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As a note, before I look like a fanatic, my roomate works for a union and I support their work fully. I actually helped him yesterday obtain a list of workers in order to help organize a workplace. I have no beefs with private unions, although I find the set-up archaic a lot of the times. They are often their own worst enemies as Darkstar stated.

It's public unions which I can no longer stand. I don't see the mechanism which can quell their demands. There is no possible scenario where they can be reformed or changed, except for by their membership, which has no interest in doing so. As long as they're comfortable, consequences be damned. They know they can't be touched (for example driven out of business by a prolonged strike). This is where my current frustration lies. I really do see it as a situation where we are being asked to carry the weight of their problems. Moreover, their problems seem very trivial to many of the people who are now forced to deal with them, myself included.
 
mangasparky said:
My statement didn't reflect what I was trying to say. I believe a better balance is needed for everyone. I am clear when I say, vacation time, sick days, and an array of benefits should be a right of every Canadian. I think unions bring these items to the fore-front which results in longterm progress.
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And who could disagree? However, the benefits which touch everyone come from the law, not unions. Unions work for their membership. Vacation time, sick days and the like are made by goverment, and if you think we should have more of them, then I would say democracy should be the mechanism we use to do it.

Perhaps unions brought many of these items to the forefront, and now many of them are entrenched by law (sexual harassment, wrongful dismissal, minimum wage, vacation, etc).

While it would be grossly naive to pretend that workers aren't subjected to unfair treatment, I believe most of this is due to improper application of the law, rather than lack of unionization. Where the law enforced properly, I can't see many situations where workers in this country would be anything close to mistreated. This is particularly true in the public sector. Why they have the most powerful unions in the land is beyond me, it would seem they would be the least likely to be mistreated.
 
Here is an interesting statistic. According to the media, the banked sick days already represent an unfunded liability of $186 million. Ouch.
 
When manga says he/she wants everyone to be paid more, it's like saying "everyone should be above average". Unfortunately, it's just not possible, and no amount of unionization or striking will make it possible.

The only way for wealth to increase is to improve productivity of inputs of production: land, labour and capital. This is what puzzles me about the behaviour of private sector unions: they constantly rail against efficiency. They impose rules on their employers that give the members very little benefit, yet cost their employer millions of dollars. Another way to think of it is for a firm, once capital gets paid (the world rate of return), the rest goes to the workers. It is actively harms the workers to impose this waste.

Now, in the public sector, waste is only limited by the taxes that can be collected before the people riot in the streets. I can't stomach the line about public sector unions getting their benefits as some sort of crusade to improve the welfare of everyone in society. Nonsense. Every dollar in excess wages/benefits for public sector employees is another dollar taxed away from the rest of society without providing incremental value in terms of goods and services. It reduces the wealth of the rest of society.
 
Eug said:
Here is an interesting statistic. According to the media, the banked sick days already represent an unfunded liability of $186 million. Ouch.
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Be careful with numbers taken out of context. Is the liability $186 million over one year, five years, thirty years, the expected career length of all current public servants? Did the City already have this fund put aside, but it was used by City Council to balance their budget (without cutbacks to their pet projects) as was the welfare fund.
 
afransen said:
When manga says he/she wants everyone to be paid more, it's like saying "everyone should be above average". Unfortunately, it's just not possible, and no amount of unionization or striking will make it possible.
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No, it isn't possible, but strong strike cultures DO tend to have a more equitable distribution of money and not so much of it pooling at the top.

I *know* that the money I make for my company is not what I end up getting paid for -- the partners have to extract profit out of me. So, saying 'everyone should be getting paid more' is obviously impossible, but saying 'most workers should get paid more and those at the top should not get paid so much' is a possibility.
 
Public sector unions aren't the people who need rising wages. They already form an upper middle class of highly paid, high job security, well-pensioned members of society. Perhaps we do need higher taxes for the very wealthy, but unionization doesn't help the people who truly need rising wages. If anything, unions retard economic innovations that could lead to rising productivity and standards of living.

