TTC April 2008 Strike Thread

[Blovertis]

AoD:

My only point is that in a negotiation, your position and your style is influenced by your who your opponent is. The TTC management and the City under Miller have hardly projected vision, strength or resolve these past few years -- which may have led the union, including the ranks, to overreach.

Just a theory.

 

[ganjavih]

We could follow Reagan's example with the air traffic controllers, and fire the lot, and then rehire on merit, while breaking up the system.

While I generally don't agree with Beez's more rightish leaning tendencies on a lot of issues, I agree with him here. This is irresponsible, it's bullying, it's holding the city hostage. They're doing this because they know they can get away with it... because they have in the past.

I arrived in Toronto this morning without a clue what was going on. Where was the 48 hour notice? So fuck Kinnear and fuck the union. Time to make the TTC an essential service.

 

[markel]

Its not unreasonable to want job security. If your job was going to be outsourced to china, i'm sure you would be pretty pissed off too.

You are kidding right? Have I missed some new technology that is going to allow our buses and subways to be operated by remote from China? Wait! Maybe then they would actually arrive on time!

 

[lister]

The drivers and maintenance workers got screwed by management. Let the capitalist rot in hell. I support workers right to strike and the public should back the union and force management to give them a better deal.

And who's going to pay for that better deal? The public via raised municipal taxes, provincial handouts (from our taxes), fare increases and service cuts. The public taxpayers purse isn't a bottomless black hole of funds.

Have you finished school and moved out of your mom's basement yet?

 

[unimaginative2]

Haha. Yeah, seriously. The rot-in-hell capitalist TTC. The taxpayer-funded, NDP administered TTC. I'd love to hear piratepete here patiently explain to me just how they got "screwed". Because the TTC wants to service their vehicles for free under warranty, rather than spending taxpayers' money completely unnecessarily?

I also find it a bit ridiculous that GO Transit couldn't do more to help out. It's the weekend -- 90% of their fleet is sitting in the yard. I don't understand why they couldn't call in some of their staff, pay them overtime, and run full weekday service within the City of Toronto. At the very least, that would provide a decent skeleton transit service.

 

[ShonTron]

GO's still providing the same shitty Brampton 30 minute service to Yorkdale/York Mills.

In Ed Drass' last column he tries to make sense of half-hourly 70 minute bus ride to Yorkdale/York Mills and the overcrowed three hour Union Station service. How useful are these buses to the Yorkdale/York Mills stations anyway with no TTC? Why not divert these buses to Union?

However, there remains at least one crucial hole in GO’s grid. Despite relatively good weekday train service between Brampton and central Toronto — the Georgetown corridor actually boasts midday trains — the off-peak buses between these points run only every three hours. Contrast this with evening and weekend bus service between Milton and Union that is super-frequent.
Although buses do run often between Brampton and York Mills subway station, transit observer Sean Marshall points out riders must pay TTC fare plus spend an extra 45 minutes to reach downtown.
GO Transit’s Bill Jenkins tells In Transit that an early philosophy at the agency was to serve subway lines. However, he says, “What people really want is point-to-point service into the downtown core, so we’re certainly looking at that in terms of how we improve things in the Georgetown corridor.”
As for me, I recognize GO is aiming to improve rail service through Brampton, but this city of 435,000 people shouldn’t have to wait any longer for better bus links directly to Union.

 

[wonderboy416]

The province legislating the drivers back to work is divisive and nonconstructive. Let the two sides work it out in the negotiating table however long it took. the drivers have every right to go on strike. they already gave 48 hours last week so the public had ample time to prepare that the contract wouldn't be ratified. The drivers and maintenance workers got screwed by management. Let the capitalist rot in hell. I support workers right to strike and the public should back the union and force management to give them a better deal.

Umm... so that was fair notice?
I'm not a huge fan the government being run like a corporation either, but do you really think anywhere in the private sector a ticket booth collector would be making more than $10/hour???

I wasn't so furious as some last night as I was simply being lazy and going from Bathurst to Spadina when I realized it was shut down, but man there were some pissed off people, and rightfully so.

It's time to force them back to work and to stop paying them more because Mississauga decided to pay their drivers more...

 

[ShonTron]

The ATU headquarters on Wilson was quiet, no cars in the driveway, and there's no picketers at the Wilson Complex. Can't they even be bothered to picket?

http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/04/26/the-ttc-strike-in-the-suburbs/

 

[Blixtein]

TheTTC is nothing but a collective of overpaid, socialist parasites. These goddamn unions are driving this city right into the ground.

 

[unimaginative2]

What frustrates me is that there's a core of wonderful, passionate people who work for the TTC, love their jobs, and care about riders. I just wish that they could be rewarded like they deserve. Conversely, I wish that employees who clearly don't enjoy or appreciate their jobs, and do their best to ensure that everybody knows about it, could also get what they deserve. On this list I would include the janitors who admit to going to see movies while being paid, collectors who swear at customers and scream "I fucking hate Canadians, America owns you," drivers who leave without warning in the middle of their shift so riders sit waiting for a streetcar that never comes, or who follow behind the next driver so they don't have to actually pick up any passengers, and supervisors who drive around in their TTC-paid trucks on the clock doing things entirely unrelated to their jobs.

 

[assteepee]

Shouldn't the TTC offer reimbursements for the people that had to pay $50 cab fares to get home last night? It only seems reasonable...

Also about the whole not harassing the employees on Monday because they're not the one's responsible for this mess or whatever - I'm not saying that I will harass them, but isn't it unfair that it was a couple out of the millions of riders that were the ones responsible for harassing the drivers, but that it was the millions of riders that were punished for their wrong doings? And sure we wouldn't be any better than them are if we did harass them, but it seems pretty justified now that we're playing by their rules.

I almost wish that someone got raped or shot as a result of getting kicked off the bus when they started striking last night. Then maybe Bob Kinnear can be held responsible for it, and then maybe he can be punished by being forced to tell his neighbours that he's a registered sex offender.

 

[unimaginative2]

Well, I don't quite see how it isn't the employees' fault, or at least 65% of them. The union agreed to the deal. They voted it down.

 

[RedRocket191]

@ Assteepee's last paragraph:

Wow that's inappropriate

 

[assteepee]

@ Assteepee's last paragraph:

Wow that's inappropriate

Not in the brightest of moods here.

 

[RedRocket191]

Not in the brightest of moods here.

Fine, but c'mon. Comments like that aren't helpful.