Some young Progressive Bloggers in Toronto struggling home from a hard night out clubbing, at some ungodly hour after midnight this past Friday-Saturday:*
You may have heard that there was a transit strike in Toronto this weekend. It went on for -- oh, forty, forty-two hours? It was hell, I tell you. We were brave, though. We didn't call out the troops this time -- well, Mel isn't the mayor any more, and the current mayor, who is supposed to be a social democrat and mature and all, doesn't do that sort of thing. He just splutters because a tough union dared to do what unions do, and how could they do that to a nice guy like him?
Ok, so it is not fair for me to trivialize a number of things. In a city this size, a lot, really a lot of vulnerable people are hurt immediately by a transit strike. The TTC normally closes down at 2.30 a.m., and a lot of the people who are relying on transit to get home after midnight are going home from minimum-wage jobs, just as a lot of people who would be getting up very early on a Saturday morning to go to work need to get to their minimum-wage jobs on time or else they'll be fired. Single mothers on welfare with kids in strollers are trapped without transit. And I could go on, as a number of Progressive Bloggers immediately did, first thing Saturday morning -- for a handy review, see Dr Dawg's initial reaction to the posts he saw scrolling past at PB before we knew very much about what was going on.
We're still working through a lot of puzzles about what has happened -- why 65 per cent of the union membership rejected the settlement their leadership had pulled out of the fire at the last moment earlier in the week; why Bob Kinnear couldn't have set walk-out time to the normal end of the operators' shifts (especially on a Friday night); how the politics within the ATU leadership and more broadly the local itself might be working; why the mayor is so cranky; why Howard Hampton also seems to be a little cranky; and so on. (About Absolute McGuinty and John Tory we mainly don't puzzle. You don't even have to live here to write those scripts in your sleep.)
What we heard early on was that, in spite of a tentative agreement that was satisfactory to the leadership and many members, maintenance workers remained angry about the threatened contracting-out of their work, and many drivers and operators voted in solidarity with them. That reading of the situation is now being challenged, so we'll see.
The solidarity among TTC workers impressed me, though, even if they were acting on misinformation, which we still don't know to be true.
Y'see, that's the thing that some of the young PBers among us didn't seem to get, I thought. The solidarity number. After they got over having to walk home themselves (having realized that not very many of us were going to weep over that for long), they started coming up with other groups of hard-working or more oppressed people they could set against TTC workers, as though that would be a useful competition in anything but a race to the bottom.
It's true that TTC workers, like most unionized workers, are making a decent living (for now), and a lot of other workers aren't. It's also true that anyone trying to live on welfare in this province is living under extreme hardship. And the way to address those problems is ... to ask the ever-shrinking ranks of unionized workers to give up the rights they have won in extremely tough struggles over the last century that have, unlike right-wing trickle-down faux-economics, actually raised everyone else's boats?
Maybe the way to address those problems is to explode at our pathetic governments for their failures to ensure that all working people in this province, this country, earn enough to live without exhausting themselves by moonlighting. Maybe there's something perverse about Mike Harris's cuts to our welfare system that Absolute McGuinty has still (conveniently for him) failed to address. Maybe all businesses should be required to have plans in place to transport workers in the event of a transit strike, instead of firing any minimum-wage worker who can't get to work on time. Maybe the prematurely middle-aged could recognize that the whole point of a strike is to get the attention of everyone else who is vulnerable and to ask them to join together for a change, funnelling their collective anger upwards, where it might make a difference. Maybe ...
But probably not.
* Miners and prospectors climb the Chilkoot Trail during the Klondike Gold Rush. From the Canadian National Archives.
You know, Skdadl, I think people would be much more supportive of unions if they would only just give up being unions. *snerk*
JJ and Dymaxion World were also heartening.
Chet at Vanity Press had several supportive posts also.
Great post. It falls into that fight over the shrinking piece of the pie, well the few that have most at US fighting over the crumbs.
I am so, so sick of heartless Libruls...I was physically taken aback when I clicked onto PB that morning. I couldn't stick around and read because I knew my temper would flare...glad there are some of you who can be calm and angry...
One thing that strikes me as a shame, although this could be just my ignorance: there was no rallying point for people to come out and express support for the strikers. Maybe this strike was too brief, but a strike becomes political and effectively so when it goes public. Maybe some of those little old ladies without cars (pick me! pick me!) or single mothers or unemployed workers whom the pompous suddenly remembered on Saturday would have been willing to show up in support of a union that fights back.
As I said elsewhere, I support a worker's right to collectively bargain, and I support their right to strike, but that doesn't prevent me from criticizing individual unions in _how_ they choose to strike.
