I'm back online after a move to Toronto. Internet took a while to get sorted out.
The city workers in Toronto continue to strike. I'm of two minds: 1) Good for you for not letting those sleazy politicians give themselves a raise while taking stuff away from you. 2) Come to terms with reality. No corporation can afford to let employees bank sick days in a recession (or ever, really). If the only reason you're doing your job is for the benefits, you need a new life philosophy and the City of Toronto needs a new set of workers willing to work hard for a living towards a better Toronto. The whole is what we're looking to improve here, not the quality of your measly existence.
Judging by how much I had to say about each, I guess I'm more #2 than I am #1.
Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes.
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3 comments:
I think this is on the wrong track. Unions exist precisely to focus the self-serving impulses of individuals into a larger context (ie: a group of other like-minded people). If the strike is evidence of dysfunctional labour relations, either the city or CUPE needs new leaders (probably both). But it's perverse to blame the individual workers; it's not in the nature of individuals to put the needs of "society" ahead of their own.
If you work for any level of government, isn't it your job to care about "society"?
Besides, the union is supposed to be a body that presents the desires of its constituents. Thus, a strike must come from a desire from the individual workers to hang on to these benefits that the government wants to cut. It wasn't arbitrarily determined by the union.
My answer to your first question is a resounding "No." If you're a Toronto civil servant, your job is something much smaller-scale, like collecting garbage or maintaining the park system or answering phones at Public Health. To be good at this, you have to care about the job you're doing and about the constituency you're serving directly, but that's about it.
The decisions of union leaders certainly aren't "arbitrary", but as in any representative democracy they can reflect a poor decision-making process. Many strikes are prolonged unnecessarily because the leaders involved are unable to negotiate effectively - they reach a deadlock. It's in this sense that labour relations can be "dysfunctional."
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