Inside workers say strike talks at an impasse

CUPE Local 79 president Ann Dembinski said on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 that the city has not taken any of its concession demands off the table.

While the city says it is making progress in negotiations with its striking unions, the leader of the city's inside workers say talks are at an impasse.

"We are at a point where there is minimal going on between the two parties," Ann Dembinski, president of CUPE Local 79, told CTV Toronto on Tuesday.

"Local 79 is still at the bargaining table. We have not walked away," she said, but added, "We're getting nowhere with the city of Toronto."

Dembinski's gloomy assessment didn't mesh with the more guardedly upbeat position of the city earlier in the day.

"The city continues to make proposals and the unions are responding with their proposals. We are making progress," city manager Joe Pennachetti told a news conference. "And I must reiterate that the bargaining process must proceed until the agreement is reached."

Until that happens, people will have a second location at which to make their first appearances on parking tickets starting Thursday.

And he asked that employers show "maximum patience" with employees who are having trouble finding child care as a result of the strike.

Aside from halting garbage collection and child care, the strike has affected a number of other city-run services, including:

The statements came on Day 16 of the strike -- which marks the period when the provincial government legislated an end to the civic strike of 2002. No such intervention appears imminent, and both sides have said in recent days that they would prefer a negotiated settlement.

CUPE Local 416, which represents about 6,200 outside workers, and CUPE Local 79, which represents about 18,000 inside workers, walked off the job on June 22.

The main points of contention appear to be the treatment of accrued sick pay, changes the city wants with respects to seniority and recall rights in the event of layoffs and wages.

The unions want the same three per cent-per-year raises that other civic workers got in contracts signed last year.

The city's mantra has constantly been that any contract settlement must be fair to the workers but affordable to the city, given the impact of the recession on Toronto's finances.

Dembinski said the city is still seeking all the major concessions that triggered the strike in the first place -- and her members want them off the table.

"They are not treating us like they treated every other unionized worker in the city of Toronto," she said.

Mayor David Miller is trying to take away gains that her union membership, which is 70 per cent female, took decades to win, Dembinski said.

Councillors' criticisms

Miller isn't just taking flak from the unions. Some on the conservative wing of city council are attacking his handling of the strike.

"The mayor, quite frankly, isn't showing very much leadership in this dispute," Coun. Denzil Minnan-Wong told reporters Tuesday. "He's not speaking up for Torontonians. He is continuing his action with respects to the wage freeze and not letting council vote on this."

City council passed a 2.42 per cent cost-of-living pay raise for itself. Twenty-three councillors want to see that raise withdrawn. Five more councillors are needed to force a special meeting on rescinding the raise.

Miller rejected the notion of linking the pay raise and the labour dispute.

"They (councillors) have been paid less than the unions for several years. It's irrelevant," he told reporters at a scrum following a ceremony to dedicate a new office building.

Toronto councillors make $30,000 per year less than their Mississauga counterparts, he said.

Several years ago, councillors here agreed to only accept cost-of-living raises. "That's all they ever do, and that was less than unions," Miller said.

Picketers block sprayers

Overnight, strikers stepped up their protest, blocking pest control companies from spraying temporary garbage dump sites.

About 30 protesters were at a dump site on Caledonia Road, just north of Lawrence Avenue near Dufferin Street, blocking a truck from Orkin, who has been hired by the city to spray the site with pesticides.

The crowd of picketers cheered as the Orkin employees drove away.

Company officials were not immediately available for comment on the incident but Orkin spokesperson Dan Dawson told ctvtoronto.ca that the details of the company's contract agreement with the city are being kept confidential.

The blockade is just one way civic workers are harassing contractors hired by the city, according to a private garbage collection company.

Julian Morton, owner of JCo Junk, told CTV Toronto Monday evening that his tires have been slashed and his staff has been threatened.

"They grabbed one of our drivers by the throat this morning, punched the front of the car and accused him of trying to drive him over," Morton alleged.

JCo stores its garbage bins at Parliament Building supplies. The manager of that company told CTV Toronto that he was also threatened by an angry union member.

"He said he was going to stop our business from functioning and that he's going to make sure that we're ticketed and that other parts of their union would be looking to cause problems for us," said manager Mike Collins. "The guy really went out of his way to make it extremely complicated and difficult, ugly, rude, confrontational."

Bill Steele, the man accused of threatening Collins, is a picket captain at a protest site on Commissioners Street, located just around the corner from Parliament Building Supplies.

Steele told CTV Toronto he objects that private companies who are certified for commercial garbage pickup are now collecting residential trash.

"We told him last week that what he's doing is illegal," he said. "He's continuing to do it, we're going to hound him wherever he goes and put him out of that business that he's choosing to do."

He also said that contractors are not helping the frustrated residents of Toronto.

"He's not helping anybody out, he's doing it wrong," he said. "They're possibly illegally dumping it, he's storing it beside people's houses, in little tight driveways in Toronto. He's storing the garbage where it's leaking out onto the cement here."

Travel advisory

The job action has caught the attention of the U.S. media as one columnist in San Francisco warned Americans against travelling to Toronto because of the strike.

"Garbage has been piling up around bins and residents were dumping their trash at 19 temporary dump sites, including city parks," Larry Habegger wrote Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle in a column titled "World Travel Watch."

"Residents complained of the stench and visitors were surprised to see the mounds of trash throughout the city that is known for its cleanliness."

Habegger also noted a civic strike in Windsor, Ont. had just entered its 12th week.

The column put Toronto at the top of the list, followed by Honduras for a military coup, Mexico for dengue fever, North Africa for a bubonic plague outbreak and Thailand for a planned protest of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum in July.

With a report from CTV Toronto's Austin Delaney