Funny how things turn out.
Police run wild on city streets, frightening citizens out of their wits, breaking bones and unlawfully detaining, and no one thinks we’d all be better served if we laid off the lot of them. But striking garbage workers who were unstrategic enough to be rude to residents are destined to have as many of their jobs axed as is legally possible.
The move to privatize trash services is a dirty affair. Not only is the discourse punitive, but it also reeks of pettiness and frames the cost-benefit analysis in a way that is nothing less than a set-up.
So successful so far is the Fordist government-demolition crew that we’re now suddenly debating killing public jobs in the narrowest possible context: the comparative unit price of delivering the service. What do the numbers show? Do taxpayers save money, and how much?
The arithmetic is a watery affair, for sure, but the dilemma is so much greater than the trumpeted (though unproven) difference between $110 and $81 per ton. With all due respect to the effort to nail down the numbers, this is a moment for full-cost accounting, not faux-balance-sheet politics.
Yes, we want full value for public dollars – the broadest benefits for the largest number of people. But just because you can’t see a benefit right away doesn’t mean it’s not there. A public service, with its decent wages, benefits and union representation, models good employer behaviour and pressures remuneration upward rather than down. It’s one of the social forces slowing the slide to Walmartization – that’s some of what we pay for when we support a public service.
Call it an “equality premium.”
And in this city, with its pressing social polarization and destabilizingly low wages, we need the market-disciplining impact of decent public jobs. The studies tell all: T.O. has a scarily evaporating middle-income sector and is badly divided between well-paid knowledge workers and those at the bottom, as An Economy Out Of Shape: Changing The Hourglass tells us.
Inequality makes life a more depressing experience for everyone, putting more pressure on government services and taxpayer dollars, and correlating with disturbing social problems. (See The Trouble With Billionaires.) But there are modifiers – and a strong union movement, the very force the Fordites want to squeeze into irrelevance, leads them all.
ellie@nowtoronto.com
