Strike Out!

The news has just reported that the transit union has rejected the tentative deal reached earlier in the week. To make matters worse, they are striking effective midnight.

For the past couple of weeks the union had been talking big about how they would give the public 48 hours notice before starting the strike. Tonight, however, they have justified reducing this notice to 2 hours by blaming the public.

According to union leader Bob Kinnear, "We have assessed the situation and decided that we will not expose our members of the dangers of assaults from angry and irrational members of the public". It seems that members of the transit union had seen an increase in threats and abuse from passengers.

What Kinnear didn't mention how unprofessional his union members have been acting. Every day I take the subway and every day I pass TTC employees "manning" the entrance to the platform. In the morning, I am greeted by employees slouching and yawning in the seat. (Not that they even bother to show up some days.) In the evening, I walk past employees who are either busy chatting with their friends or slouching in the seat. I have heard the line about what happens to a person's attitude when you put a person in uniform, but I never assumed that it applied to the burgundy suit of TTC ticket collectors.

And don't get me started on the snotty, condescending tone the subway car operators use when addressing customers getting on and off the trains at Bloor. Here's a newsflash, idiots -- using a sarcastic tone to tell us what we already know is not going to earn our cooperation. And threatening to keep the train at the station until you get your way (which I actually heard one operator say this past week) is certainly not going to gain our respect. Nor, for that matter, will the rudeness that TTC employees show to people who do not speak English as a first language.

Now, I am in favour of people getting decent wages. However, I am also in favour of people bringing something to the table, especially when discussing a new agreement. The reportage on the negotiations concentrated entirely on what the union wanted from the TTC; it never mentioned what the union was going to bring to the table. (And that bullshit public relations campaign claiming that each TTC employee was worth a million dollars to the city's economy does not count. It proves that the union is as adept at manipulating statistics as any government organization, but it does not count as anything more than that.)

Maybe if the transit union started thinking about its customers rather than just mouthing platitudes about them, we wouldn't be so bothered by the fact that unskilled, unprofessional people with bad attitudes are upset with wages that are higher than a good many of the people who ride the TTC.