If you’re looking for a distraction from the ever growing heaps of trash outside, the personalities of CUPE 416 president Brian Cochrane and Mayor Mel Lastman provide an interesting study in contrast.

Our terrier-like mayor has been even more bombastic than usual.

He can barely contain himself these days, accusing the outside workers of disrespecting people’s religion (because the sight and stench of our garbage filled streets might offend the Pope), of punishing children (because of pool closures), and of general laziness (they’re “pissing away their summer,” according to Mayor Mel).

Cochrane is no stranger to the sound bite himself — on the weekend he told reporters that “the process (of the negotiations) is even more stinky than the garbage in the street.” But, for the most part, throughout the strike, he’s been the very model of poise under pressure.

While Lastman fumes and plays on emotions, Cochrane methodically spells out his argument. Like the fact that for all that the union has been described as unreasonable, its last contract was passed by city council with only one “no” vote. Or that while indirect city employers like the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) have managed to avoid strikes during their negotiations, more than 25,000 direct city workers are now striking, due to the city’s unwillingness to compromise.

But the biggest difference between the two is that what the union president calls job security, the mayor calls “jobs-for-life.”

As outrageous as the union’s job security demands have been portrayed, what the workers want, what they are willing to lose wages on the picket line for, is the provision that currently protects employees who have reached ten years of service against layoffs if their work is contracted out. The union wants to lower that to eight years, while the city wants it to apply only to those who already have ten years of service.

According to a report of collective agreements in Ontario municipalities released by the union on the weekend, what the Toronto workers are asking for is not unprecedented. Of 221 agreements that restrict contracting out, 150 offer workers greater protection than Toronto provides:
Five ban contracting out.
Six restrict it if there are bargaining unit members able to do the work.
139 allow it but must guarantee employment to all bargaining unit members regardless of years of service.

Wanting some measure of job security isn’t an unreasonable expectation of outside workers like garbage collectors and paramedics.

Think of the kind of work they do and the nature of their employment. It’s absolutely essential for public health and safety. It’s physically demanding and often unpleasant or messy.

And in most municipalities workers only have one potential employer. An accountant or a computer programmer who is laid off can find a job at another company, or become a consultant, or start their own business. A garbage collector or a paramedic who is laid off has far fewer options. Usually they’d have to relocate to another city, or be retrained in a new field to find work.

Of course, the real subtext of this dispute is that our increasingly cash-strapped city wants to privatize its services and it’s much harder to do so when feisty unionized workers with job security come as part of the package. Two GTA boroughs have already contracted out garbage pick-up and are saving money — damn the rights of the workers.

But whether or not you believe that contracting out services is beneficial in the long run depends on whether you buy the myth that privatization is the panacea for all that ails in the public sector. If the outcry over the sale of Hydro One isn’t enough to prove that the public is leery of privatizing public services, then there’s the examples of Nortel, Enron and Arthur Andersen to demonstrate that the private sector has its own problems with mismanagement and corruption.

Privatization isn’t going to solve the troubles that amalgamation and an incompetent mayor have wrought.

The federal and provincial governments have abandoned Toronto, taking the wealth it generates while ignoring or downloading their responsibility for the city’s problems: Pollution, homelessness, an under-funded transit system, rent hikes, crowded schools and gutted social services.

All the outrage over the so-called jobs for life is just so much sour grapes. That CUPE 416 saw the writing on the wall and negotiated their contracts to protect themselves in these times of cutbacks and sell-offs just goes to show that they’re a lot savier than the rest of us.