Toronto: Fat-Cat Ford’s War on City Workers

Toronto’s new right-wing mayor Rob Ford was quick to make good on his promise to attack the city’s unionized workers, starting with the Amalgamated Transit Workers (ATU) Local 113. Last December, city council voted to ask the provincial Liberal government to declare transit an essential service, making strikes illegal. The Liberals have now complied, introducing legislation that will ban all strikes on the Toronto transit system.

The outside workers of Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 416 were next, as Ford served notice of the city’s union-busting aim to contract out garbage removal. The new council has also targeted job security provisions, so that it can fire workers at will. Meanwhile, city hall has ordered across-the-board service cuts that will hit the poorest with the greatest force. It will take a massive fight centred on the social power of organized labour to defeat the anti-union offensive, a fight in which all working people have a stake.

Such a struggle will pose acutely the question of working-class leadership. In the 2003 and 2006 mayoral elections, the union tops delivered the votes of the powerful civic unions to David Miller. For seven years Miller, a social democrat associated with the NDP, ran the city for Bay Street, and his attacks on the unions paved the way for Ford’s more sweeping anti-union drive. When transit workers were driven to a wildcat strike in 2006, Miller joined the anti-union hysteria, demanding massive fines from the union. Two years later the ATU struck again and the city demanded the province enact strikebreaking legislation, for which the provincial NDP caucus voted unanimously. In 2009, Miller & Co. targeted CUPE Locals 416 and 79 (which represents inside workers), aiming to destroy sick benefits and gut seniority rights. A bitter 39-day strike fended off most of the attacks on hard-won union gains, but the union leadership caved in on the city’s key issue and allowed the introduction of a new, inferior plan for new-hires.

Since then, it has been open season on city workers. When transit ticket collector George Robitaille, who had a heart condition, was photographed supposedly asleep in the ticket booth, there was an outburst of anti-union vitriol. Today transit workers cannot so much as take a bathroom break without some enraged petty-bourgeois creep going after them. The consequences for Robitaille—a hero who had saved the life of a passenger—were fatal. Hounded by the bourgeoisie’s labour-hating crusade, he went on medical leave soon after and tragically died in November of a stroke.

Unionization gives workers the ability to organize and fight collectively to improve their lot. But far from leading the necessary struggle, ATU Local 113 president Bob Kinnear vows that the almost 9,000-strong local “will not strike or disrupt Toronto’s transit system in any way during this year’s contract negotiations…. In other words, we will act as if an essential services law was already in effect” (ATU Local 113 website, 3 February). This amounts to surrender in advance.

It will take some militant and hard-nosed class struggle to beat back the relentless attacks on the working class. This in turn requires a struggle within the unions to replace the “die on your knees” trade-union bureaucrats with a leadership that fights uncompromisingly in the interests of the working class and the oppressed. Looking to NDP social democrats or other “friend of labour” politicians is a dead end. Workers need their own class-struggle leadership that begins with the understanding that the interests of labour and capital are counterposed. Hands off the ATU and CUPE Local 416! Defend the right to strike! No to union-busting contracting out!