From what I've seen, the executive of ATU Local 113 ill-served its members in at least two ways: for one thing, they appear to have negotiated and backed a deal which gave the operators what they wanted and yet left the impression that maintenance workers were left out in the cold. How was that allowed to happen? Where were the lines of communication between executive and membership to let them know that they were negotiating a deal breaker into place?
Even worse, though, was the decision to strike immediately. A 65% vote against the ratification of a deal does NOT necessarily mean a vote for an immediate strike, and certainly many operators and ticket collectors felt that the executive acted irresponsibly (especially those who had to face angry crowds when the subways closed early). As a tactical move, it was a damn stupid public relations disaster that angered the very public that the union needed to build critical the political support as leverage against management.
There was no need for an early strike. Earlier this year GO Transit workers voted against a deal negotiated by their union. The union executive issued a 48 hour strike notice and returned to the bargaining table. The result was a new deal negotiated with hours to spare that was acceptable to the wider membership. Instead, Bob Kinnear's act felt like an act of desperation to play catch-up with the membership.
In my opinion, while ATU Local 113 was perfectly within its rights to strike, they acted irresponsibly. They gave themselves and other public sector unions a black eye, and they set the cause of collective bargaining back a few paces. For that, they should be ashamed.
I wrote more about this here, and you should check out transit activist and NDP supporter Steve Munro's post here and here.
Thank you, James. I know that you know a lot more than I do about our transit politics, and I sit to be corrected for anything I've said. I thought at least that the midnight shutdown was petty and puzzling. I don't know what's going on between Kinnear and his membership, or Kinnear and other members of the executive, so I'm just waiting to hear.
I do think, though, that labour consciousness in North America is distressingly low -- for the obvious reason that so many of us have been de-organized, contracted out, or never organized. So when you say that this was a public-relations disaster, that it alienated the very public the union needs to build political support, I feel a bit defeated. Is there ever any strike that the public is gonna like these days? Of course most people don't grasp labour politics -- almost no one any more is exposed to them. It is going to take a catastrophe, I fear, to raise public consciousness on this continent, and unfortunately, it seems that there is a catastrophe a-comin'.
There will always be people out there who dismiss the usefulness of unions. There's no talking support out of them. But there are people out there who believe in unions, and there are people on the fence, and the two together, I believe, still comprise the majority of the population. It won't be easy, but we need some media savvy unions to figure out their message and hammer on it.
ATU Local 113's biggest mistake, in my opinion, was the immediate strike. Nobody liked that. The media got plenty of examples of stranded passengers to harp on, because they like to tell stories of people in real or perceived peril. The union's own members had to deal with angry crowds, and management had no means of offering a counter deal, which made the union executive look very unreasonable. GO Transit's union's approach of another 48 hour deadline and returning to the bargaining table would have helped ATU Local 113 keep a lot of its moral high ground. "Yes, we're looking at the threat of a strike, but we are answerable to our members, and they did not like the deal we struck, so we're obliged to try again." The ball is then in management's court, and it's their chance to respond, or look unreasonable, and fail to curry the public's favour.
As Steve Munro noted, the problem here is not that a strike happened, but that the union executive botched its communications surrounding the strike. Rather than send out its message clearly to the public, it just looked confrontational and unreasonable, and the public had little reason to come on side. Unfortunately, that damaged their cause, and the problem has rippled out to other public sector unions' right to strike.
thank you James, and thank you skdadl. having to explain the present by starting at the industrial revolution just gets exhausting! james is right "In my opinion, while ATU Local 113 was perfectly within its rights to strike, they acted irresponsibly", and also skdadl with "I do think, though, that labour consciousness in North America is distressingly low"
public sector 'folks' have to balance 'what', 'why' and 'for' they do everyday, and feeling unappreciated sometimes translates into a 'let them eat cake' type uprising. unfortunately, this can only occur during collective agreement negotiations. i personally for one when informed of a situation say (out loud to myself) "its not my job/problem" which can last up to 15 minutes, 'cause it is my job. when you choose to serve the public in the name of any government or public utility: its ultimately our job to share knowledge and collectively solve the problem. that's why some of us earn half the salary of those above but (as again today) fix the problem in their name because that's how you serve the public, and go back the next day...it just boils over sometimes...
pardon me if it sounds sappy :)
d, that doesn't sound sappy at all, and we're more than keen to hear direct testimony here. It's so hard to get that from any mainstream source -- what I mainly saw about the TTC strike in, eg, the G&M was one moan after another from riders (encouraged, obviously, by the questions they were asked). Serious labour reporting is very thin on the ground these days, I fear.
skdadl, oh how so right you are! those within the labour movement have been saying for years (?) 'work the media' (lord knows, mgt always has) but its hard to turn your thinking on its head (labourstart is a good start for labour reporting)