The Strike is O'er!...Alleluia!
My Church nerd friends that are reading this post will recognize the title of this post as an homage to the great Easter hymn "The strife is o'er, the battle done." The city is nothing short of ecstatic that the municipal employees have returned to work. I am certainly happy that I no longer have to store the garbage in the basement, but in the end, the strike didn't affect me all that much. What I have been interested in, however, is how the end of the strike came about. Allow me to give you a brief timeline of the death of a strike. This is done from memory, so my times might be off, but the information is what I remember from the news broadcasts last week. It should be noted that today, August 3rd, is the "August Civic Holiday" in most of Canada. This will become important later, but for right now, I'd like to take a moment to make fun of the fact that Canada couldn't think of a good reason to have a holiday in August, and then had the cojones not to bother naming it anything. Anyway, back to the strike...
Monday, July 27
Evening: The mayor's office announces "We have a tentative basis for an agreement." Which means, "somebody caved, but we haven't signed our names in blood yet."
A meeting of both union and City Council requires 24 hours notice before it can convene.
Tuesday, July 28
Morning: Mayor David Miller appears on television during Canada AM, and claims that "we got what we wanted." This is a very thinly veiled (or maybe not veiled at all) way of saying, "we put the screws to the union and they caved."
CUPE calls for a meeting within 24 hours.
Afternoon: CUPE representatives give a press conference wherein they take exception to Mayor Miller's implication that the city got the better of their negotiators, and insist that it was they- the Union- that took the city to the cleaners, and not the other way around.
Evening: The residents of Toronto neither know nor care who took advantage of whom, they just want their festering piles of garbage to be collected.
Wednesday, July 29
Morning: The various chapters of CUPE that were on strike hold their meeting. They apparently argue for most of the day about whether or not to ratify the "tentative basis for agreement" that union negotiators drafted with the City. It seems as though many people are not pleased with the deal, and several other CUPE chapters are poised to strike in sypathy with the city's inside/outside workers if the deal isn't approved.
Evening: Finally word comes down that the union has ratified the agreement, though not unanimously. CUPE puts pressure on the Mayor to fast-track the City Council meeting so that they can go back to work before the week is out.
Details of the agreement are released; lots of people, including many City Councilors are pissed. The agreement will allow current employees with banked sick time either to take a cash pay-out on those sick days, or carry them over, whichever they want. They have until November to make their decision. But this agreement only applies to current employees. Future employees will not get to bank or cash out their sick time. Whatever.
Thursday, July 30
Morning: Mayor Miller officially calls a City Council meeting for Friday (minimum 24 hours notice, remember!)
Afternoon: Several members of City Council are very vocal and very public about their opposition to the agreement with CUPE. They begin to rally support. There are enough of them that it appears that they might threaten the simple majority needed by the mayor to ratify the agreement.
Evening: The name-calling begins, aspersions are cast, politics as usual.
Friday, July 31
Morning: City Council convenes. There is lots of arguing. The mayor asks several council members to leave the chamber for the duration of the debate and to abstain from the vote. It seems they have spouses or other relatives that are members of CUPE, and it would be a conflict of interest for them to vote on the matter. Well played, Dave. Well played.
Meanwhile, municipal employees just assume the agreement will get the go-ahead and go back to work, even though they have no guarantees from the City. Hmm...
Evening: City Council votes to ratify the agreement, and authorizes overtime for the returning workers to remove the garbage and take care of the other business that has been neglected for the past month and a half. Since it's a long weekend, due to the August Civic Holiday, the CUPE workers get three days worth of time-and-a-half to clean up the mess.
Lots of people are still pissed.
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So that is, roughly, how the strike ended. In the end, it looks like the strike will have saved the city tens of millions of dollars over the course of the summer, and the returning CUPE workers get some hardcore overtime pay, along with some cash for unused sick time, as a reward for ending the strike. Of course, now we have to deal with the smell in a way we haven't before. Now that all the garbage is being removed from the temporary dump sites, the bags are tearing open, and the odour is filling the streets. Welcome to Canada!
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