National Post, Published Thursday, July 26, 2007 10:06 PM by Barry Hertz
Meet the salaries of the workers who move Toronto
What do you call a municipal employee who makes almost $27 an hour to collect tokens and cash in a booth? A TTC worker, apparently. Several city councillors, in a bid to get Toronto out of its current fiscal crisis, are taking aim at the wages of city workers (including TTC workers, police officers and firefighters).
The Post's Kelly Patrick updates us on an earlier story she filed about critics who are looking at reducing wages instead of mothballing entire subway lines:
When the nine city politicians on the Toronto Transit Commission met last week amid the gloom and hysteria of a threatened Sheppard subway closure, councillor Peter Milczyn made a simple suggestion.
Why, he asked, could the TTC not hold annual wage increases to the rate of inflation and ask its 8,600 unionized employees to return $6-million a year in provincial health premiums, a cost most Ontarians pay out of their own pockets? Mr. Milczyn’s motion failed, five votes to four.
“Five commissioners are supporters of the NDP or left-leaning and four aren’t. We’re politicians, so it boils down to politics,†Mr. Milczyn said after the meeting ended with TTC bosses unearthing only $4-million to $5-million of the $30-million in cost savings they had been asked to find for this year.
Mr. Milczyn’s failed motion was an illustration of all that is tangled, complex and intensely political about reducing city workers’ paycheques, even in the midst of a financial crisis sparked by a deferred vote on two new taxes.
City workers, even the unskilled kind, make a considerable hourly wage. Janitors make at least $19.56/hour, litter pickers $21.11/hour, garbage collectors $24.14/hour, meter readers $26.58/hour, bus and subway drivers $26.58/hour and bylaw enforcement officers $28.67/hour, to cite a few examples.
“When you hear daily laments about dire consequences and how the [city] budget is going to have to be cut to the bone, and meantime those kinds of wages are being paid, boy that infuriates people,†said Judith Andrew, the Ontario vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which has mined census figures to show government wages vastly outstrip private-sector pay.
Nearly 50% of Toronto’s operating budget is spent on salaries and benefits. Critics say the only way city hall can meaningfully cut costs without reducing services is to begin paying city employees more like their private-sector cousins.
Mayor David Miller is on record as saying the city, as a matter of public policy, has an obligation to pay its workers a decent wage, but as contract talks grow nearer for two of the city’s largest unions — those representing police and TTC workers — some of his opponents say the municipality should try to force wage freezes, wage rollbacks or unpaid days off in the next rounds of bargaining.
“The city is up against a financial wall,†said councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who’s been busy peddling a plan similar to the “Rae days†of the early 1990s at Queen’s Park around city hall. “We’re left with very few options. The city has to take a tough line because we’re out of money and we can’t afford these salaries anymore.â€
Michael Thompson, another councillor who says both unionized and non-unionized staff should cut back, put it this way: “In my view, you just cannot get blood out of a stone. If we don’t have the money to pay, why would we put ourselves in the position of paying funds that we actually don’t have?â€
The difficulty with these suggestions, of course, is that could bring a war with labour unions.
The city does not have the legal power to crack open existing collective agreements, or to impose settlements packed with pay and benefit cuts. The province has to legislate an end to any strikes. That means city negotiators must convince unions to take less money.
“Trying to rollback wages from an existing collective agreement is always disastrous,†said Anil Verma, an industrial relations professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
Such fights rarely win cities the cuts they desire. In the fallout of Toronto’s 2002 strike, which involved 6,800 outside workers and 15,000 of 18,000 inside workers, an arbitrator wound up imposing a settlement that included 3% wage increases in 2002, 2003 and 2004. The current contract, which was negotiated without a strike and expires at the end of next year, includes only slightly higher wage hikes overall.
In fact, wage increases for the city’s inside and outside workers have held relatively steady since 1999, through the right-leaning Mel Lastman years and the left-leaning Miller era. In the case of the TTC, its workers’ union — Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 — contract expires on March 31, 2008.
About 75% of the transit system’s operating budget goes to salaries and benefits, and it could achieve significant savings by cutting back on some salaries or not paying the Ontario health premium — which was imposed by the courts. But at last Friday’s meeting, while Mr. Milczyn and his transit authority colleagues were debating fare hikes and the mothballing of $933-million subway line, Local 113 president Bob Kinnear was outside telling reporters they would get no concessions from his workers.
“There is no way that our men and women out there are going to bear he brunt of the city’s inability to acquire the proper funding from the upper levels of government. It just will not happen,†he said.