1. This deal could have been reached on day one.
Not really. What about “never make your best offer first”? If this proposal were tabled on day one, we wouldn’t have the deal we have now.
2. This shows it’s time to privatize.
Privatizing doesn’t mean savings. The city would still have to pay for labour, after all, and for the profit margin, as well. Does anyone really think renting equipment is better than owning it? And we know it doesn’t end unrest: the GTA civic strike that preceded this one, the Viva bus line walkout in York Region, was against a private employer.
3. The strike was about the sick day bank, and Miller failed to nix it.
Whether or not the bank should have been jettisoned, it has been in the long term. And, really, raise your hand if you’d even heard of the sick day bank before June.
But Local 416 president Mark Ferguson tells another story. He showed me the list of dozens of proposed concessions that, he says, were what actually appalled the union. It included removal of wage protections and re-employment rights, control over working lunches, internal job postings and even employees’ right to attend grievance hearings.
“They could have removed these back in March when we first asked them to,” he says. “It was all these things combined – the massive rewriting of the collective agreement – that caused the strike. It had nothing to do with the recession. It had nothing to do with anything but control.”
