(The following article is from the July 1-31, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)
By Liz Rowley, Ontario leader of the Communist Party

By Liz Rowley

Toronto - 24,000 CUPE members struck here on June 22, after City of Toronto negotiators refused to lift 100 pages of concessions off the table, or to meet the 3% plus wage increase already paid to other unionized city workers, including police, firefighters, and the housing and parking authority.

     "This is about getting a fair deal similar to what everyone else got. No other city workers had to negotiate huge concessions," said Ann Dembinski, President of Local 79, representing 18,000 inside workers. "We deserve the same collective agreement as other workers. The mayor is using the recession as an excuse to rip our collective agreement into pieces... On those issues we've never been close and we're not remotely close now."

     Mayor David Miller, twice elected with the support of the labour movement, has made the city unions the scapegoat for the global economic crisis and the chronic underfunding of Toronto and other cities by the Ontario and federal governments.

     "The world has changed," Miller said. "The city has extremely serious budget challenges. One needs only to look at our welfare rolls to understand that... we have to negotiate in the real context of our current financial circumstances - particularly this year and next."

     During the budget debate in January, the Mayor opposed freezing Council's salaries, instead raising them to $99,153 plus expenses. Right after that he got converted, freezing the salaries of the City's non-union employees, and now unionized workers. 

     Local 416 President Mark Ferguson, representing 6,200 outside workers, noted fruitless negotiations have continued for six months after the expiration of the last collective agreement. The City's last offer is "complete garbage", and a vicious attack on workers, he said.

     "We believe it's been their intent to put us out on the streets all the way along," Ferguson said. "The contempt that the City holds for city workers, through the proposals that are on the table, is much worse than we saw in 2002," when civic workers faced Tory Mayor Mel Lastman and a Tory government in Queen's Park which brought in back to work legislation after just two weeks on strike.

     The concessions demanded by the City include eliminating the current system which allows workers to bank sick days and cash them out on retirement or leaving, with a short-term disability program. The cost of the current system has been grossly inflated by the employer in order to reduce public support for the strike.

     Another key issue is seniority. The City wants to lay off senior employees and retain junior employees, "proposals" that would see people who have worked for many years not being able to qualify for their jobs, Ferguson said.

     Job security, schedules and benefits are also at issue. Only half of the members in the two bargaining units are full-time workers; the other half are part-time.

     Meanwhile, CUPE Locals 82 and 543 have been on strike against the City of Windsor since mid-April. Municipal employees are faced with an employer more interested in prolonging the strike than in negotiating a collective agreement. The key issues in Windsor are wages and part-time work. Once again the employer is citing the global economic crisis as the reason for demanding concessions.

     CUPE has laid charges of bargaining in bad faith against the City and a new mediator was being sought in late June.

     Around the province, municipal workers are facing city and town councils willing to push employees out on strike in an effort to whip up hostility against public sector workers and their unions, and to "save" money on undelivered municipal services.  The blogs are full of vicious attacks on the wages and benefits of the lowest paid civic employees, and increasingly this frenzy is showing up in assaults on picketers. In Windsor, there are a reported two to three incidents per day of cars gunning through picket lines and injuring strikers.

     The Communist Party (Ontario) passed resolutions of solidarity and support for striking Windsor workers at its June 14-15 Provincial Committee meeting in Toronto. Another resolution was adopted on June 23 by the Ontario Provincial Executive in support of striking Toronto civic workers.

     "What happened to autoworkers last spring is now the pattern in bargaining everywhere, with unionized wages, pensions and workers becoming the main target," says a CPC(O) statement. "Workers didn't cause the global economic and credit crisis, but they're being forced to pay for it through vicious attacks on their jobs, wages, pensions, benefits, and working conditions, not to mention the loss of purchasing power, services, and the increased sales and property taxes they will soon be forced to pay. The banks, who contributed big time to the current crisis, got $200 billion in bailouts last winter; workers are being taken to the cleaners now to fund that bailout and other corporate bailouts too."

     The CPC (Ontario) is calling for unity of public and private sector unions and their allies, to defend workers' jobs, wages and pensions, to mount a counter-offensive to rebuff the corporate agenda and secure adequate public funding for healthcare, education, cities, and social programs, and to rebuild an environmentally sustainable manufacturing and industrial base in Ontario.

     "What we need now is unity of the labour and democratic movements to defeat this vicious attack on wages and living standards. A united fightback is decision in successfully turning the situation."