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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

A negotiation has two parties and both sides determine decide what is in the contract and the contract's length. You make it sound like the government is wholly in control which is only true if you accept back-to-work legislation should be used regularly, or that the government should always give unions what they want and raise taxes accordingly. This is not a lockout... it's a strike.
 
nfitz said:
Has this happened in the past?
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GO Transit employees have never struck in the history of the company.

Allandale25 said:
What about the trains that don't leave from there?
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I'm sure all rail yards will be targeted for picket lines including places like the Lincolinville yard in Stouffville, the Allendale yard in Barrie and all the other overnight storage yards in the system.
 
EnviroTO said:
or that the government should always give unions what they want and raise taxes accordingly.
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If you read the articles about this strike, you will see that they highlight that the GO union's chief concerns are thus: "Cormier said the union's key issues include job security and job safety relating to hiring contract workers from outside companies."


If ensuring that contracting out services is not a danger going forward is a problem for Metrolinx, perhaps the organization ought to be scrutinized to see exactly why that is. It is certainly not in the public's interest that the services be contracted out as more often than not it results in much worse service than came before (see also: British Rail. Or, for a more recent example, the grief that Arriva has been causing various regions in the former Czechoslovakia). Where the private sector comes, a severe reduction in the quality of services offered is sure to follow.

Not that I'd agree with you even if the union's issues were with money. No one is obligated to work poverty wages. The cost of living is going up, if you don't increase people's wages accordingly they will go somewhere and then you'll be left without anyone to run the transit system at all.
 
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T3G said:
Not that I'd agree with you even if the union's issues were with money. No one is obligated to work poverty wages. The cost of living is going up, if you don't increase people's wages accordingly they will go somewhere and then you'll be left without anyone to run the transit system at all.
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I'm completely for living wages, and they should be mandatory. Getting a living wage shouldn't be dependant on you being in a union. No human being should not be able to cover the cost of food and housing for themselves and their dependants. However, I don't think there is any risk of the bus drivers going somewhere else and having nobody left to run the transit system because if that was the case Metrolinx would raise the wages in order to be able to hire more drivers and it wouldn't require a strike to get that to happen.

Yes, the cost of living is going up, however the cost of living is a vicious circle... the more that people can afford, the more they are willing to pay to get what they want, the more the prices go up. In Canada close to 20% of the workforce works in the public sector so if you raise wages significantly in the public sector it will have a noticeable affect on prices going up further. The only reason a house is sold for $2 million in Toronto is because someone wants that house enough to pay $2 million and has access to $2 million to spend on it. If everyone didn't have access to mortgages or funding to allow them to pay for a $2 million house and all they could afford was $500 thousand, miraculously the cost of the house would be $500 thousand. The greater issue with affordability is the size of the gap between rich and poor... if everyone had the same amount of money then everyone could afford almost everything (with some things still out of reach but only because of differing priorities on spending/saving) and it would quickly become clear what is actually "out of stock" vs no longer affordable.

Focusing on the GO workers... they have contracted out GO rail staff to Bombardier/Alstom already so doing that for busses doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. Contracting out can be a good thing. It really depends on many factors. Is GO today running its own fleet of busses as a well run operation achieving efficiencies of scale, or has it created a bloated bureaucracy with inefficient working arrangements? Is contracting out going to break up the monopoly, or just shift the monopoly to a very large private company that needs to make profit in addition to running the service (i.e. where did the money for profit come from and if it were run similarly by the government where could that profit have been invested)? Is the contract in a small enough chunk to get a broad range of companies able to bid, or is the contract so big that only a few very large companies could contemplate bidding? Will the government continue to run a portion of the fleet themselves so they have a way of comparing the costs of the government running a fleet at cost (no money paid out to cover profit) vs a company which needs to show a profit? It seems wrong to assume that government will always run an efficient operation, and it also seems wrong to assume that large companies that bill the government will do it better for less. However, if you are bound to a contract that doesn't allow you to find efficiencies you certainly will not be efficient.

All that said, it may entirely be that the GO bus drivers are underpaid and deserve more. Certainly a wage increase cap of 1% across a wide swath or the workforce doesn't seem to suggest that a detailed analysis into what to fairly pay a person based on job responsibilities and job performance has occurred. The challenge is that in a monopoly like situation the market is so distorted that it is hard to know the value of work. The government is clearly in a position where they can act unfairly and put caps on wages that are not supported by any market data, and the union can ask for wages that aren't comparable to a free market because a free market for the same skill set doesn't exist and can rule out performance based pay measures.
 
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EnviroTO said:
A negotiation has two parties and both sides determine decide what is in the contract and the contract's length. You make it sound like the government is wholly in control which is only true if you accept back-to-work legislation should be used regularly, or that the government should always give unions what they want and raise taxes accordingly. This is not a lockout... it's a strike.
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You are assuming that the Government has been negotiating in good faith.

They haven't been.

Dan
 
I’m really disappointed by how little noise there is about the GO bus strike.

Students have led the ridership recovery, and they’re the most affected by the GO bus strike as they’re the least likely to have cars, and much of the GO bus network is centred around universities and colleges.

GO bus is the only way to get to Peterborough without a car, and places like Niagara Region, Milton, Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, Brantford, Orangeville, are all hit hard.

Without weekend trains, it’s really bad for Brampton too. There are alternatives to get downtown, but they are much slower.
 
you may say "hit hard", but in places like Niagara I would be surprised if GO has even 2% modal share.

The reality is GO bus service is a niche service mostly for students and to get office commuters home from downtown in off peak times. There are some exceptions, but the vast, vast majority of people going from one 905 place to another 905 place just drive. The office commuters just adjust by not coming home mid-day, and students don't really have political clout... so..
 
I assume there was a protest at the entrance to the storage yard?

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ShonTron said:
I’m really disappointed by how little noise there is about the GO bus strike.

Students have led the ridership recovery, and they’re the most affected by the GO bus strike as they’re the least likely to have cars, and much of the GO bus network is centred around universities and colleges.
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It's reading week at U of T. I don't know how universal this is though.
 
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