The members of Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 416, are fighting the city government’s demand for a three-year pact that allows them to contract out to nonunion outfits the jobs of workers with less than 10 years of service now or 13 years at the end of the proposed agreement. Union negotiators have said the city’s offer of a 9 percent wage increase is acceptable.

On the picket line at a "transfer site" on Lakeshore Boulevard, set up by the city where the union is allowing residents to dump up to 10 trash bags into city garbage trucks without waiting, strike picket captain Tom Dupont told the Militant that job security is the key issue the union is fighting to defend. Dupont, a street sweeping machine heavy equipment operator, noted that the local represents a large number of workers who were hired under minority hiring targets, including employees who are mentally handicapped or deaf. He pointed to one of his fellow workers on the picket line who is deaf. "If the city gets its way what would happen when their jobs are contracted out? No one will hire them."

Deputy Mayor Case Ootes said the city’s position is firm and that the job guarantee proposal is "fixed." The city has adopted a report to study the contracting out of jobs in four service groups. "Council has made a clear decision that, over time, it wants to have the flexibility to look at other ways of delivering services to ensure the services provided in-house are cost-competitive. That’s why it’s important to phase out the jobs-for-life clause that exists within the past contract," Ootes said.

According to city figures from December 2001, the council’s demand would eliminate 16 percent to 25 percent of those jobs, meaning that roughly 860 to nearly 1,400 union members would be thrown on the streets.

Dupont referred to the Navistar strike by truck assemblers in Chatham, Ontario, where a van driving scabs into the plant rammed the picket line and severely injured workers. He said a CUPE member was injured at the Dufferin Street and Finch Avenue transfer site on June 27 when a private commercial garbage contractor didn’t want to wait the 30 minutes required by the picket line and drove into a striker. "That wasn’t covered anywhere in the newspapers," he said.

The CUPE Local 416 strike committee head Dave Hewitt said that the worker’s kneecap was dislocated and up to a dozen strikers have suffered minor injuries in similar incidents.

Local 416 president Brian Cochrane told the press that tensions were heightened by the council’s approval of the privatization study in the week before the strike and the settlement with police that raised their pay at least 11 percent over three years, plus bonuses. "It seems that every other service gets treated with enormous respect and our people, the front-line workers, are left to chew the crumbs," he said.

The issue of garbage piling up is the one that government officials have used to try and whip up resentment against the union. Ontario’s Conservative premier, Ernest Eves, has indicated he is willing to introduce back-to-work legislation to force the workers to end their strike if city officials claim that public health is at risk.

Meanwhile, 17,000 workers organized in CUPE Local 79 are also in contract talks, but that local’s negotiators have indicated they were willing to postpone a strike deadline to allow the city’s lone negotiating committee to meet with Local 416 officials. Local 79 represents Toronto’s public health nurses, restaurant inspectors, ambulance dispatchers, city day care staff, parks and recreation workers, and others.  
 
 
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