“Socialists have become conservative, the conservatives have become socialist,” quipped Mike Del Grande after the Wednesday, April 29, council meeting, where David Miller won his vote to freeze non-union civic workers’ wages.
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Well, not quite. But there was a lot of ideological weirdness about the way Miller’s right-wing opponents suddenly championed employee rights to a pay packet increase in fiscal hard times.
It was especially vexing considering that last fall the mayor conceded to his foes’ complaints and established a Fiscal Review Panel that called for “restraint on wages.”
Of the whole pack, only Denzil Minnan-Wong, in approving the wage freeze and saying it should go deeper, remained consistent.
And so an opportunity arose to once again accuse Miller of being in the pocket of the unions and, somehow, the NDP. After all, it wasn’t their wage demands he was trying to curb.
“Wouldn’t you think it would be perceived that there’s some inequality,” asked Rob Ford, “that you might be favouring the unionized employees?”
“I’m sorry, Councillor – I don’t think any rational person could infer that from this action,” said Miller.
And with people like Ford leading the charge, an equally rational inference never needed to be aired: that the freeze for the non-unionized was not a gift to the unions, but a shot across their bow.
If you’re looking for a way to understand what Miller was doing here, consider this: it’s been council policy for years to set non-union raises at union rates, after labour negotiations are complete.
To change now suggests that council lefties may doing a bit of public bargaining, attempting to lower overall wage expectations in the midst of negotiations with CUPE locals 79 and 416. As recent Miller convert Norm Kelly said, “I sincerely hope [city unions] will take a look at the restraint that has been displayed by… non-unionized staff.”
Speaking to me afterward, Adam Vaughan said there was good reason to freeze these particular wages. “Upper middle management – you want to talk about people who frustrate initiatives, who give the city a do-nothing reputation?” he said. “It’s those folks who stop funding from trickling down [to front-line staff]. And they’re getting a merit bonus?”
Vaughan made an (ultimately defeated) attempt to exempt those non-union employees in the lower pay grades. These are analysts, upper clerks and the like making $35,000 to $60,000, according to city figures, about 400 out of a total of 3,900 non-union workers.
And many, according to Vaughan, are women in a sort of “gender ghetto” among clerical staff.
Many upper managers, meanwhile, make $110,000 or more. Not exactly prime objects of sympathy in a deepening recession. And whenever cuts have been made at City Hall recently, it’s been in administrative staff, which makes them, at the city, the least protected workers. Is this a worrying precedent?
Vaughan says wage freezes are much preferable to layoffs. Full employment, not raises, should be the goal of council and, now, the unions. That, he says, is “the new economic reality.”
But the phrase “the new economic reality” is getting annoying. The right wing says the actions of the private sector must now start to set the standard for the public. The right wing, of course, has always said that, only now more people are listening. Problem is, their war against Miller trumps everything – and so fiscal conservatives find themselves trying to zap a wage freeze.
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