If you think everyone deserves a decent, inflation-indexed pension, then public sector unions are not the answer. They are a recipe for 30% having gold-plated pensions that the rest of us have to pay for. What we should do is increase CPP contribution rates so that in time we can afford to grant pensions that someone could comfortably live on, and to every member of society, not just those who've managed to snag a government job. Then there will be little need for private or public sector defined benefit pensions, and people can use their RRSP/TFSA savings to afford the finer things in life should they so desire. If you think that the problem of equity in society is solved by giving unfairly high wages to public sector employees, you are sorely mistaken, or are trying to dupe all of us in the private sector.
 
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afransen said:
If you think everyone deserves a decent, inflation-indexed pension, then public sector unions are not the answer. They are a recipe for 30% having gold-plated pensions that the rest of us have to pay for. What we should do is increase CPP contribution rates so that in time we can afford to grant pensions that someone could comfortably live on, and to every member of society, not just those who've managed to snag a government job. Then there will be little need for private or public sector defined benefit pensions, and people can use their RRSP/TFSA savings to afford the finer things in life should they so desire. If you think that the problem of equity in society is solved by giving unfairly high wages to public sector employees, you are sorely mistaken, or are trying to dupe all of us in the private sector.
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I don't think that equity in society is solve by giving unfairly high wages to public sector employees and agree with just about everything you've written here. The problem is in the private sector, where unionization is hardly existent and where vacation time is an incredibly prized commodity (even though many economists agree that short vacation allowances mean negative productivity) and unpaid overtime is de rigueur.

And - to give public sector employees that little bit of credit - they do set a certain standard, at least in some fields (I'm in planning, and public sector jobs do, to some extent influence private sector compensation and benefits, at least from what I've observed).
 
I was watching City-tv news this evening and they did a report about how Etobicoke still gets garbage collection because those services were contracted out before almalgamation.

The private sector employee is paid slightly under $18/hour vs. $25/hour for public service ... that's a premium of 35-40%; and we haven't even talked about the number of sick days city employees get which are also bankable.
 
Kaiserhead77 said:
Be careful with numbers taken out of context. Is the liability $186 million over one year, five years, thirty years, the expected career length of all current public servants? Did the City already have this fund put aside, but it was used by City Council to balance their budget (without cutbacks to their pet projects) as was the welfare fund.
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It's a liability over the expected career length of the public servants of course.

My point though was if somehow the city did decide to privatize garbage collection for example, they would be on the hook for a large amount of unbudgeted money all at once just for these banked sick days.
 
This is a stretch, but has the new garbage bin and truck system increased efficiency? If so, according to afransen, does that not increase the wealth and value of our local garbage people?

I agree with increasing CPP payments for a more comfortable retirement for everyone. Unions are also forcing that hand. I can't see how unions reduce the wealth of everybody else, I just can't see it.
 
easy more and more gets paid to support lucrative wages and benefits.

City Hall budget gets in the hole every year and taxes increases taking away more money from you and me.
 
Toronto on strike: A good week to be in Etobicoke

Doug Holyday was the Etobicoke mayor who hired a private contractor to pick up that city’s garbage.

“The cost was getting out of line,†recalls Mr. Holyday, now a Toronto city councillor for Etobicoke Centre. “We had a huge strike with our people and it got me thinking.â€

The council simply tendered the garbage collection contract, and invited the Canadian Union of Public Employees to bid, along with private operators.

“Their price was nowhere near what the private sector offered us,†he says. Initially, Waste Management won the contract. “In Etobicoke we had 71 people collecting the garbage and the contractor did it with 35.â€

Today Turtle Island employs unionized workers to pick up Etobicoke garbage, Tuesday through Friday, and Mr. Holyday says it does it for $2-million less than it would cost to pick up the trash with city crews.

The beauty is that the contractor must sign a deal with labour before it can bid on the work, so there are no walkouts, he added.


Ontario won't rush to end strike

"They're not going to pick up my garbage this week – so it looks at this point in time. I will be inconvenienced, as will many here in the city of Toronto," the premier said.

"But I think it's important that we just hold our fire and allow the two sides to do what needs doing," he said.
 
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