Delay could boost prospects for contracting-out Toronto trash pick-up

Vote now would probably have failed, while waiting until after contract talks could put the union between a rock and a hard place.

Thestar.com
Sept. 24, 2015
By Edward Keenan

Trash collection is always big news in Toronto. Without it, as we learned during the strike of 2009, we’re left sitting around stewing in a broth of each other’s garbage. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people,” then other people’s garbage has got to be the most insufferably repulsive feature of that underworld.

So, opening the garbage collection file folder at city hall, we see that a decision on whether or not to contract-out service on the east side of the city, which would mean fully private collection across Toronto, has been put off until a later date, quite possibly as much later as 2017.

This seems to have angered a lot of people on both sides of the longstanding argument. What should we make of that?

Is it good news, or bad news? The answer to that last question depends a lot on your opinion of the union that represents city workers, and the city’s position in relation to it. This decision appears to put the garbage-collection workers’ heads in a vise that’s only likely to get tighter between now and 2017, when you think it through.

Of course, city councillor and mayor emeritus Rob Ford didn’t attain his prominent position in Toronto by thinking things through. So his immediate analysis is a bit different from mine.

“It’s appalling, is what it is,” Ford told a scrum Tuesday. An advocate of privatizing garbage collection, Ford felt Tory was kicking the can down the road to avoid implementing the measure he’d promised during the campaign.

“It should have been done in the first six months,” the Globe reported Ford saying. “You say you’re going to do something, you move ahead with it. You don’t dither and defer everything.”

That’s certainly one way of looking at it.

The catch, for contracting-out advocates like Ford, is that if a motion to privatize collection had been brought before city council right now, it probably would have died. There’s the matter of the current city staff report that recommends against it, saying that the cost of redeploying long-serving workers (a displacement clause guaranteed in the collective bargaining agreement) and improvements in public collection in recent years mean the city wouldn’t save enough money to make it worthwhile. That report would have weighed heavily on centrist swing-voting councillors.

And that decision would have come just before the city enters new contract negotiations with the union representing outside workers, including garbage collectors.

If the city had ruled out privatization before negotiations, one suspects the union would be motivated to make strong demands, given that the job security of its workforce had just been reinforced by city council.

On the other hand, if the city had voted to contract out and then entered negotiations just as the interim period of seeking and considering bids began, the union would be inclined to play hardball, trying to reinforce those job protection guarantees that keep displaced workers and perhaps all sorts of other things on behalf of all its members (not just garbage collectors) who might be feeling affronted by management’s disregard.

You don’t necessarily want to fight people who know they have nothing left to lose. Especially when those people have the capacity to leave the city marinating in a heap of rotting organic waste for a few months while you engage in the fight.

But by punting the decision until after labour negotiations are over, those in the city who think cost is the only important criterion when evaluating options for getting the city’s dirtiest job done have put the union in a bind. In a few ways.

Tory’s administration can now bargain with an eye to changing the considerations outlined in the staff report: the city can aggressively seek to remove or further water down the obligations it has to protect long-time workers who are displaced by privatization, for instance. Remove those protections and the math changes on the cost of contracting out.

Expect to hear Tory and his allies trotting out the old “jobs for life” label for the job-security clauses that apply to workers with 15-plus years on the job.

And while the union will now have extra incentive to guard those clauses at all costs, with a possible contracting-out decision looming, it will have a rock-and-a-hard place negotiating position on virtually everything.

If union leaders negotiate too good a deal for their workers, they’ll make privatization look more attractive to the bottom line. If they decide to go on strike, they’ll almost certainly cement public opinion against them and ensure their workers will be out of a job when the privatization debate resurfaces. If the union doesn’t do any of those things, what will the contract it signs look like? What kind of jobs will it have saved?

You can draw a straight line between the strike of 2009 and the decision to contract-out garbage collection west of Yonge St. - some city councillors even made speeches crowing about that last privatization decision as a kind of revenge for the 2009 strike. Negotiating with the threat of contracting-out hanging over their heads will make the union and its workers wary of a repeat.

“Dithering”? Doesn’t look like it to me. “Appalling”? It may be. It depends on your opinion of the city’s obligations to the workers who have made a long career of doing one of its hardest and dirtiest jobs.

Whatever it is, it makes a decision to contract out those jobs look more likely, not less.