Negotiations continue.
While a strike or lockout is not possible this weekend, the city is preparing to make changes to working conditions for its outside workers if no deal is reached by Sunday morning.
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A strike or lockout of the City of Toronto’s outside workers is not possible this weekend, but the city was preparing on its own to change working conditions for 5,100 employees if a deal is not reached by Sunday morning.
After releasing a final offer Thursday, Feb. 2, the city said it will be “appropriate and necessary” to make these changes if a deal isn’t reached by 12:01 a.m. on Feb. 5 with Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 416.
“We’re entitled to do certain things and we are doing them,” Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday said on Friday afternoon.
The sticking point after months of negotiations is not money - indeed, the union is offering to take a three-year pay freeze, while the city is offering lump sump payments of 1.25 to 1.75 per cent over four years - but several “prohibitive clauses” in the contract, he said.
Such clauses protecting jobs for permanent employees when work is contracted out, requiring union agreement in scheduling work and filling vacancies, or allowing workers to take meal breaks when they wish, lead to inefficiencies and cost the city millions each year, Holyday argued.
“It allows the union to manage the system,” he said. “We can’t even change a Zamboni driver from one arena to another.”
The union has responded by saying it has agreed to change many of the clauses.
On Friday, Local president Mark Ferguson called the city offer “threatening” and said it was not acceptable.
Holyday, chairperson of the city’s labour relations committee, said his bargaining team wanted what he called the contract’s “jobs for life” clause - protecting permanent employees - restricted to workers with at least 22 years of service. The union has said it should be in effect after five years.
Services the local’s 6,000 workers provide, such as waste collection in Toronto east of Etobicoke, should not be affected immediately after the city’s Sunday morning deadline.
No legal strike is possible by the local without a strike vote, and late Friday afternoon none had been scheduled. The union must give its members 48 hours notice before a vote.
Certain Local 416 employees - 850 paramedics in the Toronto Emergency Medical Services and 34 workers in city-run long-term care homes - would not be subject to rule changes imposed by the city, because their contracts are protected by other provincial laws. The long-term-care workers cannot strike.
Even with the contract changes, which the city said are legal under Ontario’s Labour Relations Act of 1995, the rest of the local will still be left with “one of the best contracts” for municipal workers in Canada, Holyday said, adding he did not think most residents, or most Local 416 employees, would notice a difference overnight.
Negotiations were continuing through a provincial conciliator between the city and the union bargaining team in the Sheridan Centre Toronto Hotel on Queen Street across the street from city hall, but it was not known when face-to-face talks would resume.
Separate negotiations with the city’s inside workers in CUPE Local 79 are said to be continuing.