But gates seem a more appropriate image for a Ford administration suddenly under siege after the previous week’s surprise budget smackdown. The über-prop for a press conference warning of the hidden dangers posed to the city by an impending Canada-Europe free trade deal (think privatization) made for some delicious irony given last week’s betrayal of former Ford allies.
No word if Mark Ferguson, president of CUPE Local 416, the city’s outside workers’ union, was hiding inside the wooden figure after spending the weekend across the street at the Sheraton Hotel in contract talks. He was spotted at Tuesday’s meeting of the mayor’s executive, at which making paramedics an essential service was the topic of discussion.
The clock has been ticking down to a lockout after a provincial conciliator declared a stalemate January 12.
But something strange has happened on the way to a full-blown city-versus-unions cage match.
And all of a sudden a lockout may not be a foregone conclusion, thanks in part to the reversal of political fortunes that took place on the council floor over the budget. Some $19 million in city services were saved from the axe, and a sizeable chunk of Ford’s political capital went up in flames.
Is it a coincidence that labour talks until then that amounted to both sides staring at the wallpaper for weeks swiftly took off the day after Tuesday’s budget vote? It’s a mistake to think anything that happens at 100 Queen West occurs in a vacuum.
Those councillors in the mushy-cum-mighty middle who rallied against cuts, and the few more on the right who joined them, have been hearing from constituents about more than just budget cuts.
Taxpayers prize their public services, it turns out, and the men and women who deliver them. Surprise. If we didn’t know that from the Core Services Review, that exercise meant to tell us otherwise, we know it now. So do the Fordists, whose tune on the labour front has gone from giving no quarter to something like conciliatory.
It’s not clear if the city’s been doing any internal polling outside of the regular feedback at Tim Hortons the mayor seems to rely on. But I do recall Councillor Doug Ford saying something about siccing crack pollster Nick Kouvalis, the mayor’s former chief of staff, on the unions after he was done with that Ford Nation business. It’s the Windsor model of privatization the Fordists are looking to follow, and Nicky, being a Windsor boy, knows a little something about it.
CUPE’s own polling shows that the public is losing its appetite for Ford’s war on public services. And that may be putting it mildly. In a poll of 600 Torontonians conducted by Environics, the majority, some 84 per cent, wanted to see spending on public services increased. Only 10 per cent wanted spending on services and programs reduced.
The poll, conducted between January 10 and 13, highlights a few other developing trends. Chief among them: two-thirds of Torontonians want services maintained, even if it means higher taxes or fee increases.
The kicker: only 38 per cent of Environics’ respondents said the mayor was on the right track on city priorities.
While no poll is definitive, these numbers help explain the city’s newfound cooperation with labour, which was noticeably absent even after Local 416 offered to accept a three-year wage freeze. The union’s proposal was part of a highly publicized PR offensive in the days before the budget debate, and even Ford friendlies in the City Hall press corps had to admit begrudgingly that it’s a significant concession.
The city’s point man on contract talks, deputy mayor Doug Holyday, said then that the overture was not enough. Parroting the party line, he said the city needed more – namely concessions on job security language, the so-called “jobs for life” provisions of the current collective agreement, which the usually measured city manager, Joe Pennachetti, termed the most restrictive in the country.
But even on that front, the administration’s been playing word games. In fact, the two sides aren’t as far apart as we’ve been led to believe on employee “bumping” rights, which allow those with more seniority to bump those with fewer years on the job in the event of layoffs.
Reality check: the current contract gives bumping rights only to employees with more than 10 years’ seniority – and only in the event their jobs have been lost to contracting out.
The city, after showing no flexibility on the issue, has come partway, making a counter-offer to restrict bumping rights to employees with more than 25 years’ seniority.
Whether the union will give a little more on that score remains to be seen. It’s unlikely, though. Some might argue, and rightly so, that the city should have conceded more, given the $8.5 mil in savings in each of the next three years the union has handed over through its wage-freeze offer.
But losing more ground on bumping rights would put a serious dent in the mayor’s privatization plans for garbage pickup east of Yonge. The administration didn’t rush to privatize curbside pickup there when it moved to do it west of Yonge, precisely because it didn’t want to be stuck with redeploying city employees.
Not that privatizing services means savings, or guarantees an end to work stoppages.
We need only look north to York Region, where transit services run by private interests were deadlocked in a battle with unionized workers from October until this week’s tentative deal. There, the regional government has been caught in the middle, powerless to do anything but urge the two sides to get back to bargaining.
To expect Ford to find the middle ground in contract talks may be too much to ask. For many of his supporters, the so-called “gravy” has always been the supposedly bloated workforce.
But he may be forced to invoke the c-word, as in “compromise.”
On Tuesday, the brakes were put on a plan to sell off 675 TCHC homes scattered across Toronto, another sign that the administration doesn’t want to risk another political defeat so soon after the budget backlash.
If Ford has learned anything from that experience, it’s that residents don’t want drama. They want solutions. He’d best get on with it.
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Enzo Di Matteo
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