Toronto city workers strike against sweeping concession demands

[Hannah Bell]

More than 24,000 Toronto municipal workers—members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees locals 79 and 416—launched strike action shortly after midnight Sunday to oppose the city’s sweeping concession demands.

The strike, which involves both “inside” and “outside” workers, has caused a halt to garbage collection in Canada’s largest city, forced the closure of 57 city-run daycare centers, shut down municipal swimming pools and recreational activities, and affected a broad array of other municipal services...

The city, says Local 79 President Ann Dembinski “has been using the recession as an excuse to rip our collective agreement to pieces.”

...Mayor Miller’s reference to burgeoning welfare rolls in his initial post-strike statement is part of an ongoing big business campaign to depict the Toronto city workers and indeed any workers who resist their attempts to use the capitalist crisis to destroy worker rights as “selfish” ingrates who are indifferent to the large numbers of workers who have been thrown onto the unemployment lines since last fall.

The reality of course is that Canada’s economic and political elite are intent on boosting profits and dividends by driving down the wages and working conditions of all workers and toward that end they have been ruthlessly slashing jobs and making increasingly draconian concession demands.

The Toronto city workers, like the GM and Chrysler workers who were forced to make drastic contract concessions this spring, are being made the target of a media campaign of vilification...

Typical of the media campaign...was a column Marcus Gee penned for last Saturday’s Globe and Mail...he took a run at the inside and outside municipal workers, the most poorly remunerated group of city employees, claiming that they live in “cloud-cuckoo land” for wanting to cling to “plush” “entitlements” in the midst of “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

Gee claims that with the City of Toronto facing a likely shortfall in next year’s budget of between $350 and $500 million there is simply no money to maintain city workers’ current working conditions.

But if the government of Toronto, Canada’s wealthiest city, has “no money” one key reason is that over the past two decades NDP, Conservative and Liberal provincial governments have reduced grants to municipalities, while offloading significant responsibilities, so as to slash the taxes of big business and the highest-income earners. This has been part of a systematic drive by the ruling elite to dismantle the welfare state and slash taxes so as to redistribute an ever greater share of the national income from working people to the rich and super-rich.

The corporate media’s campaign against the Toronto city workers and the growing calls from business for the Ontario Liberal government to outlaw the strike attest to the fact that in opposing the city’s concession demands, the city workers are challenging the entire economic and political establishment.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/toro-j23.shtml