Privitization of Toronto Services

[Urban Shocker]

It would obviously be in the best interest of any low-paid, anti-union person to abandon their anti-union rhetoric and apply for a better-paying union job with better benefits if it came along.

 

[Whoaccio]

If it came along, yea, a union job would be great. The point is, from a macro-economic point of view, it doesn't come around for enough people. If one person takes a unionized job, other people will not receive a job precisely because he is getting paid more than market forces dictate. And that is my point, since when is it a left wing ideal to screw the many so that the few may succeed?

I got really pissed off with this after going to France. The entire country thinks of itself as socialist, but "socialism" has become an excuse to just freeze the poorest residents, mainly disadvantaged immigrants, out of the economy. So, a French laborer is getting overpaid while immigrants are starving in slums. Unions are a monopoly on labor, and the poor almost always loose out the most from monopolies.

 

[Chuck]

^
I wonder if the Spadina extensions' $500M contingency component is an attempt to "responsibly" foresee the cost inflation that contracted companies (as Chuck says) add to their TTC bids. What I'm suggesting, basically, is this: was there already $500M of padding included in the management and engineering and tunnelling and station costs before the $500M contingency was added? I gotta wonder...

To answer your question, it really doesn't matter in the end. Not only has the TTC notified the world that the projected cost of the Spadina subway is $2 billion, upper levels of government have publicly confirmed that the money is available. This nullifies the concept of competitive bidding because even the dumbest of contractors knows that they can get $2 billion dollars out of the TTC. If the true cost was actually $1.5 billion, you wouldn't see any bids that low because doing so would cost your company half a billion dollars that it could have received otherwise.