2009 Toronto Garbage Strike!

[Colonel]

For all of us who live in Toronto and was around to deal with the strike that went on back in 2002, how are we feeling about the possibility of a strike tonight at midnight?

This time will be a little different for me considering now I will be on the other side of the fence. I will be going on strike with the rest of my CUPE 416 brothers. This will be my first time ever going through something like this and I finally realize why strikes are neccessary. Everything the 20 and 30 year guys have gone through to get what we have now is being threatened. I really don't blame them for trying to protect what they do have.

Now I know its not just garbage that will be going on strike but it seems to be the thing people are most concerned about

Feel free to post opinions either about garbage, or any of the other services that are being threatened to stop as of 12:01am tonight.

[Epinephrine]

This will be my first time ever going through something like this and I finally realize why strikes are neccessary. Everything the 20 and 30 year guys have gone through to get what we have now is being threatened. I really don't blame them for trying to protect what they do have.

Nothing like asking for automatic non-performance based raises as well as having 18 sick days a year that you can bank and cash in whenever you want. Yeah...

I hope the city manages to bargain down these ridiculous contracts. Not likely to happen though considering Miller's union powerbase.

Didn't know you were a garbageman Colonel.

[Colonel]

Haven't been for very long... took the job because its 4 days a week and I get to be home every night. Better than being on the road weeks at a time :P

[Nycle]

lol i was in toronto's chinatown when the garbage strike was on in 2002. it was... interesting

[Troll King]

Nah, that's what it's like all the time.

[Cops]

I live just outside of Toronto so the stench won't bother me unless I go into the city.

I actually like the idea of being able to bank your sick days, if your employer allows you x number days off a year and you don't use them then you should be able to bank them. I know my mom who's a teacher assistant gets two days off a month, which works out to 20 days a year (a year being a 10 month period). I heard the standard is 7-8 days a year, I get 3 right now. I'm currently using 1 of my 3 days off I have for the next 12 months, that is fucking ridiculous. I like working and all, I mean it's great having money but I want a better gig than this. Time to take my U of T offer seriously and figure out how to become a teacher asap. I'd love to have two days off a month, get benefits, and make a decent salary. Stability would be sweet.

[castromarx]

I really want to go to the island on Wednesday. Fuckers better come to terms.

[ÆNIMA]

I was in Toronto just a couple of weeks ago. A huge thing my wife and I noticed was that it was really clean. So clean that my wife wanted to move there (from a warmer part in USA). Well, you guys are gonna ruin it for her. Shame.

[D1st0rt]

Hey if I lived in Charlottesville I would want to move too

[ÆNIMA]

Well if you feel that way about Charlottesville, you must really be itching to get out of Blacksburg, Zing!:turned:

[Epinephrine]

I live just outside of Toronto so the stench won't bother me unless I go into the city.

I actually like the idea of being able to bank your sick days, if your employer allows you x number days off a year and you don't use them then you should be able to bank them. I know my mom who's a teacher assistant gets two days off a month, which works out to 20 days a year (a year being a 10 month period). I heard the standard is 7-8 days a year, I get 3 right now. I'm currently using 1 of my 3 days off I have for the next 12 months, that is fucking ridiculous. I like working and all, I mean it's great having money but I want a better gig than this. Time to take my U of T offer seriously and figure out how to become a teacher asap. I'd love to have two days off a month, get benefits, and make a decent salary. Stability would be sweet.

Well anyone would like to be able to 'bank' their sick days. But to expect taxpayers to pay for this luxury is ridiculous in my opinion.

The POINT of 'sick days' is that employers recognize that you cannot work every day, and that if you make yourself work when you are sick because you HAVE to, then that will be a detriment to your health and thus detriment to productivity and perhaps make you do a bad job (less job satisfaction, making more mistakes, etc). Having sick days allows you to time to recuperate from being sick and come back at 100% strength to work again.

The point of sick days is NOT basically a free paid vacation day that you get no matter what and that even if you are never sick, you still get to use it.

The only justification for 'banking' sick days is the argument that people will just randomly take 'sick days' whenever they feel like it to get long weekends or whatever.

The way to prevent this, is to have workers be required to have a doctor's note for each sick period. This imposes a minimum amount of work for the worker to do before being able to claim a sick day, and as such would be a significant enough of a barrier to not make people continuously claim days whenever they wanted to get long weekends.

The second way to prevent this is to have regular performance reviews which tie into raises. If you are not being productive enough, or if your taking random sick days is affecting your overall performance, you lose out. This is done somewhat informally in the private sector, and makes people take sick days only when absolutely necessary. The thing about this system is that it completely changes the union system as raises are tied to performance instead of being a 'warm body', and as well, I'm sure actually sickly union workers will complain they are being discriminated against. In the real world, if you are sickly, and you can't do your job, you shouldn't have that job in the first place, but government doesn't work like that.

The third way to prevent this is to have unpaid or 1/2 pay sick days. This means, you can be sick all you want and not worry about losing your job, but it is financially tough for you. The disadvantage for this is that it yet again penalizes people for being sick, and may make people come to work even if they are very sick for the sake of coming to work. Not an optimal solution, but is frequently done in the private sector.

Unfortunately City of Toronto worker get the best of all worlds... they get to bank AND they don't need sick notes AND they get guaranteed raises AND they get paid sick days.

