The Fight for Jobs and City Services - CUPE vs Rob Ford

CUPE by FTGU

Partial transcript of interview.

The contract for Toronto’s municipal inside and outside workers expired last year. Members of CUPE 79 and 416 are facing a lockout and strike in 2012 as Mayor Rob Ford seeks deep concessions from its members including the removal of job security provisions as well at the elimination of 2,300 jobs.

CUPE 79 and 416 face a tough challenge ahead as the rhetoric of a fiscal crisis by Mayor Ford is used to justify these cuts. Julia Barnett, a community health officer and member of CUPE 79 joins me to discuss the stakes and strategy of this year’s negotiations.

Q: What are the stakes in this year’s negotiations?

JB: What is at stake as a whole is that these are about keeping programs public and the viability of communities. And allowing for communities to grow and live in a viable city. This is about opening up our collective agreement and privatizing services and opening it up to the lowest bidder. It’s about keeping what we have public, but it’s also about making sure all people can have access to services and not just those that can afford them.

Q: What would be the best strategy for this year’s negotiations?

JB: The key strategy should have been, could have been, and should be working directly with communities, grassroots organizations like Stop the Cuts, and other community based organizations to support community based initiatives like keeping libraries open, keeping community centres open, making sure student nutrition programs were going to be funded. We should we have been putting forward a campaign to support our cleaners who are about to be privatized and contracted out. Yes, it is about decent wage jobs. Yes, it is about how everyone should have access to decent benefits and pensions, but at the same time those decent jobs and decent services are intertwined.



Q: What impact will these job cuts have?

JB: The impact is we’re going to see a very different city. It means that the fake crisis that the Ford administration want to put forward to people is that we are going to have a real crisis. The real one is that marginal communities in particular, but everyone across the city will bearing the brunt of fake financial crisis.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many workers are contacting me, because I’m a steward, about how they are still trying to make up for the six weeks that they lost during the 2009 strike. The fact that people are scared and stress out about this is very real.


Q: What is your assessment of the 2009 strike?

JB: Many people, progressive people and particular the union movement supported David Miller’s campaign for mayor. Although there were a number of key essential programs that David Miller supported and he created a framework for a growing changing city, especially around the environment and around marginal communities having access to funding, we also know that it was under David Miller’s watch that a number of contracting began to happen and privatization was beginning to occur and the attack on public service workers when it came to having a decent illness and injury plan took place.

The 2009 strike was a precursor to what we are about to face now. Believing that one individual mayor or councillor can actually provide what’s necessary both for the public sector as workers and for the community is a problematic way of formulating what our needs are.

From a rank and file perspective, it was essential that leading up to the last strike that our members both as workers and residents should have been given the type of education and understanding that our jobs and benefits are linked to the services that we provide. The connection between providing decent public services and having decent public services is essential to having decent living wages and benefits. The organizing the organized, as we call it in the trade union movement, where we organize our own members to understand and making the links to other struggles is absolutely essential. It is absolutely tied to getting a decent collective agreement.

We should never had allowed the mainstream media to control or to determine what that strike was going to look like. So what it ended up looking like was that 18,000 workers were a bunch of garbage collectors that were asking too much and being too confrontational. That was not what was occurring.