To the ordinary person going to work on the Queen car every morning, it may seem a trifling thing that the streetcar driver is about to lose his right to go on strike. The driver is reasonably paid to begin with. Strikes are a pain for everyone. Why should one group be allowed to disrupt a whole city?
But it’s not a trifle to rob anyone of an established right. Unions fought for decades to win the right to walk off the job in protest without being thrown in jail or worse. On a field that is usually tilted in favour of employers, who deliver the paycheques and hold the right to hire and fire, it is the only real weapon that they have.
It is no accident that the world’s nastiest regimes ban strikes. “The right to withdraw one’s labour is a basic civil right in a free society,” says John Cartwright, president of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council. He is one of several union leaders who is fighting the provincial government’s move to declare the Toronto Transit Commission an essential service at the behest of Mayor Rob Ford.
“It is unacceptable to say that working men and women lose that right if somebody is inconvenienced. Declarations of essential service are supposed to be defined by risks to public health or safety, not convenience.”
He has a point. Governments can sometimes justify banning strikes by police, firefighters or hospital workers. They deliver services that are often a matter of life and death. Transit workers are not in that category. A strike at the TTC may be a massive inconvenience for commuters. It may even hobble the city’s economy while it lasts. It doesn’t put anyone’s life in danger.
If inconvenience is the standard, why not ban garbage workers from going on strike? After the silly 2009 walkout, we all know what a hassle that was. If the concern is about damaging the city’s economy, why not ban workers at the planning and building-permit departments from striking. In their absence, approvals pile up and builders lose money. Or what about daycare workers? They are vital for working parents. Should we ban them from striking, too?
Let’s remember what it means when we take away the right to strike, as the Liberal government is doing so casually and with such politically motivated haste. We already prohibit workers, quite rightly, from walking out during the life of an existing contract. Now we are saying they must stay on the job in all circumstances, regardless of how they feel they are being treated, or face prosecution.
The move to ban transit walkouts would make at least some sense if Toronto were coming off a traumatic TTC strike. In fact, the transit riders have endured only two brief stoppages in the past decade, one of them an illegal walkout – and essential-services legislation can’t guarantee against another one of those.
It can’t guarantee lower costs, either. When you take away the threat of a strike, it means that the two sides have less incentive to settle their differences between themselves. If they fail, a labour arbitrator usually steps in. Experience shows that arbitrated contract settlements are often more generous than negotiated ones.
There are at least two other practical reasons to think banning transit strikes is a bad idea. It makes work-to-rule campaigns and other labour slowdowns more likely, because workers have no other way to protest. It makes it harder to negotiate more flexible work rules that might improve customer service, because the decision usually falls to an arbitrator and most arbitrators shy away from making big changes to the status quo.
But the best reason is one of principle: it is wrong to take away a right. The right to strike is an important one. It shouldn’t be stripped away so lightly.