[genocidal]

I'm glad I live in a country where labor is relatively well repressed and I don't have to deal with strikes.

[Exalt]

so I don't understand why they are striking... they get more benefits then a LARGE majority of jobs out there... and they seem to be getting paid quite a bit for a job that takes no skill to do or learn, thus no degree or even high school diploma are even needed

you pick up garbage for a few hours in the morning... what the fuck

I hope this strike fucks you in the ass, because you already have too much. If you already did a strike in 2002 then you should have been done with it. Its only 7 years later. I hope the city fires all of you and refuses to hire anyone in the union. It's not like it would be hard to replace you. It takes no skill to pick up garbage.

[Cops]

Well anyone would like to be able to 'bank' their sick days. But to expect taxpayers to pay for this luxury is ridiculous in my opinion.

The POINT of 'sick days' is that employers recognize that you cannot work every day, and that if you make yourself work when you are sick because you HAVE to, then that will be a detriment to your health and thus detriment to productivity and perhaps make you do a bad job (less job satisfaction, making more mistakes, etc). Having sick days allows you to time to recuperate from being sick and come back at 100% strength to work again.

The point of sick days is NOT basically a free paid vacation day that you get no matter what and that even if you are never sick, you still get to use it.

The only justification for 'banking' sick days is the argument that people will just randomly take 'sick days' whenever they feel like it to get long weekends or whatever.

The way to prevent this, is to have workers be required to have a doctor's note for each sick period. This imposes a minimum amount of work for the worker to do before being able to claim a sick day, and as such would be a significant enough of a barrier to not make people continuously claim days whenever they wanted to get long weekends.

The second way to prevent this is to have regular performance reviews which tie into raises. If you are not being productive enough, or if your taking random sick days is affecting your overall performance, you lose out. This is done somewhat informally in the private sector, and makes people take sick days only when absolutely necessary. The thing about this system is that it completely changes the union system as raises are tied to performance instead of being a 'warm body', and as well, I'm sure actually sickly union workers will complain they are being discriminated against. In the real world, if you are sickly, and you can't do your job, you shouldn't have that job in the first place, but government doesn't work like that.

The third way to prevent this is to have unpaid or 1/2 pay sick days. This means, you can be sick all you want and not worry about losing your job, but it is financially tough for you. The disadvantage for this is that it yet again penalizes people for being sick, and may make people come to work even if they are very sick for the sake of coming to work. Not an optimal solution, but is frequently done in the private sector.

Unfortunately City of Toronto worker get the best of all worlds... they get to bank AND they don't need sick notes AND they get guaranteed raises AND they get paid sick days.

There's two ways I look at the private and public sector

Private Sector

Possibility for more money than public
Less benefits
Less sick time

Public Sector

Substantially less pay than private
More benefits
More sick time/flexibility

When people are deciding what industry they'd like to enter, they usually think about those three things; benefits, sick days, and pay. There's benefits to working in both sectors, which is why I think it's necessary for both sectors to be presentable to the employee.

Why would anyone work in the public sector and take a huge pay cut if they didn't get more flexibility with their sick days, as well as better benefits? I'm not saying that the public sector is perfect or that teachers need to take off all their 25 sick and personal days, but if the union fought to get that number then that is an acceptable number of days a worker can have off without being penalized.

I had this discussion awhile ago, and I was presented with the point of view that unlike other jobs teachers don't have a lot of lul time to sort their files, mark papers, plan assignments or anything else that is a daily task of most teachers. A lot of teachers have to cover recess or bus duty, leaving them roughly 20 minutes a day to throw something down their throat. I know 25 days off seems an exorbant amount of days but I understand why certain jobs have more days off then others, as for garbagemen I can't see why they need more than 12 days off a year. I think a day off a month is fair given their field.

Also, there's ways of balancing your workforce in a public sector, there's yearly reviews as well as contracts teachers must sign when going to a new school. If a princicpal believes you're not putting in a real effort or you're always late you can be told you can't teach at the school the following year, of course once your in the system it's very hard to get fired.

Asking for a doctors note everytime you're sick is kind of ridiculous, it would backlog walk in clinics to no fucking end. I don't mind going to see a Doctor and waiting 10-20 minutes, but there's no fucking way I'll be waiting a few hours to get a note saying I have dhiarea, a cold, or a viral infection. Sometimes you're just sick, but in no way shape or form in need of seeing a Doctor. Requiring all your workers to provide you with a doctoor's note would bankrupt our health-care system, not to mention that it would make workers feel like their employers don't trust them.

[PureOwnage]

Work for Wal-Mart and don't get any of those options. lol 3 sick days per 6 month rolling period. If you call of 2-3 days in a row, it's considered as 1 call off. So if you go with it I can technically have 9 call offs before I get a coaching.

On the other hand, we get sick HOURS to use when we call off. So all sick days are unpaid till you use your sick hours, which accumulate over time. I currently have 192 sick hours along with 60 hours personal time and 80 hours vacation.

Sick hours cap out at 192 hours and start rolling over into personal time. Keep in mind I've only called off 2 days in 5 years. So you can do the math if you want to see what we get in a year. lol It's based off of hours worked in a year.

Edit: Looking at those numbers I can take about a 2 month leave of absence and still get paid my regular amount on my paychecks. $$$