If any of us think one month of coping with excess garbage and no community programs is difficult, we might try living our whole lives in constant emergency.[rssbreak]
Last Friday, July 17, OCAP demonstrated in front of City Hall to press for a resolution to the strike along with social assistance recipients who live most days on the edge and who have now been without service for a month.
“We didn’t come to blame the union,” the group’s lead organizer, John Clarke, told the dozen or so present. “We lay the blame on the mayor and city council in trying to take away the rights of workers. Don’t bring CUPE members down to the level of people on assistance bring people on assistance up to the level of CUPE workers.”
Now OCAP blaming the mayor of Toronto simply means that it’s a Friday. But then, David Miller had already suggested, at the start of the strike, that it was new welfare cases that made the union’s contract unaffordable.
Of course, there truly is a matter of money. In 2003, the city had $94.4 million in its welfare reserves, which were steadily drained into general revenues, until by 2008, there was only $8 million left (plus another $15 million surplus due to lower welfare needs in 2008).
These funds were tapped this year to bolster the social assistance budget. Even then it was understood that this was possibly no more than half the cost of rising assistance applications in 2009.
Financial observers and councillors, both left and right, saw this crunch coming. But the mayor played it down, and the province simply watched, making a blithe promise last year to slowly upload social services over a leisurely 10 years.
Now the mayor is playing the polarizing card on the poverty front, blaming workers for striking “against the most vulnerable Torontonians, including social assistance recipients and children.”
He was referring, in part, to the difficulties welfare recipients have faced receiving their cheques during the strike.
But is this all the union’s fault?
As one striker explained to me, “There have been many provisions for garbage, but provisions have been entirely lacking for low-income people trying to access services during the strike.”
And indeed, for all the temporary dumps, the city has only kept three out of 11 welfare offices open with skeletal services. Interesting, isn’t it?
A source in CUPE 79 says the semi-official policy among caseworkers at those offices has been to allow unimpeded access to welfare offices during the strike – though the city has knocked the union for tampering with confidentiality and making those seeking cheques identify themselves as welfare recipients.
During the OCAP rally at City Hall, union members walking the picket decided to lift that line, as well, and let people through.
There, I meet Khadija Abdulkadir, a resident of the west-?end Willowridge neighbourhood, who’d already been organizing the Somali community around getting full benefits from the local welfare office, and has now shifted focus to City Hall.
Of her four children, Abdulkadir had two in tow. Her smallest has been receiving Special Diet Supplement payments for a year, a benefit that has to be renewed annually – in July. With no one to process the renewal, the family loses $250 every month the strike persists.
Leslie Ciampaglia is also out $250 – and says she’s one of the lucky ones. She gets her basic benefits through direct deposit, while most people she knows get theirs mailed. Not all her friends received a cheque this month, and those who did, she says, got the wrong amount.
“I understand the problem with garbage, but people need their cheques to live,” she says. “I have friends who have nowhere to go now, because they screwed up on the rent.”
One CUPE member ruminating on the possibility of alliances between unionists and the public tells me that some strikers see “attacks on those who provide the services” as identical to “attacks on those services.”
Yet, most of the public agrees with the city that the union isn’t on their side. Have strikers convinced us otherwise?
“We haven’t been making those links as well as we should,” she said.
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