LORINC: Labour vs. the City

 

Monday morning pop quiz: Is the labour relations ball in the city’s court, or CUPE’s?

The latest volley from the bargaining front took place Friday, just hours after the City filed a no board report with the province but with plenty of advance notice from a labour-friendly public relations firm. That morning, CUPE 416 president Mark Ferguson held a press conference to announce its members will take a three-year wage freeze. The political not-so-sub-text: we get the financial pressure story (see high-stakes stand-off over the budget), and our members will do their part.

All heads in the audience then swiveled in the direction of deputy mayor Doug Holyday, who oversees the Ford administration’s labour relations war room. It’s a start, he told reporters, but added what everyone in the city knows perfectly well, which is that this stand-off isn’t (and has never been) merely about money.

Ball’s back in CUPE’s court.

That was fast. So now what?

I am not waiting up for a return conciliatory gesture from Holyday or the city’s labour negotiators; indeed, one could argue that CUPE’s gambit on wages reveals a telling glimpse of concern on the part of the union’s leadership and could serve to fortify the city’s determination to break the outside workers. But the exchange also poses an increasingly important question: can CUPE actually win the hearts-and-minds of the public in this looming knife fight, and if so, how?

Or should the union even try?

Let’s hit re-wind for a moment and go back to 2002, when CUPE and Mel Lastman, then in his second and far more gaffe-prone term, were at loggerheads over… job security and the outsourcing of union positions. Sound familiar? After protracted negotiations and a war of words over “jobs for life,” Mel’s catchy phrase, the union went out, shortly followed by the inside workers. But with a papal visit in the offing, the Province hastily legislated CUPE back to work, and an arbitrator eventually upheld the job security provisions in the collective agreement.

The 2009 strike, of course, played out very differently, with David Miller’s administration opting to go after the sick bank benefit to ameliorate the city’s long-term financial liability. Unlike 2002, City staff were far better equipped to manage the service disruptions while Queen’s Park chose to let the drama play itself out, as happened in Windsor. It’s easy to forget now that Miller had the public’s support early on, not to mention Holyday’s steady backing. But the public turned on Miller when the garbage started to pile up in parks, and after the two sides agreed on a phase-out deal to end the strike, and it’s fair to say that many Torontonians ended up blaming both sides for the 44-day stand-off.

There’s little doubt that Rob Ford, first as a candidate and then as mayor, succeeded in conflating Miller and CUPE as jointly responsible, although the story, of course, is much more complicated, on both sides of the equation.

While Ford could have slipped on the banana peel that tripped up Mel in 2002, it appears his administration — which is to say, Holyday — has learned a thing or two from these previous feuds. Unlike Miller, who insisted on speaking for the city during the strike, Ford has (wisely) remained off stage, leaving the job to Holyday, who has a lot of experience with the labour file and can communicate the City’s fiscal narrative in sentences containing more than three words. And the City’s labour negotiators have adroitly caricatured Ferguson as “Dr. No.”

Unlike the previous strikes, both CUPE locals have been running an aggressive multi-media air war aimed at humanizing the membership and discrediting the administration’s budget cuts.

But as a potential lock-out date approaches, the only point that matters is which side ends up wearing responsibility for yet another labour disruption.

While the Ford administration’s strategy clearly is to pre-empt a stinky summer garbage strike at all costs, I’d argue the public will be no less aware of the disruption in cold weather; indeed, the trash will still pile up in garages and on porches, and there are all sorts of winter-related municipal services (skating rinks, sidewalk snow-clearing, etc.) whose absence will be difficult to ignore.

And then there are the imponderables: Who blinks first? How does CUPE 79, whose leadership has never been on good terms with the outside workers, respond to a lock-out or a strike? And how will the public and the media react to possible confrontations between union members and replacement workers?

Perhaps the inevitable story line here is that disgruntled voters in 2010 hired Ford et al to come in and bust 416, come what may. But with the Ford faction on council increasingly fractured over the depth and degree of budget cutting and other policy blunders, CUPE, in theory, should be able to ride the wave of public discomfort about the administration’s direction and the Fords’ bully-boy tactics. In short, the wage concession seemed like a capable opening volley. But from where I sit, Dr. No must apply a lot more top spin if he hopes to win the whole set.