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Below is a repost of my Eye Weekly Psychogeography<\/a> column that appeared last week. The TTC has, obviously, had a bad few weeks (worse than the US Democratic Party’s January, maybe). That’s no fun for them, but it’s good for the rest of us because it’s a perfect storm of complaint, anger, citizen reporting and an election year that has led to movement on issues that have been systemically ignored<\/a> for years. Earlier in the week The Star’s “Fixer” was incredulous<\/a> at Chair Adam Giambrone’s acknowledgment that customer service is a problem after earlier denials and just yesterday TTC general manager Gary Webster released a letter to employees<\/a> regarding this heretofore elephant in the TTC’s boardroom.<\/em><\/p>\n It’s easy to be cynical and wonder “why now” — those of us who have been riding the TTC for a long time have all experienced routine events like drivers leaving a running bus or streetcar to get coffee, and certainly management did too. So, how to manage this perfect storm now that it’s blowing change all over the city? Can it be channeled into someplace not-angry and useful, with long term effect (that is, beyond this election cycle)? Perhaps, as I write below, a TTC Riders Union could fill that void. Responses to this column and the past week’s events-at-large have reinforced my call for an ideologically-free union (with no ties to either side of the political spectrum). On the right we’ve heard the usual tired calls to “crush the union” while the left shifts any blame from workers to either management or chronic funding problems (a problem, yes, but not an excuse for bad customer service and broken corporate culture). Both look at the TTC through ideological goggles and, as I write, a TTC Riders Union can’t do that in order to be successful. Last year in this space I wrote about quitting my near-decade-long TTC metropass subscription<\/a>. It was a difficult decision, but the routine anger and frustration I felt using the system was tarnishing my experience of Toronto. As expected, the rider rage is largely gone, because now I can abandon the streetcar stop anytime, as I haven\u2019t prepaid for bad service. Now I walk directly to places two to four kilometres away, without any wait-and-see delay. This also is the first year I\u2019ve continued to ride my bike into January (the warmish, desert-dry winter we\u2019ve been having is, admittedly, helping). Once you start winter riding, it\u2019s easy and it can be all done without looking like a fleece and GORE-TEX Mountain Equipment Co-op gear fetishist.<\/p>\n As I mentioned in that column, my living and doing most things roughly within the old city of Toronto boundaries makes this possible, a luxury a lot of Torontonians don\u2019t have, so my escape from the TTC is not an option for many customers. One letter to the editor<\/a> in response to that column suggested I was being irresponsible by abandoning the TTC, that I should have stayed and worked to make it better from the inside, as if there is some kind of altruism in submitting yourself to the bad machine for the greater good.<\/p>\n There is hope on the horizon though, and it isn\u2019t Adam Giambrone<\/strong>\u2019s \u201cBlue Ribbon Panel\u201d of experts looking at how the TTC can improve its customer relations<\/a>. That\u2019s a good thing, certainly, but we all have a hard crust of cynicism when it comes to change happening from inside at the TTC, a bureaucracy that some city hall insiders refer to as (with appropriate apologies to the disabled) the \u201cmost autistic of the city\u2019s agencies.” TTC management has a habit of blaming riders for problems (whether subway delays or the removal of the \u201cWalk Left \u2014 Stand Right\u201d signs<\/a>) and now, so does its union.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Last week we saw Toronto\u2019s collective rider rage find a rare visible target: that poor fellow at McCowan Station who got caught sleeping on the job<\/a> by somebody with a camera. It\u2019s a bad thing to do on the job, yes, but he, perhaps undeservedly, became the target at whom Torontonians could finally direct their pent-up frustration with a system that doesn\u2019t respond to complaints particularly well. A statement from Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 113\u2019s president, Bob Kinnear<\/strong>, chastised the picture-taker for not checking to see if the employee was all right (he didn\u2019t say anything about the fare collectors who post hand-written \u201cno-knocking\u201d signs on their windows, but when spinning a story, subtleties often get left out). You, dear riders, are the problem again.<\/p>\n The real hope for customers is coming from the outside: last year a new TTC Riders Union<\/a> was formed and, while it\u2019s just in its infancy, it has the potential of uniting all riders and focusing their general rage somewhere productive, giving riders a feeling that they have a little bit of power. Even when I quit the Metropass last year \u2014 one of the only empowering acts I could have taken \u2014 the TTC took one last bureaucratic swing: I was charged for cancelling my pass before my 12-month contract was up. When I explained in an email that I had been a faithful subscriber for 10 years, a functionary at Davisville HQ forwarded the Metropass contract that said the 12-month lock-in is renewed each year. When I asked to appeal, I was told, \u201cThere is no possibility of appeal.\u201d<\/p>\n The TTC Riders Union offers the possibility of a unified voice, and a place to channel ambient dissatisfaction into a politically effective tool. The majority of good and sometimes great TTC rank-and-file employees should also welcome this development as incidents like the \u201cTTC Sleeper\u201d might not take off the way it did if the public felt it were being listened to.<\/p>\n There are precedents for this. Most famously (and with the best name) is the New York Straphangers Campaign<\/a> that has been around since 1979 and is a respected force in city politics, representing all riders as well as producing reports and analysis of the entire system (a sort of cross between an advocacy group and local transit think-tank). Los Angeles has their Bus Riders Union<\/a>, and some other cities have similar set-ups. With Toronto\u2019s high level of transit use cutting across class and income demographics, our version has the potential to be quite successful.<\/p>\n While an effective and strong TTC Riders Union could bring me back to riding the rocket, it\u2019s the new group\u2019s labour-union association that gives me pause. One of the organizing sponsors of the group is the Toronto and York Region Labour Council<\/a>. While I don\u2019t doubt the Labour Council is committed to \u201cbuilding strong cities,\u201d individual unions are conservative and inherently self-interested organizations, and the link (and what it represents) on their website<\/a> to the ATU #113\u2019s website is cause for concern.<\/p>\n First, a TTC Riders union should be non-partisan and non-ideological. It should appeal to both a Bay Street Tory lawyer who lives in North Toronto and those guys who hand out copies of the Socialist Worker<\/em> at political rallies. If it is going to represent all riders it must be free of any ideological leaning because the taint of dogma will evaporate potential membership.<\/p>\n The other concern is that as a rider, neither the TTC management nor the ATU union is my friend. I want my riders union never to pull any punches when acting on my behalf. Political romantics sometimes evoke the punch Ali never gave George Foreman as the latter went down<\/a> during the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle. When it comes to the TTC, I want my Ali to throw that punch and then another because you know the TCU\u2019s Bob \u201cWildcat Strike\u201d Kinnear would never be so compassionate on our behalf and the TTC-bureaucracy brain can be as thick as a punching bag, too.<\/p>\n This is not an anti-union rant. Both my parents were members of the Canadian Auto Workers union in Windsor (my straight teeth are what is known in Windsor as \u201cthe Buzz Hargrove smile,\u201d named after the former union president who negotiated the nice benefit packages we grew up with) and somewhere I still have my CAW card from a stint working in a factory. (I\u2019ve yet to make as much money since.)<\/p>\n Yet the conservative, self-interested nature of unions eventually let down my hometown: in the 1990s and into the 2000s, when the auto factories were pumping out big SUVs and Windsor worker driveways were full of new F150s and Explorers, the CAW provided little long-term leadership on the sustainability of the industry and its products. Its members were working, and that\u2019s all that mattered. CAW leadership is as complicit in my hometown’s current troubles as any auto executive is. For the TTC Riders Union to work, its conservative self-interest must have the back of its members and nobody else.<\/p>\n Photo by Cannon Fodder XT<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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