Legislated settlement won’t serve city’s goal in overhauling current contract: Experts
Back in 2009, before Rob Ford became mayor of Toronto, he was one of several city councillors demanding the provincial government order striking city employees back to work.
But York University law professor David Doorey says that’s unlikely to be the mayor’s wishes this time around if the city and its outside workers can’t reach a new collective agreement.
The deal signed following a 36-day strike two years ago expires at the end of the year.
Recently, the city introduced a bargaining proposal that reportedly targets almost all of the 48 articles in the current collective agreement.
“Since the city is trying to squeeze out substantial concessions from the unionized workers, the last thing he wants is an arbitrated settlement,” Doorey says. “Arbitrators don’t tend to award employers breakthrough claw back of workers’ rights. Employers usually need to ‘win’ those concessions through industrial warfare: a failed strike or a successful lockout that pressures employees to concede.”
He says it may be the other way around this time, with the unions pressing for back-to-work legislation in the event of a lockout, noting the city would want it to run its course, hoping workers cave and agree to the concessions.
“The city may consider using replacement workers to continue to run some city services,” Doorey says. “That will no doubt raise tensions on the picket lines, and make work for lawyers running back and forth to court seeking injunctions.”
Kevin Banks, an employment law expert at Queen’s University in Kingston says the situation unfolding in Toronto is “unusual” because employers in the public sector rarely demand radical changes to a collective agreement.
“Normally, when an employer does that it’s because it has an ulterior motive of breaking a union — and typically it’s in the private sector where it’s about saving money,” he says. “Here you have a monopoly sector and a union that has a longstanding relationship. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where a municipality could rationally break a union.”
Banks adds there is a fine line between “bargaining hard” and bargaining in bad faith. He says there will be pressure on the city to prove the demands are related only to cost savings, and not to undermining the union or the collective bargaining process.
He adds that may be difficult to prove given some of the articles being targeted by the city.
Among the reported demands is an article dealing with redeployment of permanent employees who lose their job due to contracting out, technological change or the deletion of a position.
“It’s an extremely tough issue to lay off people without redeployment,” Banks says. “That’s the kind of sticking point that could provoke a work stoppage.”
The union has vowed to work with hockey leagues and neighbourhood groups to avoid service disruptions at arenas and community centres in the event of a lockout or strike.
Banks says that could be a challenge if the city locks out its employees. While the city can be selective about which employee groups it locks out, it’s often not advantageous to do so.
Aside from the legal issues, he says there are other risks attached to demanding a substantive overhaul to a collective agreement.
“There are tremendous labour relations risks and it can take years to recover,” Banks says.
Labour historian Laurel MacDowell at the University of Toronto also calls the city’s approach to this round of collective bargaining “unprecedented” but she’s more blunt in her assessment of its motives.
“The mayor is attacking the public employees not just for financial reasons but because he hates unions,” she says. “He said this in the election and he is now intent on turning good jobs into poor jobs.”
