By Herman Rosenfeld
By the end of March, the Ontario Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty will have passed Bill 150. It declares the TTC to be an essential service and denies Toronto public transit workers – members of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union (ATU) Local 113 – the right to strike.
The attack on the transit workers was one of the first things that the newly elected right-wing populist Mayor of Toronto did this winter. Building on the memory of a short transit stoppage and the municipal workers strike from a couple of summers ago, Ford saw this as part of his plans to demonize public sector workers as a way of isolating all unions and weakening the collective gains of working people. (In fact, the ATU has walked out a total of 75 days since 1921).
He packed the Toronto Transit Commission with his allies (as he did all other administrative bodies in the city government), and pushed through a resolution calling on the Provincial government to pass legislation affirming this attack on union rights. Only the provincial government has the power to take away these workers’ right to strike through designating their jobs as “essential”.
No sooner had Ford declared his intentions, the McGuinty Liberal publicly agreed to put forward a law to make it reality. Bill 150 was sponsored by the provincial government and is scheduled to pass just before the expiry of the current collective agreement between the government and the ATU. It eliminates their right to strike and provides for binding arbitration, should negotiations fail to reach agreement. That the Liberals agreed to pass this law reflects their electoral opportunism and their unwillingness to challenge the Ford administration’s gross hatred of organized workers. It also flies in the face of their half-hearted efforts to appear as neutral friends of the labour movement.
McGuinty and his government have defended Bill 150 by claiming that public transit is essential. Considering that they have refused to fund the TTC and supplement the transit needs of Toronto’s people, it is hard to take them seriously.
In reality, this has nothing to do with making sure that people have access to essential services. As John Cartwright, the President of the Toronto Labour Council noted, “Declarations of essential service are supposed to be defined by risks to public health and safety, not convenience”. Instead, it is meant to undermine the rights of unionized public sector workers and eventually, all workers, as part of a growing agenda of austerity.
Unfortunately, in contrast to the incredibly inspiring fightback of unionized workers in Wisconsin to defend their rights to collectively bargain and survive as a movement, the Toronto and Ontario union movement – and the ATU Toronto Local – did not organize any real resistance, as the provincial Liberals cravenly agreed to attack their union.
The ATU opposed the legislation, but acted defensively. The union president offered to settle its upcoming contract through arbitration, regardless of the law. He publicly criticized the bogus arguments of both the city and the province, while requesting that they take more time to allow people to consider the merits of the law.
While it is understandable to be cautious about the public’s perception of the union, the lack of any effort to build a campaign of opposition or resistance – which could tie-in this unjust law to the larger attack on the living standards and rights of working people and the users of social services – represents a major defeat for labour in Toronto and province.
Labour organizers need to consolidate their own membership about why the right to strike is so important and do educational work with the riders and the general public. We need to build a fightback movement to respond to the storm of attacks coming from Ford and McGuinty.
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