Though the strike deadline for TTC employees passed on April 1, we were encouraged to hear that the union and management planned to keep negotiating for at least a week beyond that, and that the union has committed to giving the people of Toronto at least 48 hours warning before any work stoppages.

Given the importance of the TTC to Toronto, this spirit is essential. About 1.4 million riders take the TTC every day, and many of those are people with few other options for getting to work or school or doctors’ appointments. If transit workers go on strike and the system shuts down, tens of thousands of the poorest and most marginalized people of the city will be virtually housebound.
That would perhaps be reason enough to implore the TTC’s union to consider other work actions besides a full-scale strike. But we’d also like to point out that as disastrous as a strike would be for the city, it would be almost as much so for the striking workers themselves, due to a very simple and very obvious quirk of public service employment that makes striking a self-destructive and ineffective negotiating tool.

When members of a private-sector union strike, they directly attack their employer’s bottom line. For example, striking auto workers shut down the factories and halt production. In such a case, the longer auto workers are out, the longer the big automaker they work for is unable to supply cars to the market and profit from selling them.

On the other hand, since public services are, almost by definition, money-losing enterprises, a strike does not cost the employer anything — it actually saves the employer money. A strike by TTC employees would save their employer almost $750,000 per day — that’s 1.5 times the cost of a new bus. The commission clearly does not want to shut down the system, but 10 free buses per week would likely make the medicine of a work stoppage easier to swallow.

This was illustrated during the Harris years when, after long and bitter public-­service union strikes, it was reported that compromise wage hikes were financed through savings accrued during the strikes.
In a strike by a public-sector union, the people punished are the public. Theoretically, the power of the striking public service workers would come from the voting public’s outrage at the government over the lack of services being provided. But in practice, the government generally says something along the lines of, “Hey, we just want to negotiate on behalf of the people in good faith, but the big bad union has shut down this service in order to take their frustrations out on you.”

It doesn’t help that those who most rely on public services such as transit — and would therefore be held hostage by a strike — are those most likely to be in a financial position that would leave them unsympathetic to the unionized civil servants’ demands. If you’re earning minimum wage behind the counter at a fast-food joint, the complaints of the $25-per-hour transit collector who gets benefits and handsome vacation pay sound a bit like whining. “You say you only get 75 per cent pay on short-term disability, eh? Last time I got sick, I didn’t get paid at all.”

And that is generally the public perception during and after strikes by teachers and garbage collectors and bus drivers — that greedy, overpaid civil servants who don’t know how good they have it used the people they serve as a bargaining chip. It’s as if a disappointed parent had grounded the children to protest late child support payments. Whatever nuance there is to the union’s argument gets lost.

So while the right to strike is important in principle, as a bargaining tactic, it’s an ineffective disaster for public-sector unions.

And the TTC union cannot afford any more bad PR, after the illegal wildcat strike last year that shut down the system without any notice to the public at all. We’d urge them to consider other tactics. A work-to-rule campaign where they refuse to collect fares would be worth considering, since it would actually not hurt the general public at all — it would in fact benefit them — while forcing real pain onto the management who would suffer huge monetary losses by the day. Or tried-and-tested arbitration would avoid pain on all sides. In whatever case, both union and management should remember that the riders are not represented at the bargaining table, and so they shouldn’t be the ones threatened with consequences. 

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