Wildcat Strike Shuts Down Toronto Transit

TORONTO—Fed up with management harassment, safety violations and arbitrary shift changes, members of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 113 staged a wildcat strike in Toronto on May 29, shutting down North America’s third-largest transit system for most of the day. Subways, buses and streetcars came to a halt when drivers refused to cross picket lines set up by plant workers at the depots. Declaring the strike “illegal,” the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) bosses got an early morning court injunction banning the walkout. When the union refused to order a return to work, management got a second injunction, after which Local 113 president Bob Kinnear called off the strike in mid-afternoon. But much of the subway system remained tied up for hours as ATU members picketed the key Wilson marshalling yard until early evening.

The immediate spark for the strike was management’s unilateral reassignment of over 100 track workers and janitors to the midnight shift. But workers on the picket line pointed to numerous other issues, including management inaction on installing protective screens for bus drivers and the TTC’s refusal to obey a court order to pay workers’ health care premiums. There are no fully paid sick days, and workers face formal discipline if they’re off sick more than three times a year. Safety is a major issue, highlighted by a carbon monoxide leak that poisoned a section of the Yonge subway tunnel earlier this year. Eight TTC workers and four firefighters were hospitalized in this near-fatal incident. For years, the union has been pushing for gas detectors to be used in the tunnels.

The strike showed the tremendous social power wielded by the 8,500-strong ATU local, without whose labour Toronto simply cannot function. As hours-long traffic jams tied up the city amid a heat wave and smog alert, the capitalist media went into hysterics about trade unionists “holding the city hostage.” Toronto mayor David Miller, a member of the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), joined the anti-union barrage, railing that those responsible for the strike should be “punished” and vowing to seek up to $3 million in fines from the ATU.

The media vilified ATU local president Kinnear for backing the strike and refusing to demand an immediate return to work. For their part, many ATU members are still bitter at Kinnear for pushing through a contract settlement in April of last year that resolved none of the outstanding issues around job security and contracting out. Fully 40 percent of the members who voted were against this sellout deal. And while Kinnear now rightly denounces NDP mayor Miller for “antagonizing working-class people,” the ATU supported his election in 2003. Miller’s anti-union rantings show clearly how this social-democratic party supports and enforces the capitalist system against workers and the oppressed.

With none of the issues resolved and the ATU facing the threat of huge fines, there is talk of new walkouts to press the union’s demands. It is crucial that the entire labour movement—from the auto factories that surround Toronto to city workers and the heavily immigrant hotel workers union, whose contract is set to expire—stand with the transit workers against the attacks of the bosses and city government. Beat back TTC attacks—Defend the ATU!