced to resign his post this week in the wake of the mayor’s manufactured TCHC crisis. The Regent Park redo visionary and former TCHC head, winner of the Jane Jacobs Prize, is now out of a job thanks to Rob Ford’s vow to “deal with” him. One whipped-up scandal one city reformer safely disposed of.
Increase in the feds’ contracting out to consultants and other assistants since 2005-6, at a cost of nearly $5.5 bil, despite the capping of departmental budgets. From a new report, The Shadow Public Service, by David Macdonald (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives).
Stephanie Bloomingdale, Wisconsin AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer and an organizer of the labour uprising there, spoke at a CUPE Ontario meet at the Sheraton on Monday, March 14. Union supporters in Madison recently occupied the Capitol building for several weeks and drew tens of thousands of supporters to protect public sector bargaining. They lost.