TORONTO, July 11 — Summer is usually the time Toronto's 2.5 million residents savor their gardens, parks and long, winding bicycle trails. With the winter snows a memory, there are street festivals, an international tennis tournament and this year a scheduled papal visit for World Youth Day later this month.þþBut as a bitter garbage strike enters its third week, many downtown streets are clogged with refuse and a fragrance that is anything but festive.þþVermin and the raccoons that prowl the city's leafier neighborhoods at night are having a feast, while many people have been left to wonder if this city's reputation for working like a Swiss clock is beginning to give way under the strain of financial stress and worker dissent.þþThe situation reached the point today that the Ontario provincial legislature voted to force an end to the strike, although even so Mayor Mel Lastman predicted that it would take 10 days to remove all the accumulated garbage. That might be optimistic, if returning workers are unenthusiastic about cleaning up.þþAs labor negotiations bogged down in recent weeks, increasing numbers of city workers joined the work stoppage. As many as 22,000 have walked the picket line, making this the biggest municipal strike in Canadian history. Services like water and restaurant inspections, public pools, needle exchange for drug addicts and ferry service for residents who live on lake islands have either been curtailed or shut down.þþVirtually every resident of the city has been inconvenienced. þþWorking mothers are being forced to make the daily choice of taking a day off from work or paying a baby sitter, because public day care centers have had to close. Commuters driving to work load their cars with bags of garbage to leave them either in company receptacles or at one of more than 20 disposal sites designated by the municipal authorities.þþÿI'm sad because ordinary citizens are the innocent victims,ÿ said John McLarney, 57, a computer graphics technician, as he took a bag of garbage to a disposal site Wednesday afternoon. ÿThis strike is causing mistrust between the municipal workers and the city fathers who call the shots, which is only going to raise the risk of more of these situations in the future.ÿþþThe strike's central issue is the demand by municipal unions for job security as the city considers privatizing services to save money.þþThe city has offered lifetime employment to any permanent unionized city worker who has 10 years' seniority, if his job is taken over by an outside contractor. The unions have asked for such guarantees for those with six years on the job. Those newly hired would not be guaranteed a job in any case.þþBut workers on the picket line say they are also struggling against the concept of privatization, which they contend puts profits over compassion in the delivery of city services.þþÿTom, Dick and Harry can't possibly deliver what it has taken me years to learn with experience,ÿ said Angela Walters, 42, a welfare caseworker who was picketing outside a garbage dump this week.þþFearing a health hazard, the Ontario premier, Ernie Eves, called provincial legislators back to a rare summer session to pass emergency back-to-work legislation. At first, New Democratic Party leaders, who rely on union support, balked and threatened to delay any legislation for weeks. But today they agreed to a compromise in which the government would pick an arbitrator from a list proposed by the the city and striking unions.þþUnion leaders said they were disappointed, but there was no sign they would resist.þþRadio talk show hosts have called this a summer of disaster. As if the strike were not enough, they are squawking about the Toronto Maple Leafs' loss of their star goalie, Curtis Joseph, to the Detroit Red Wings, while the slumping Blue Jays traded the slugger Raul Mondesi to the Yankees.þþÿWith city day-care centers closed, pools drained and summer camps shut down, it's turning into a lost summer,ÿ The Toronto Star fumed in an editorial this week.þ
Source: NY Times
